Foxx and the Republican Study Committee

Down-thread, a comment was posted saying I should do my homework before publishing a statement that Virginia Foxx is not a member of the uber-conservative Republican Study Committee. Turns out she is, but it took a call to her Washington office to confirm it. The official website for the RSC does not list her, though it lists a hundred other Republican congresspeople. I know this because I had done my homework. But I'm also glad to have this small but significant fact settled and readers willing to correct me.

Details about "Operation Offset," devised by the RSC, continue to tumble out and make for interesting analysis. Matthew Yglesias at The American Prospect points out that this "hit-list" "partakes heavily of a much-beloved Republican tactic: using phase-ins to obscure what's really happening. In the first year, 78 percent of the cuts come from delaying the implementation of the scheduled Medicare prescription-drug benefit and rolling back earmarks attached to the recent highway bill. Both are genuinely wasteful, though neither is 100 percent waste, so both proposals look to be on a good path. Both, however, are one-time savings, not enduring elements of the budget. In year two of the plan, for example, 0 percent of the cuts come from those measures. In year three, it's also zero percent. Year four? Zero percent. You get the idea. By the time you look at the full 10-year picture, only about 10 percent of the cuts are coming from these wasteful endeavors. Almost half, meanwhile, is accounted for by the cryptic 'Block Grant Medicaid Acute Services.' What this means is that instead of providing an amount of money for emergency medical services equal to the amount necessary to provide acute services to everyone who's eligible, the government will appropriate too little and just let poor people not get treatment when they're sick."

Here's the line that resonates, like a tuning fork struck on Virginia Foxx's hard hard heart: "Say what you will about the idea of making sure poor people get treatment when they fall ill, but this isn't 'waste' by any standard definition. It's just something conservatives don't care about."