Letters: Get it together, Republicans

Re “McConnell lies low as ‘cliff’ nears,” Dec. 27

My-way-or-the-highway is no way to run a country, fellas.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell “lies low” while House Speaker John A. Boehner won’t even call members back to Washington after pulling his failed “Plan B,” which his extreme members wouldn’t support. Yet the president is returning to reach out, again, to these folks.

If you legislators do nothing, it will cost my family more than $2,000. It will throw millions off unemployment relief just as our economy is starting to recover.

The president won reelection resoundingly in November on this deal: protect the middle class and ask a bit more of the wealthy who’ve been doing so well.

Let’s go, boys! Have the courage to compromise and prevent more fiscal damage.

Marcia Schneider
Northridge

After an earlier favorable Republican election year, politician Leon

Panetta asked, “Can they govern?”

Since then, McConnell’s primary goal has been not to govern but to make Barack Obama a one-term president.

Rather than working to make government better, Republicans starve it

by underfunding and defunding programs passed by Congress, thereby thwarting the democratic process.

They zero in on Dodd-Frank, enacted to curb the excesses that led to the Great Recession. They complain about rising Medicare costs, yet they block attempts to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical firms.

They take marching orders from zealots such as Grover Norquist and the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, which prevent implementation of improved tax policies and passage of laws to curb the proliferation of deadly automatic weapons.

Can the Republicans govern? We won’t know until they try.

George Shahinian
Huntington Beach

McConnell is lying low because he has absolutely no idea what to do with this herd of so-called Republicans he leads, who are all over the place about what they want and/or what they need in order to avert the “fiscal cliff.”

This is evident in the recent failure of McConnell’s equivalent in the House, Speaker Boehner, who suddenly realized that he didn’t have enough votes to support an alternative fiscal plan.

McConnell and Boehner have been relegated to being the proverbial animal control officers — responsible for herding cats, and everyone knows how easy it is to herd cats.

I’m afraid we are going to go over the fiscal cliff because the only two things the Republicans can agree on are to disagree with the Democrats and among themselves.

A.E. Irish
Glendora

McConnell didn’t make Obama a one-term president as promised, so it appears that the Republicans want to punish those who voted for the president in November. What’s frightening is that they want to punish everyone by throwing the country back into a recession. Their nonsense has already impacted the stock market and retirement funds.

Paul Shubunka
Santa Clarita

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