The Senate today approved a short-term continuing resolution that was passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, granting lawmakers a two week reprieve in which to craft a longer-term spending plan. But the two parties are really no closer to that goal than they were before the short-term resolution was approved.

As we’ve detailed, the long-term continuing resolution that House Republicans have approved — which sets spending levels for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year and is staunchly opposed by Senate Democrats — would gut important federal investments in special education, K-12 education for low-income students, federal job training, environmental protection, community health centers, infrastructure, and programs that aid both pregnant women and newborns. Yesterday, we added housing assistance for veterans to the list.

And here’s one more consequence of the drastic decrease in discretionary spending that House Republicans envision — 10,000 long term disabled people will lose their rental assistance (and likely their homes):

– Cuts in the GOP bill would result in 10,000 people with serious long-term disabilities losing rental assistance through the Section 811 voucher program. Most of these would lose their homes.

As the National Low Income Housing Coalition noted, Section 811 vouchers are “one of the few remaining HUD programs that ensures housing affordability for people with extremely low incomes, such as people who rely on SSI payments which for a one-person household equal only 18% of the national median income — far below the poverty line.” The Coalition on Human Needs bluntly noted that under the GOP plan, “more people will be homeless.”

As if that weren’t enough, the House GOP’s spending plan would also cut funding for maintenance of low-income public housing:

– [The cuts would] allow the housing units of the 1.2 million low-income families in public housing to deteriorate as the Public Housing Capital Fund — which makes maintenance and repairs on the U.S. stock of public housing — is cut by over 40 percent.

Since the Great Recession struck, Republicans in Congress have shown little sympathy for those who are losing their homes through no fault of their own. And, evidently, this attitude extends to low-income disabled people who depend on housing assistance to keep a roof over their heads.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — who has fashioned himself as a kingmaker amogst Republicans — said during a radio interview yesterday that government workers should never be allowed to collectively bargain. “It’s a bigger issue than people think, and it’s something that I’m going to work a lot on, because I really don’t think that collective bargaining has any place in representative government,” DeMint said.

DeMint has also opined that he is looking for someone who is “a combination of Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill” to be the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee. So it might surprise DeMint to know that it was his cherished Gipper who granted California’s municipal and county employees the right to collectively bargain in 1968 by signing the Meyers Milias Brown Act. In fact, former Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, who wrote several books on Reagan, explained that Reagan’s approach to organized labor differed drastically from that of the current-day GOP:

Cannon agreed that Reagan’s relationship with labor was complicated but noted it was very different than today’s Republican approach. “He didn’t like the fact that the unions always supported the Democrats, but it wasn’t a hostile relationship,” Cannon said. “I never heard Reagan, in all the interviews, say those ‘damn unions.’”

In fact, Cannon notes that Reagan “was always very proud of the fact he got working class support,” estimating that Reagan garnered as much as one-third of union households.

Reagan is still the only president in American history to have belonged to a union;, he even served as president of the AFL-CIO affiliated Screen Actors Guild.

He also called membership in a union an “elemental human right,” while criticizing Soviet-backed crackdowns on Polish organized labor. “By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights — the right to belong to a free trade union,” he said in a radio address.

Of course, Reagan was far from an entirely pro-labor politician, as evidenced by his firing of federal air traffic controllers in 1981. But the current Republican crusade to strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights contradicts the very policy supported by Reagan when he was a state’s chief executive.

ThinkProgress intern Kevin Donohoe provided research for this post.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) has been claiming that his budget repair bill — which strips Wisconsin’s public employees of their collective bargaining rights, sparking weeks of protests — must be passed soon because it includes a debt restructuring provision that will save the state $165 million. Walker claims that the debt restructuring is necessary to avoid layoffs of state employees.

“If we want to avoid the layoffs that will eventually come at the state and local level, the only way to achieve that” is to pass the bill, Walker said last week. “This is not a threat, this is not a strategy, and this is not a negotiation. The bottom line is that if [the bill is not passed], there are dire consequences,” he added yesterday. He has even gone so far as to issue layoff warnings to some state employees.

However, according to both finance experts and Wisconsin’s own finance director, failure to refinance the state’s debt by Walker’s deadline “doesn’t mean the state is in any kind of immediate fiscal peril”:

The notion that the state needs to refinance the debt because it’s broke and can’t make its debt payments is “completely wrong,” said Mr. Hoadley, the state finance director. “This is about providing relief to the budget situation by rearranging the payments,” over a longer period, he said.

However, there are other ways to address Wisconsin’s current fiscal year budget deficit of $137 million other than refinancing the debt, said Joshua Zeitz, municipal finance analyst for MF Global.

This is one more piece of evidence showing that Walker’s assault on public sector unions has little to do with balancing the budget; instead, it’s an attempt to kneecap an ideological opponent. “There’s a good amount of political theater in what you’re seeing,” said municipal credit analyst Tom Kozlik. “With any state, I’d really question whether they are going to fall off a cliff over one budget cycle.”

Of course, if Walker were truly serious about balancing the budget, he would not be proposing a $36 million cut in the state’s capital gains tax or a $46 million corporate tax cut, on top of the millions of dollars in tax cuts he and the Republican legislature have already approved. As my colleague Zaid Jilani found, Walker could balance his current budget by ending a variety of special interest tax dodging that is occurring in his state.