Congressman Roskam owes apology for $24 billion shutdown hit

Everyone in Illinois' 6th District owes Congressman Peter Roskam a thank you for voting with a minority of House Republicans to end the government shutdown. Then we should demand he apologize for serving as one of House leaders who caused the shutdown which inflicted, according to Standard & Poor's and Bloomberg News, $24 billion in economic losses and a decline in consumer confidence for future economic growth. Roskam is no meek back bencher who can feign innocence on the shutdown. He was right there leading the bomb throwers in the extremist Tea Party faction in the House who had been agitating for a government shutdown since before they were even elected to Congress in 2010. When Roskam entered the House in 2006, he could boast with some validity that, although highly conservative, he had a reputation for working with his Democratic colleagues in the Illinois Senate to pass important legislation. Sadly, the lure of power beckoned so Roskam grabbed the brass ring of House Chief Deputy Whip, working with Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor to implement the slash and burn policies of the of the Tea Party fanatics who held veto power over their leadership roles. The result has been nearly three years of relentless resistance to every job creation measure and vital progressive legislation such as health care reform, Wall Street reform and immigration reform. When they lost the vote on the Affordable Health Care law both in the Congress and the Supreme Court, they turned to the economy killing tactics of government shutdown and threatening debt ceiling default. The recent shutdown is simply their most outrageous action since they began this policy nearly three years ago, costing cumulative economic losses of around $700 billion, and adding 1.4 percentage points to our unemployment rate according to a widely cited study http://pgpf.org/special-reports/the-cost-of-crisis-driven-fiscal-policy. It's possible that Congressman Roskam voted to end the shutdown because he finally listened the the many constituents who called and wrote him to stop supporting, leading in fact, the Tea Party radicals who would destroy our economy. Since that legislation only delayed this destructive fiscal blackmail for a few months, we need to keep the pressure on him to finally break with the faction that puts ideological purity above sensible governance. If that costs him his leadership role in Congress, fine. He wasn't elected to serve the Tea Party radicals. He was elected to serve Illinois' Sixth District...and the country. For the past three years he hasn't served either. And when contacting him, don't forget to ask for the apology.