In both 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented its original profile of the current U.S. House Representative from Pennsylvania’s 9th Congressional District, Bill Shuster, who is a political legacy. Bill was first elected to serve Pennsylvania’s 9th way back in the 2000 elections, after his father, fourteen term Congressman Bud Shuster, retired. Bud, a Chairman of the House Transportation Committee, was forced into retirement by multiple ethics investigations that he was accepting gifts from lobbyists, and using a former aide turned lobbyist, Ann Eddard, to speak on his behalf, actually trying to hide in the backseat of Eddard’s car while 60 Minutes tried to get him to comment on the arrangement.
Like father, like son, apparently. Because Bill Shuster has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior as the current head of the House Transportation Committee, admitting in April of 2015 that he has been dating a lobbyist for Airlines for America. But before they announced it publicly, you see, they finalized Bill’s divorce from his wife of twenty years, and then signed documents to assure that his new squeeze wouldn’t lobby Bill directly (how romantic). Now, his gal pal would only lobby the entire rest of the committee that he runs and leave him be. See? Totally no influence there, right? I mean, other than the fact that Shuster keeps hiring people from Airlines for America to positions in his office and to be staff directors for the Transportation Committee in a way that sounds more like arranged marriages on Game of Thrones than part of a democracy.
Yes, we are now in an era where our Congressmen can LITERALLY be in bed with lobbyists.
Bill Shuster is also a climate change denier, insisting that there’s still “debate” on the subject, in spite of 98% of scientists saying the data is conclusive. And in 2009, he posted his own evidence that it didn’t exist at all… the weather forecast for Copenhagen… in December. And there was snow. So obviously it can’t be getting hotter if a balmy place like Denmark was seeing snow! In 2013, he introduced legislation to make any new rules enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency first require Congressional approval because he felt the organization was “running rampant”. (It’s not hard to imagine what an EPA being hamstrung by GOP obstructionism and a resentment of science would be faced with.)
But perhaps the worst kind of denialism you’ll see from Bill Shuster is his efforts to petition his fellow members of Congress to not recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915, where over a million Armenians were killed, saying, “the events of 1915…did not constitute genocide because over two million Ottoman Kurds, Arabs, and Muslims…also suffered in this conflict.” Shuster told his colleagues that adopting the resolution to recognize something that clearly happened would be “cataclysmic”, and fearing what our Mid-East ally Turkey might think if they were forced to acknowledge a dark chapter of their own history, a century later.
As far as the rest of Shuster’s voting record goes, he was around to vote for the Iraq War Resolution, and in 2006, was a co-sponsor of a bill that attempted to create a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage as well as to support the “Abortion Pain Bill”, which would create an unconstitutional ban on abortion at 20 weeks. Bill Shuster voted in 2007 against ENDA, allowing the continued discrimination of LGBT citizens based on their sexual identity in the workplace. Through the early part of the Obama administration, he was quite the obstructionist, voting against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, against the Hate Crimes Expansion, against Dodd-Bill Wall Street Reform, against stricter regulations on offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon spill, against the DREAM Act, against the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and against the Zadroga Bill, to provide healthcare to the First Responders from 9/11, after many inhaled toxic dust and chemicals looking through the rubble for survivors after the tragedy. Since Republicans took control of the house, he voted for both attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, the great majority of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, voted against raising the Debt Ceiling limit (which would have collapsed the global economy, and led to the United States having its credit rating reduced for the first time in its history), and also voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown. Shuster voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security in 2015, and was a co-sponsor of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, an attempt to ban Syrian refugees from being resettled in the United States.
Rep. Shuster returned to Washington in 2017 to start his ninth term in office (the only challenger he faced in 2016 was a Tea Party candidate who lost to him in the primary, but then re-entered the race as a “Democrat” to challenge him in the general election), and has been all over every Republican initiative in the new session, including flat-out lying about what a repeal of the Affordable Care Act would do to people with pre-existing conditions:
“If you have a pre-existing condition today and you’re on health insurance, (they) can’t get rid of them. People aren’t going to get thrown off. The states have criteria they have to meet. Some state can’t willy-nilly say: ‘We’re going to throw everybody off.’ (Also) they have voters, (and) the state legislatures and governors have constituencies in those states to respond to. This is giving them the flexibility to drive down costs and make the plans work better for the people who live in their states.”
See? They’re not throwing anyone off of their health insurance, they’re only making it POSSIBLE for state legislatures to do that. BIG DIFFERENCE. Blame those guys if and when they choose to do it. He also added, at a later time, the brazenly false statement that Obamacare covered “24 million people fewer than it was supposed to, and the projected price tag doubled to $2 million”. Fact-checkers were all over him on this, and thankfully, and his constituents were highly suspicious of his claims. Not that those voters would get a chance to confront him about it, because Shuster dodged all of his town halls for the past two years.
But now, some good news. Up until last year, Pennsylvania’s 9th district has a +14 Republican lean in the Cook Partisan Voting Index (the most conservative of any district in the state), but just prior to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling where judges threw out the gerrymander engineered by the Pennsylvania GOP this year, Bill Shuster saw the writing on the wall and decided to hit the “EJECT” button and abandon Congress, vowing to try and pass a new nationwide infrastructure bill before he leaves office. That last promise to his constituents will also almost certainly be broken, because the White House has declared it “Infrastructure Week” at least a half dozen times if not more since January of 2017, and Congress struggles to pass ANY legislation with their current leadership, at best their only achievement being a bizarre photo op of a 70 year old racist toad of a man playing in a fire truck.
So in the end, Bill Shuster will be gone after 18 years of redefining corruption in Washington, D.C., and to his retirement, we bid him a hearty, “Good Riddance.”
One Year Ago, June 18th, 2017: Bill Shuster (PA)… 2017 Update
Two Year Ago, June 18th, 2016: Bill Shuster (PA)… Original Profile
Three Years Ago, June 18th, 2015: Ilario Pantano (NC)