Tag Archives: cruelty

Listing The Obscenities

On Tuesday evening, I participated in a Zoom hosted by Indivisible of Central Indiana. It was focused on Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” and if you can stand yet another enumeration of that insult to Americans, I’m posting my comments below.

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As Heather Cox Richardson has said, the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is MAGA’s attempt to replace the government we’ve had since the 1930s with one that reflects the goals of Project 2025.

It is also an effort to rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy.

The Bill is 1000+ pages, but in this brief presentation I want to highlight the major elements—and alert you to the fact that, despite the fact that it is billed as a “budget,” it has numerous, damaging non-fiscal provisions which should be ruled non-germane in the Senate, but may not be.

Before getting to the truly horrifying fiscal mischief, let me share with you some of the most egregious non-fiscal provisions:

  • A measure to cripple the courts by prohibiting any funding from being used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. Passage of this measure would enable Trump and his officials to defy court orders at will.
  • The addition of billions to various parts of Trump’s deportation efforts, ramping up those efforts to the tune of an additional trillion dollars That includes $45 billion for construction of immigration jails (more than 13 times ICE’s current detention budget.) In addition, it would allow the indefinite detention of immigrant children and would charge families $3,500 to reunite with a child who arrived alone at the border. Asylum seekers will be charged an “application fee” of at least $1,000.
  • The administration would be given authority to label nonprofits as “terrorist-supporting organizations,” and terminate their tax status- an open invitation to suppress the free speech and activism of climate and civil liberties organizations, among others of which Trump and MAGA disapprove.
  • The bill would eliminate the National Weather Service, making local weather reports far less accurate.
  • One provision would allow the administration to sell off national parks.
  • A particularly ugly provision repeals the $200 excise tax on the sale of gun silencers, which have no lawful purpose other than concealing shootings.

Other bits of “fine print” more directly support the major goal of the bill, which is, as I’ve noted, to protect the extremely wealthy against efforts to get them to pay their fair share of taxes–basically, the bill exempts rich people from paying their dues to the country that made their accumulation of wealth possible. (For example, the bill would basically eliminate an Estate Tax that is already massively favorable to the top 1%.)

The “guts” of the bill are the fiscal provisions. Basically, the bill is an effort to fund the extension of Trump’s tax cuts for the rich by eliminating health care for the poor and middle class.

The Congressional Budget office estimates that as many as 16 million people would lose health insurance under the House-passed version of the bill. The annual cuts to Medicaid would average over 70 billion dollars a year—the same amount millionaires and billionaires would gain in tax cuts. The media has focused on those Medicaid cuts, but a number of analysts have explained that measures that have been minimized as “technical revisions” would essentially repeal Obamacare.

Not only would millions of individuals lose their health insurance, the consequences of these cuts would close many, if not most, rural hospitals and would have a dramatically negative impact on local economies, ironically mostly in Red states like Indiana. Economists have estimated that depressed local spending under the House bill would force the loss of 850,000 jobs. (Health care is the largest employer of any sector of the economy; it employs 18 million workers.)

Republicans who claim that they’re just adding “work requirements” to Medicaid are lying—the budget cuts 715 billion from Medicaid and 335 billion from Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act). And prior experience in the states has demonstrated that work requirements do nothing but erect paperwork barriers that throw eligible people off Medicaid; as we’ve learned from those previous efforts, Medicaid recipients who are able to work are already working—most Medicaid recipients are disabled, elderly or children.

There’s much more. The bill weakens the Child Tax Credit, by lowering the eligibility income threshold, so millions of children will suddenly become ineligible. It expands school vouchers–continuing the GOP effort to destroy public education and shift tax dollars to religious institutions, in violation of the First Amendment. It includes a variety of “Stealth Cuts’ to the Affordable Care Act that will increase out-of-pocket costs and make insurance more expensive for those people who are fortunate enough to retain it.

As if the assault on poor folks wasn’t mean-spirited enough, the bill also has deep cuts to SNAP. The House-passed version would cut nearly $300 billion from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. That would be by far the largest cut to SNAP in history, and it would mean that millions of low-income families would lose some or all of the food assistance they need to afford groceries and feed their children.

SNAP has been the nation’s most effective anti-hunger program, and the bill cuts it by roughly 30 percent. These extreme cuts are actually deeper than the $230 billion in cuts the original budget resolution called for because the bill adds tens of billions of dollars in new spending for farm programs, and pays for those dollars by taking more food assistance away from people with low incomes.

And despite the GOP’s purported concerns about budget deficits, the bill blows up the budget deficit. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will increase borrowing by a total of $2.4 trillion by 2034, because the $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs don’t even come close to canceling out $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the rich. Just the tax cuts going to the richest 5 percent outstrip the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps by 300 billion. If you add in interest costs, the total debt the bill creates exceeds $3 trillion.

This is just a horrible bill, and it needs to be defeated.

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Who Is A Real American?

Adam Serwer is a staff writer for the Atlantic, and the author of a forthcoming book titled “The Cruelty is the Point: the Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America.” He recently contributed an op-ed to the New York Times, in which he undertook to defend the thesis of that book

Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has always been the drive of some leaders to restrict its blessings to a select few.

This is why Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump but has not vanquished Trumpism. Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with, from shattering migrant families and banning Muslim travelers to valorizing war crimes and denigrating African, Latino and Caribbean immigrants as being from “shithole countries.” Republicans have responded with zeal, even in the aftermath of his loss, with Republican-controlled legislatures targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most significant for democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority that Republicans fear no longer supports them. The focus on Mr. Trump’s — admittedly shocking — idiosyncrasies has obscured the broader logic of this strategy.

Serwer locates the origins of that cruelty in the Democratic Party of the post-civil war, post-Reconstruction eras, and he concedes that contemporary Republicans are somewhat less violent and racist than were the Democrats of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. But he points out that, as the parties exchanged positions, Republicans have adopted the Democrats’ prior political logic. They view victories of the rival party as illegitimate, the result of “fraud, coercion or the support of ignorant voters who are not truly American.”

That last belief–that people who vote for the “other party” (i.e. the Democratic Party) aren’t “real” Americans–shocked me, and I thought it must be an exaggerated claim. But Serwer documented it.

On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In outlets like National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” Trumpist redoubts like the Claremont Institute publish hysterical jeremiads warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

There’s a great deal to provoke thought in the essay, and I encourage you to click through and read it in its entirety, but this accusation seems to me to sum up the crux of the argument Americans are having right now.

We are debating just who is entitled to be called a “real” American.

In a very important essay in the Atlantic, George Packer recently identified the Americans who consider themselves “real Americans.”The narrative of “real America,” Packard said, “is white Christian nationalism.”

Packard is correct. Survey research suggests that slightly over thirty percent of Americans believe that, in order to be a “real” American, one must be a White Christian. Those of us who reject that belief define a “real American” as someone who embraces what I call the American Idea: the philosophy that animated the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Unlike the European countries that awarded citizenship on the basis of identity–ethnic, religious, etc.–  the Founders established a country in which one becomes a citizen–an American– via acceptance of those foundational values.

American citizenship depends upon behavior, not identity.

The arguments we are having today in our dramatically-polarized country really boil down to a conflict between those who see “real Americans” as members of a tribe that one must be born into, and those of us who believe that being a “real American” requires that we understand, accept and uphold the principles and aspirations embodied in those constituent documents.

G.K. Chesterton once argued that the American experiment aspired to create “a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles” united by voluntary assent to commonly held political beliefs.

The real “Real Americans” agree with Chesterton.

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