July 30, 2011 07:09 PM UTC

Gardner Spokesperson Pushes Debt Ceiling Denial Envelope

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• by: Colorado Pols

Back in June, we had some fun with the…unusual defense of freshman Rep. Cory Gardner’s vote in favor of the GOP 2012 budget proposal (known as the “Ryan Plan”) offered by Gardner’s spokesperson Rachel Boxer. Despite the undisputed agreement that the 2012 GOP budget would result in large reductions in coverage for Medicare beneficiaries starting in ten years, Gardner spokesperson Boxer asserted that since the number of dollars being spent on Medicare would continue to grow every year, Medicare was “not being cut at all.”

A bit of a problem since her boss and everybody else in the Republican Party was out there selling the fact that their budget would “reduce” (their words) the cost of Medicare. And although she didn’t get called on it by the reporter, we have to think there are lot of people in CD-4 smart enough to understand things like population growth, or have ever gotten a smaller piece of pie than they wanted. That is, any of the considerable number of Gardner’s constituents who know better; and can see through this wildly deceptive semantic contortion in about two seconds.

We’re sorry to report, via NOCO5, that Ms. Boxer is at it again.

A routine news report about one of the more or less daily protests outside the offices of Colorado Republican congressmen this week on the debt-ceiling impasse–this one yesterday in Ft. Collins outside Gardner’s office there. The most interesting part starts exactly one minute into the report, and seems to become the whole focus of the story afterward:

Boxer: There is nothing in the Boehner Plan being voted on today that directly addresses the issue of Medicare…

As most of our readers following this debate know, the Boehner plan would have created a bipartisan “super committee” of legislators charged with finding an additional almost $2 trillion in cuts to “entitlement programs”–that’s Social Security and Medicare, right? What’s more, Boehner’s bill, the one Gardner voted for yesterday, would make adoption of these cuts mandatory in order to allow the debt ceiling to be increased long enough to get through next year. While Sen. Harry Reid’s Senate alternative also creates a committee to find more cuts, Reid’s bill doesn’t make extension of the debt ceiling through 2012 contingent on adopting them.

Bottom line: the bill that Cory Gardner voted for yesterday evening was designed to force, and would indeed have resulted in, huge cuts to Medicare. It would simply have forced those cuts six months from now, while simultaneously forcing another all-consuming political crisis–the very same engineered climate of panic over the debt ceiling as we are living through today.

The NOCO5 reporter who mindlessly bought this cowpie is no longer smiling? Sorry about that!

Like the semantically tortured idea that the 2012 budget Gardner voted for doesn’t cut Medicare “at all,” you might spend a couple of reasonable minutes entertaining this–before realizing that it’s off-message, wholly intended to mislead, and above all, preposterous.