August 09, 2011 02:54 AM UTC

Please, Scott Tipton. Please Stop Talking.

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

The Colorado Statesman’s Ellen Miller reports from Grand Junction on freshman Rep. Scott Tipton’s growing incoherence trying to explain his votes in the debt-ceiling debate:

More than 200 people, most of them Republicans and many who identified with the Tea Party, packed the City Council chambers Friday night for an hour-long question-and-answer session with 3rd District Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez.

…His second vote, on the final compromise, was in opposition because it postpones cuts until after the next election and adds more than $2 trillion to the $14.3 trillion national debt, he said.

“It’s about jobs, about work and about common sense,” Tipton said, reiterating his support for the “cut, cap and balance” approach put forth by Republicans…

[Mesa County Democrats chair Karl] Castleton, who won one of the question-asking tickets, asked Tipton what his future might be, since he is 44, paying into Social Security and Medicare and trying to save for his two children’s education, in light of Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposal to shift Medicare into a voucher system for people under 55.

Tipton said Medicare will be broke in 12 years without changes, but said the government has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.”

But just a little while later:

[An attendee] asked Tipton if the so-called super committee to be appointed by congressional leaders to identify deeper budget cuts is “something to be afraid of.”

Tipton said the committee was one of the reasons he voted against the final debt ceiling agreement, because of the massive spending cuts in both defense and social programs that would be triggered if the committee cannot produce an agreement or Congress fails to act on its recommendations.

“We could see a $650 billion cut from our military and a 2.5 percent cut to Medicare providers,” he said.

Got that, folks? Scott Tipton voted against the debt-ceiling compromise because it didn’t cut enough. But his real problem is that it might cut too much. And this is the same guy who spent weeks of this debate insisting that the whole concern about the loss of the United States’ AAA rating was “not so,” right? And who laughably claimed that Obama wanted three-quarters of the debt-ceiling deal to consist of tax increases? Seriously, can any of you, right or left, make sense of Tipton’s nonsensical contributions to this debate?

The only way one can rationalize Tipton’s latest contradiction is if he is really only upset about the possibility of defense cuts, and hiding behind Medicare under questioning. Because between “Cut, Cap and Balance,” and Tipton’s earlier vote for the 2012 House budget proposal that privatizes and slashes Medicare spending, it’s impossible to see where Tipton was ever at any point actually worried about cutting Medicare. That seems to be the whole point.

Folks, we really don’t know any other way to say this. It’s becoming a glaring and undeniable problem. From his earliest pledges to “cut the government in half” to this moment, Tipton has proven an unqualified embarrassment to the voters he represents. He’s becoming a poster child for what happens when totally clueless people are elected to Congress.