POLITICAL NOTEBOOK: Rep. Sanford Bishop labels budget plan a ‘bad deal’

The U.S. House narrowly passed a budget resolution on Thursday by a 216-212 vote.

Georgia’s delegation was split along party lines on the vote, with Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Austin Scott, R-Tifton, supporting the measure and Democrats, including Rep. Sanford Bishop Jr., D-Albany, opposing it.

“I could not support the budget resolution that was put to a vote earlier today due to its misplaced priorities and dubious economic assumptions,” Bishop said. “It would add trillions of dollars to the deficit through tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent, while increasing taxes on one in three middle-income Americans.

“Further, the budget resolution includes significant cuts to health care, education, child care, housing, nutrition assistance, transportation and other vital programs. In particular, Medicare would be cut over the next decade by $473 billion and Medicaid by $1 trillion.”

Bishop said the spending plan “relies on unrealistic economic growth numbers to support its tax cut and deficit reduction policies and would further exacerbate our nation’s fiscal situation. The bottom line is that this budget resolution is a bad deal for the American economy and the American people.”

Disaster Relief

Georgia’s two U.S. senators split on a concurrence of the House amendment to a $36.5 billion disaster relief package. Sen. Johnny Isakson joined the 82-senator majority that passed the package, while Sen. David Perdue, R-Sea Island, was one of 17 negative votes.

The bill would provide funding for recovery efforts following recent hurricanes and wildfires in the West and for the government’s National Flood Insurance Program.

“Washington has got to wake up,” Perdue said in response to the vote. “Our national debt hit $20 trillion a few weeks ago, and no one blinked an eye. As a country, we’re losing the right to do the right thing. Washington’s inability to get its financial house in order is causing us to lose the ability to pay for all the things we need to do. Four words not in Washington’s vocabulary: ‘We cannot afford it.’

“Unless we solve our debt crisis, we won’t be able to deal with emergency situations, invest in our infrastructure or fund any of our national priorities. This can be fixed, but Washington must develop the political will to fix this budget process and deal with the exploding debt.”

Iranian inspections

Perdue and Isakson were among the 13 GOP senators who on Friday sent a letter to UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, asking her to call on the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect Iranian military facilities and strengthen reporting and verification requirements of Iran’s compliance with the Iran Nuclear Deal.

“When unveiling the JCPOA,” the senators wrote, “President Obama promised that, ‘inspectors will also be able to access any suspicious location. Put simply, the organization responsible for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when necessary.’

“He stressed that Iran’s nuclear program ‘faces strict limitations and is subject to the most intrusive inspection and verification program ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.’ In practice, it appears that this is not the case.”

Last summer, Perdue noted, Iranian officials said their military sites were “off limits.”

In the letter, the senators ask Haley to work with her colleagues at the United Nations to address reporting shortcomings and vague inspection boundaries that they said have prevented the IAEA to conduct comprehensive inspections.

Opioid crisis

On Thursday, Scott applauded President Trump’s action to combat drug addiction and the opioid crisis. The Tifton Republican was at the White House when Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.

“Over the last decade, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids, including in Georgia, where we have seen families and lives ripped apart from the crisis of opioid use and drug addiction,” Scott said after the event. “I applaud President Trump’s action today declaring the opioid crisis a public health emergency, deploying tools and resources to combat this epidemic and provide real relief for millions of Americans.”

In 2016, more than 2 million Americans had an addiction to prescription or illicit opioids. Drug overdoses are now a leading cause of death in the United States, outnumbering both traffic crashes and gun-related deaths.

Scott’s office said Trump’s announcement:

— Allows expanded access to telemedicine services, including services involving remote prescribing of medicine commonly used for substance abuse or mental health treatment;

— Helps cut through bureaucratic delays and inefficiencies in the hiring process by allowing the Department of Health and Human Services to more quickly make temporary appointments of specialists with the tools and talent needed to respond effectively to the nation’s ongoing public health emergency;

— Allows the Department of Labor to issue dislocated worker grants to help workers who have been displaced from the work force because of the opioid crisis, subject to available funding;

— Allows for shifting of resources within HIV/AIDS programs to help people eligible for those programs receive substance abuse treatment.