MoveOn.org would like to tap into the fervor on display in Wisconsin to push back against House Republican spending cuts and replicate at least a taste of the Madison unrest on the national level.
In an e-mail to members, MoveOn leaders encouraged activists to show up at the offices of their member of Congress on Thursday at noon to rally against GOP spending cuts and any burgeoning national attempts to put the squeeze on unions and worker’s collective bargaining rights.
“Republicans in Congress are proposing a federal budget that would cut one million jobs and eliminate services that help low-income families,” the MoveOn leaders said in ithe e-mail, referring to GOP efforts to cut federal spending for the remainder of this year by $61 billion.
MoveOn is pulling the one-million job claim from an estimate of one of the best number crunchers in Washington: Scott Lilly, who served as staff director of the House Appropriations Committee and chief of staff to its chairman, former Rep. David Obey (D-WI), and is now at the Center for American Progress. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank quoted him making the one-million-job-loss estimate in a column last week.
If House Republicans are successful in slashing $61 billion this year, Lilly estimates the loss of 650,000 government jobs, and the indirect loss of 325,000 more jobs as fewer government workers travel and buy things.
“That’s nearly one million jobs - possibly enough to tip the economy back into recession,” Milbank wrote in a column calling Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to task for his “so-be-it” response to a question about whether GOP-proposed spending cuts would spur job losses and how that squares with Republican pledges to make job creation their No. 1 priority.
Boehner’s comments quickly went viral, and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) seized on them as proof that Republicans don’t care about working families, a theme Democrats are trying to hammer home in Wisconsin as well.
MoveOn would like to see the same level of pushback on the national stage — although with Congress out of town this week and members in their districts, it might not be the most effective way to try to get members’ attention this week.
“Protesters in Wisconsin are successfully pushing their state legislators to fight back — and we have to demand members of Congress fight for us in Washington, D.C. too,” said the Monday e-mail.
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