Tag Archives: GOP

Truth Or Power

One of the very few (inadvertently) positive outcomes of Trump’s election has been an eruption of public soul-searching by thoughtful Republicans. Pundits like David Brooks, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Michael Gerson have cut through the dissembling and hypocrisy of Congressional Republicans, and haven’t hesitated to point out the consequences of electing a spectacularly naked “emperor.”

A recent column by Gerson contained a scathing and utterly accurate summary of the man demanding (and receiving) Republican loyalty.

President Trump is remarkably unpopular, particularly with the young (among whom his approval is underwater by a remarkable 48 percentage points in one poll). And the reasons have little to do with elitism or media bias.

Trump has been ruled by compulsions, obsessions and vindictiveness, expressed nearly daily on Twitter. He has demonstrated an egotism that borders on solipsism. His political skills as president have been close to nonexistent. His White House is divided, incompetent and chaotic, and key administration jobs remain unfilled. His legislative agenda has gone nowhere. He has told constant, childish, refuted, uncorrected lies, and demanded and habituated deception among his underlings. He has humiliated and undercut his staff while requiring and rewarding flattery. He has promoted self-serving conspiracy theories. He has displayed pathetic, even frightening, ignorance on policy matters foreign and domestic. He has inflicted his ethically challenged associates on the nation. He is dead to the poetry of language and to the nobility of the political enterprise, viewing politics as conquest rather than as service.

Trump has made consistent appeals to prejudice based on religion and ethnicity, and associated the Republican Party with bias. He has stoked tribal hostilities. He has carelessly fractured our national unity. He has attempted to undermine respect for any institution that opposes or limits him — be it the responsible press, the courts or the intelligence community. He has invited criminal investigation through his secrecy and carelessness. He has publicly attempted to intimidate law enforcement. He has systematically alarmed our allies and given comfort to authoritarians. He promised to emancipate the world from American moral leadership — and has kept that pledge.

The Republican lawmakers who continue to support, excuse and enable this deeply disturbed man demonstrate where their values truly lie, and what their priorities truly are. For Ryan, McConnell and their obedient GOP minions in the House and Senate, clinging to power is far more important than serving the nation. Most of them know how dangerous Trump is, and how much harm he is doing, but they won’t desert his sinking ship until it costs them at the ballot box.

The irony is, the GOP is reaping what it very deliberately sowed.

From Nixon’s “Southern strategy” on, the Grand Old Party has been encouraging racial and religious resentments, rewarding “base” voters (in both senses of that word) with red meat rhetoric and divisive policies. It has colluded with rightwing media, supplying “talking points” to the talk radio ranters and Fox News, and defending racist and misogynist messaging.

As the party has become ever more cult-like, it has lost the so-called “country club” Republicans and the fiscally conservative, socially-liberal voters who used to make up a considerable portion of its membership. (When we see reports that majorities of Republicans still support Trump, we need to recognize that the percentage of Americans who identify as Republicans is far smaller than it used to be. Those supporters are the majority of a shrinking minority.) More recently, the party has lost the conservative pundits who genuinely care about policies and principles.

The question now is: how long will it be until the inevitable backlash–and how much harm to America will have been done in the meantime?

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Even Toto Is Leaving Kansas

Not that it will make any difference to the ideologues for whom evidence is irrelevant, but Republicans in Kansas have now thrown in the towel on the nation’s most wholehearted effort to prove that lower taxes generate higher state revenues.

As the Washington Post headline put it, “Kansas Republicans Raise Taxes, Ending Their GOP Governor’s ‘Real Live Experiment’ in Conservative Policy.”

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is a supply-side “true believer,” who made draconian tax cuts after assuming office in 2010, and waited with anticipation for the state’s economy to grow in response. That growth failed to materialize during his first term, but he was re-elected, and he continued stubbornly waiting–still a true believer– as Kansas’ deficit grew to over a billion dollars and basic services were cut.  Education, mental health, healthcare–all took huge hits.

Members of his own party called for an end to the “experiment,” and joined Democrats in passing a bill to increase taxes. Brownback vetoed it. The legislature subsequently overrode that veto; in the end, eighteen of the state’s 31 GOP senators and 49 of the 85 Republican members of the House voted against the governor.

Under Brownback, as has been widely reported, the pace of economic expansion in Kansas has consistently lagged behind that of the rest of the country. What is particularly telling is the very different experience of Minnesota, where a Democratic Governor elected at the same time as Brownback raised taxes and substantially increased education spending, and where by 2015 there were multiple reports like this:

Since 2011, Minnesota has been doing quite well for itself. The state has created more than 170,000 jobs, according to the Huffington Post. Its unemployment rate stands at 3.6% — the fifth-lowest in the country, and far below the nationwide rate of 5.7% — and the state government boasts a budget surplus of $1 billion. Forbes considers Minnesota one of the top 10 in the country for business.

