The Examiner: Rep Schakowsky Calls Ryan Budget A "War on Seniors"

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Democrats on Wednesday amped up their rhetoric against the Republican budget unvieled yesterday by Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

"Make no mistake about it, the Ryan budget is a war on seniors," Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said a press conference called by the Congressional Task Force on Seniors, held down the hall from the Budget Committee hearing room where members were considering the proposal. "Newt Gingrich has said Medicare should wither on the vine. Well, this Republican budget would chop it down."

She went on to say, "Republicans are literally trying to kill Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Democrats will stand of the way of their war on seniors."

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., declared, "They use Medicaid as a piggy bank in order to avoid asking the people at the very top of our economic ladder, the very richest in our society, the highest ncome earners of millions and dollars or more, to avoid paying their fair share of taxes."

A fired up Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., said, "When it comes to shared sacrifice in this day and age, when we're at war and we face budgetary constraints, with wars unpaid for, in a time unparalleled since the Gilded Age, when the accumulation of wealth is in the hands of so few, that the other side would offer a budget that would balance itself on the backs of seniors, and children, and people who need to be educated, and veterans families returning from two wars. This is unconscionable."

Referencing a famous quote from conservative activists Grover Norquist that he wanted to shrink government to the point where he could drown it in the bathtub, Larson said, "The only thing that we're going to drown is these wrong headed ideas on the part of Republicans who seek to do harm to our citizens."

But nobody was to outdo Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., just tapped to take over the Democratic National Committee, in the metaphor department.

"This Republican path to poverty passes like a tornado through seniors' nursing homes," she said during the Budget Committeee hearing.