House Republicans made it clear earlier this year that they had no intention of upholding the debt deal reached in 2011, despite a vow from President Obama that he would veto any appropriations bills that attempted to cut more spending than was agreed upon last August and a pledge from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the deal would be upheld in the Senate.

After earlier indications that they would make substantial cuts to domestic programs to preserve defense spending, the House Appropriations Committee made it official yesterday, setting a spending level $27 billion below the level agreed to in the debt deal. The committee, bowing to the GOP’s more conservative wing, will make deep cuts to food assistance, financial regulations, and a host of other programs, setting up the potential for a government shutdown when the fiscal year ends in October, Politico reports:

The House begins with a total of $1.028 trillion for discretionary spending, $19 billion below the $1.047 trillion target set last summer and $15 billion below what was enacted just months ago for the current 2012 fiscal year. Republicans would also go $8 billion over the caps set in the Budget Control Act for defense spending, and the result would be a net reduction of more than $27 billion from all other appropriations.

This translates into an added cut of about 5 percent, with the burden falling chiefly on a half-dozen domestic spending bills affecting nutrition programs, transportation, financial regulatory agencies, natural resources, and especially the labor, health and education bill cited by Dicks.

After GOP leadership worked with Democrats to form the debt deal last year, the party’s conservatives have seemingly wrangled control back from Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). House Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers (R-KY) opposed efforts to break the deal but went along at Boehner’s urging in attempts to assuage more conservative members — even still, four conservatives pushed Rogers to cut as much as $97 billion from the debt agreement.

Senate Republicans, despite McConnell’s stated position last week, are now making similar rumblings. South Dakota Sen. John Thune (R) said Wednesday that the Senate GOP may back House Republicans in setting lower spending limits, saying, “I think we’ve got to be as aggressive as we can in trying to rein in the cost of government, the growth of government.” With White House officials reiterating the president’s veto threat, however, 2012 is shaping up similarly to the summer of 2011, when Republicans repeatedly pushed the government to the brink of shutdown and nearly caused its default before striking a debt deal at the last minute.

Thirty years ago today, President Ronald Reagan threatened to fire almost 13,000 air traffic controllers unless they called off their strike and returned to work. He then followed through on his threat, firing most of the workers — represented by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (Patco) — and banning them from the federal workforce for life. Today’s GOP is celebrating by holding another group of airline industry workers hostage over the party’s radical anti-union stance.

Republican demands that a measure making it harder for workers to unionize be attached to the re-authorization of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has led to the agency’s shutdown, costing the government more than $200 million a week, leaving 4,000 FAA employees and 70,000 construction workers out of work, and forcing airline inspectors to work without pay. And because Congress is now in recess until September, the shutdown is almost assured to last at least another month.

The FAA shutdown is the latest GOP effort to weaken unions at the federal and state level. And while Reagan broke Patco, a move that had many damaging and long-lasting effects on the American labor movement, today’s Republicans are going much further, according to Joseph A. McCartin’s editorial in today’s New York Times:

Over time the rightward-shifting Republican Party has come to view Reagan’s mass firings not as a focused effort to stop one union from breaking the law — as Reagan portrayed it — but rather as a blow against public sector unionism itself.

As McCartin points out, Reagan did not oppose public or private workers’ right to organize or collectively bargain, only the ability of public workers to strike. Reagan himself was a former union leader and led the 1960 strike of the Screen Actors’ Guild.

The GOP’s attempts to further weaken the labor movement, meanwhile, come at a time when union membership continues to shrink, thanks in large part to Reagan’s 1981 effort and Republican policies of the last 30 years. And the moves come at a time when American workers could benefit the most from robust unions.

Union members make more than comparable non-union workers, and a recent study tied declining union participation to rising levels of income inequality. Other studies show that returning to 1980 union membership levels would add more than $1,500 to the income of the average middle-class American worker.

Republicans still insist that they care about workers and ending America’s job crisis. Unfortunately, by standing up for airline companies and against the 74,000 people they have put out of work, their actions continue to tell a different story.

The Federal Aviation Administration will shut down at midnight after GOP senators refused to let go of an anti-union provision amending the National Mediation Board’s union voting rules. Speaking of the matter, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) lambasted his colleague Sen. Orinn Hatch (R-UT) on the Senate floor over the political manuevering, saying that Hatch is only presenting “one side of a story”:

We’re going to lay off 4,000 people at midnight tonight. Do you think that means anything to them? What I offered was a clean extension that didn’t get into the merits of this, which said let’s put this big debate aside and that debate aside and keep the agency working, the federal aviation administration. [Hatch] said, ‘No, you either take the Republican approach or else.’

And incidentally, he told you at the outset, the House Republicans have gone home. They’re gone. They sent this over and said, ‘Take it or leave it or close it down.’ That’s not a very sound choice for our country.

Watch it:

As a result of Congress’ failure to pass any sort of long-term funding deal for the FAA, around $2.5 billion worth of airport construction will cease and airlines will have to stop collecting around $200 million a week in ticket taxes. The up to 4,000 furloughed employees will include engineers, administrative assistants and computer specialists, but air traffic controllers will stay on duty.

–Sarah Bufkin