Despite the fact that Brownback’s experiment in Kansas has failed so spectacularly, its tax cuts remain the blueprint for the Trump Administration and for “true believers” like Paul Ryan. As the Post article puts it,

The principles Trump endorsed during the campaign and in the early stages of his presidency are broadly similar to those enacted in Kansas. As Brownback did, Trump has proposed bringing down marginal rates, getting rid of brackets and giving a new break to small businesses.

That is no coincidence, since Brownback is well connected to the Republican policymaking establishment in Washington. Trump and Brownback have shared economic advisers, and when Brownback was a U.S. senator, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), now the speaker of the House, served as his legislative director.

There’s a pattern here.

Today’s Republicans–unlike the sober and prudential members of the party to which I once belonged–are simply impervious to evidence.

They continue to insist that raising the minimum wage will depress employment, ignoring the fact that cities that have raised the wage have seen job growth and increased economic activity.

They ignore rigorous studies by (genuine) conservatives showing that so-called “welfare reform”–far from being a great success, as they routinely proclaim –has diverted funds from programs to help struggling Americans (who are, if anything, worse off) and used the money to plug state budget holes and compensate for tax cuts for the wealthy.

They stubbornly insist that tax cuts will generate economic growth, and that their repeated, demonstrable failure to do so is because we just haven’t cut deeply enough, or waited long enough.

These are the same people who dismiss climate change as a hoax, but tell us that if it turns out to be real, God will take care of it. They’re the same folks who agree with Jeff Sessions that the drug war would work if we’d just increase the penalties for smoking weed.

With these people, ideology consistently trumps experience. (What are you going to believe? Conservative political doctrine or your lying eyes?)

I’m beginning to think these people would go to a doctor who told them what they wanted to hear even if that doctor’s patients all died…

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One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

In an article written for the Atlantic, James Fallows compares the current Administration’s Russia scandal with Watergate, and provides reasons for his conclusion that this one is actually worse.

Worse for and about the president. Worse for the overall national interest. Worse in what it suggests about the American democratic system’s ability to defend itself.

Fallows begins by deconstructing the adage that the coverup is always worse than the crime; as he points out, what Nixon and his allies were trying to do falls under the category of “dirty tricks.” It was a bungled effort to find incriminating or embarrassing information about his political enemies,  and the adage held: the crime really wasn’t as bad as the subsequent illegal efforts to cover it up.

And what is alleged this time? Nothing less than attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an election—and doing so as part of a larger strategy that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere. At worst, such efforts might actually have changed the election results. At least, they were meant to destroy trust in democracy. Not much of this is fully understood or proven, but the potential stakes are incomparably greater than what happened during Watergate, crime and cover-up alike.

Fallows enumerates other differences: As he points out, “even in his stonewalling, Nixon paid lip service to the concepts of due process and check and balances.” As I have previously posted, to the extent Trump even understands those concepts, he is contemptuous of them.

Nixon was “paranoid, resentful, bigoted, and a crook.” But as Fallows reminds us, he was also deeply knowledgeable, strategically adept and publicly disciplined. Trump…well, supply your own descriptors; Fallows is more reserved than I would be, settling for impulsive, ignorant and uncontrollable.

Most troubling, however, aren’t the differences between these two deeply flawed men. As Fallow’s notes, the social and political contexts within which they rose to power are dramatically different.

When Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox,

Within the space of a few hours, three senior officials—Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox—had all made a choice of principle over position, and resigned or been fired rather than comply with orders they considered illegitimate. Their example shines nearly half a century later because such a choice remains so rare….

The Republicans of the Watergate era stuck with Richard Nixon as long as they could, but they acted all along as if larger principles were at stake…

On the merits, this era’s Republican president has done far more to justify investigation than Richard Nixon did. Yet this era’s Republican senators and members of congress have, cravenly, done far less. A few have grumbled about “concerns” and so on, but they have stuck with Trump where it counts, in votes, and since Comey’s firing they have been stunning in their silence.

Charlie Sykes, who formerly hosted a conservative radio call-in show,  recently summed up the reasons for that silence, and the differences between then and now.

If there was one principle that used to unite conservatives, it was respect for the rule of law. Not long ago, conservatives would have been horrified at wholesale violations of the norms and traditions of our political system, and would have been appalled by a president who showed overt contempt for the separation of powers.

Sykes gives a number of examples supporting his thesis that conservatism is being eclipsed by a visceral tribalism: Loathing those who loathe the president. Rabid anti-anti-Trumpism. Rooting for one’s “team,” not one’s principles.  As he concludes,

As the right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism, it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct just as long as it annoys CNN and the left.

In many ways anti-anti-Trumpism mirrors Donald Trump himself, because at its core there are no fixed values, no respect for constitutional government or ideas of personal character, only a free-floating nihilism cloaked in insult, mockery and bombast.

Needless to say, this is not a form of conservatism that Edmund Burke, or even Barry Goldwater, would have recognized.

