Veteran Blames Member of Congress for VA Mess Openly

Ok folks,,,,we talk about all of this and more veterans are doing it publicly. Make sure you check out the voting record of your elected official and ask them when they will get to work for veterans and stop playing politics!

OP-ED: Toomey helped create VA mess
York Dispatch
By GEORGE H. FLEMING
Jackson Township
POSTED: 07/08/2014

As an Army veteran, I'm dismayed with the way Sen. Patrick Toomey has used the recent Veterans Administration (VA) scandal to gain headlines for himself. During his last eight years in public office as a congressman and a senator, Toomey voted against every — every — funding bill that supported veterans.

And now he is holding himself up as a leader for demanding accountability from a VA system he did not back? What about his own lack of accountability for not supporting the veterans he voted to send to war in Afghanistan and Iraq?

His "no" votes included more than a dozen VA appropriation bills that provide the annual funding to run our VA hospitals, provide shelter for the homeless veteran, develop prosthetics for the missing limbs of wounded warriors, and treat the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental challenges with which our veterans returned home.

Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, once claimed he voted against these VA appropriations bills because they were tied to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) bills. Then why did he also vote against a veteran standalone bill that would have provided an additional $2 billion to treat the traumatic brain injuries and PTSD of our returning war veterans? And why did he vote against the recent $21 billion stand-alone bill to do the same?

Those VA bills are crucial to our veterans, and it pains me to know a senator would attempt to block them for political reasons. It pains me more to see such a politician claiming he now wants to hold accountable the VA system he voted to defund.

Toomey has talked about how he is searching for how to fix the backlog of veteran claims. But the bills he voted against were the ones that actually funded caseworkers who can fix this backlog of disability claims. When Toomey left Congress in January 2005, the VA claims backlog had jumped to almost 500,000 because of a lack of resources as he voted against each VA funding bill. By the end of 2013, that figure nearly doubled to 900,000.
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