Once again, Memorial Day weekend has passed. This weekend is commonly regarded as the country’s gateway to summertime and the time for cookouts, beach trips, good times with family and friends and the chance to sleep in on Monday.

Less common are displays of gold ribbons and signs lining local boulevards, a litany of the names of the sons and daughters who were lost in various conflicts throughout our history. This is the true heart of Memorial Day, honoring the sacrifice of those who gave all for our country.

Medical advances in the past half-century have dramatically reduced the overall number of those names on our local Memorial Day shrines, and for this, we are all grateful. However, the trade-off on saving more soldiers’ lives is that we have vastly more veterans returning home with devastating, life-altering injuries than we did in previous wars like Vietnam and World War II. Our VA system has been underfunded and overwhelmed by the huge influx of these veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The VA needs a lot more help honoring these veterans, and Washington needs to step up, because we have a clear responsibility to care for our soldiers when they return home. However, Republicans in Congress only think of veterans when they are convenient props to shore up their patriotism credentials.

Sure, they trot out the Stars and Stripes and wax poetic about dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (“it is sweet and fitting to die for your country,”) especially on holidays like Memorial Day. There is no more convenient prop than a veteran who cannot talk back.

They can’t ask why there’s always trillions of dollars for building new weapons (that don’t even necessarily work), but not enough to ensure that they get the adequate rehab they need to adjust to life after the traumatic brain injury they got from an RPG in Ramadi, Kandahar, Tikrit, or any of the other far-off places that civilians like myself, or Sen. Richard Burr, who has never served, are privileged to hear about only on sanitized TV news broadcasts.

People love to opine that “there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans,” but on the issue of making sure our veterans are cared for, the difference could not be starker. Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill, the Comprehensive Veterans Health and Benefits and Military Retirement Pay Restoration Act of 2014. The Sanders bill was heavily endorsed by veterans’ groups and was defeated on a party-line vote in February 2014.

The nays were entirely Republican votes, and Richard Burr was one of them. Assuming himself to be the spokesperson for veterans, his excuse was that it was doing too much for veterans, and, predictably, it cost too much. Burr himself went on record to say that he thought it would be better if instead of immediate relief, these various proposals were adopted piecemeal over a long period of time.

Of course, this approach would be voted down as ineffective, if indeed any such piecemeal bills ever even saw the light of day for a vote at all. It’s a cynical way to justify not supporting what should have been a slam dunk for veterans. A much watered-down version of the bill was eventually passed and signed into law, but Republicans balked at even a sharply reduced price tag, and even modest items like $500 million to hire more doctors and nurses for the VA were derided as being too much.

These same Republicans in Congress positively howl at the merest mention of cutting wasteful weapons programs that even the Pentagon doesn’t want, regardless of the price tag, and they were happily parroting the line a decade ago, that “deficits don’t matter,” when George Bush put two wars on the national credit card.

But now that the soldiers who fought in those wars need prostheses and neurological care, suddenly deficits matter more than giving these veterans what they need? We spend 65 cents of every tax dollar on defense spending and yet we can’t afford to care for our veterans?

No-bid, cost-plus-whatever-we-want-to-gouge contracts for Halliburton? No problem. But if you are a veteran, Republicans label you a “taker.”

The Wounded Warrior Project is a valiant, amazing organization, but it shouldn’t have to be begging for dollars on television so that our wounded warriors get the basic help that our government VA system could and should be providing anyway. The answer is not merely firing some ineffective low-level bureaucrats and pretending that solves the problem when the entire system is crippled from massive underfunding.

Caring for these heroes should be a matter of pride, not penny-pinching. Our veterans are a living memorial to the greatness of our country, and we should celebrate them every day, with more than vague platitudes. The Sanders-McCain compromise was a good start, but there is much more yet to be done.

It’s time to put veterans before the military-industrial complex and enact into law the rest of the bill that Bernie Sanders originally proposed last year. The cost of not doing the decent thing is far more staggering.

P.S. — To all veterans still living, and loved ones of those fallen, thank you for all you have given.

Dylan Frick of Stanly County is chairman of North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District Democratic Party, which includes Richmond County.