Instead of doing sensible and productive things to reduce deficits like ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or making their wealthy donors pay their fair share in taxes, House Republicans are proposing slashing federal spending that benefits the middle class and the poor.

Desperate to prove just how much they are bought and paid for by Big Oil, the Goppers want to eliminate $1.565 billion in annual Amtrak subsidies. The Goppers, hoping that people are ill informed, I'm sure will claim that Amtrak should be able to survive on its own.

But, they have no interest in making automobile transit pay its way. In addition to direct subsidies to that form of transit, most of our military spending goes to securing oil for the car culture and the Big Oil vultures that benefit financially from it. Those subsidies are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which make the tiny Amtrak subsidy a mere pittance. None of the military budget subsidy of oil is on the chopping block.

And, Amtrak reduces our CO2 emissions, while Big Oil and the cars they love increase them. The Republicans are mostly Global Warming denialists, but that is hardly surprising. Big campaign checks from Big Oil and Big Coal make sure of that.

The attack on Amtrak is part of the bigger pay for play culture in DC. We need change to public financing of political campaigns. A big first step for that to happen is to have a judiciary honest enough to acknowledge the obvious fact that big money campaign contributions are not "speech."

They are bribes.