Conservative political philosophy has been replaced with racist and classist resentments. Donald Trump is President because he is very good at exploiting those resentments. In that sense, and that sense only, he has channelled–and perfected–Nixon.

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Truer Words Were Never Spoken

A column by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post is unkind, but deadly accurate.

Actually, the subhead says it all: Trump is crazy. What’s Pence’s excuse?

Cohen’s lede:

When history holds its trial to account for the Donald Trump presidency, Trump himself will be acquitted on grounds of madness. History will look at his behavior, his erratic and childish lying and his flamboyant ignorance of history itself and pronounce the man, like George III, a cuckoo for whom restraint, but not punishment, was necessary. Such will not be the case for Mike Pence, the toady vice president and the personification of much that has gone wrong in Washington.

On any given day, Pence will do his customary spot-on imitation of a bobblehead. Standing near Trump in the Oval Office, he will nod his head robotically as the president says one asinine thing after another and then, maybe along with others, he will be honored with a lie or a version of the truth so mangled by contradictions and fabrications that a day in the White House is like a week on LSD.

Those of us who have known Pence prior to his unlikely ascension to the Vice-Presidency aren’t surprised by his acquiescence; Pence is not particularly intelligent, thoughtful or self-aware. The adjective Cohen uses– “toady”– is entirely apt. (In fact, when I see him doing his “bobblehead” routine, or especially when he is proclaiming his Christian piety, I always think of Dickens’ Uriah Heep–the smarmy character who was always proclaiming his humbleness.)

What is worrisome about Mike Pence isn’t that he is, in Cohen’s words, “clueless.” It’s that he is entirely typical of today’s GOP officeholders.

I don’t feel an iota of sympathy for Pence. He was among a perfidious group of political opportunists who pushed Trump’s candidacy while having to know that he was intellectually, temperamentally and morally unfit for the presidency. They stuck with him as he mocked the disabled, belittled women, insulted Hispanics, libeled Mexicans and promiscuously promised the impossible and ridiculous — all that “Day One” nonsense like how the wall would be built and Mexico would pay for it….

The president cannot be trusted. He cannot be believed. He has denigrated the news media, not for its manifest imperfections but for its routine and obligatory search for the truth. He has turned on the judiciary for its fidelity to the law and, once, for the ethnic heritage of a judge. Trump corrupts just about everything he touches.

From most of the Republican Party comes not a whisper of rebuke. The congressional leadership is inert, cowed, scurrying to the White House for this or that ceremonial picture, like members of the erstwhile Politburo flanking Stalin atop Lenin’s mausoleum. They are appalled, but mute. They want to make the best of a bad situation, I know, and they fear the voters back home, but their complicity ought to be obvious even to them.

This captures the situation perfectly. Here in Indiana, the Republicans we’ve sent to represent us in Congress are all doing their best imitation of Pence’s “bobblehead.” They’ve traded whatever honor and integrity they had (and in some cases, that wasn’t much) for more visible committee assignments and financial help from the RNC in the next campaign.

I don’t know how they sleep at night.

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Despicable and Inexcusable

When I sat down to write about yesterday’s vote in the U.S. House, I discovered that Paul Waldman had beaten me to it, with a column so detailed and scorching that there is no way I could equal it.

Waldman titled his piece “Every Republican Who Voted for this Abomination Must be Held Accountable.” His words fairly sizzle on the screen–and for good reason.

I won’t mince words. The health-care bill that the House of Representatives passed this afternoon, in an incredibly narrow 217-to-213 vote, is not just wrong, or misguided, or problematic or foolish. It is an abomination. If there has been a piece of legislation in our lifetimes that boiled over with as much malice and indifference to human suffering, I can’t recall what it might have been. And every member of the House who voted for it must be held accountable.

Waldman starts with process criticisms: the GOP passed this bill without holding  a single hearing on it. They were desperate to hold the vote before the Congressional Budget Office could issue a report describing its effects. Hardly anyone had an opportunity to read the damn thing. And as Waldman points out, “all this despite the fact that they are remaking one-sixth of the American economy and affecting all of our lives.”

In contrast, the Affordable Care Act (which Republicans constantly claim was “rammed through”) was debated for an entire year and was the subject of dozens of hearings.

Waldman notes that every major stakeholder organization vocally opposed this bill:  the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the AARP, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and on and on.

But then he gets to the horrifying details. Quoting from his exhaustively researched article:

  • Takes health insurance away from at least 24 million Americans; that was the number the CBO estimated for a previous version of the bill, and the number for this one is probably higher.
  • Revokes the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which provided no-cost health coverage to millions of low-income Americans.
  • Turns Medicaid into a block grant, enabling states to kick otherwise-eligible people off their coverage and cut benefits if they so choose.
  • Slashes Medicaid overall by $880 billion over 10 years.
  • Removes the subsidies that the ACA provided to help middle-income people afford health insurance, replacing them with far more meager tax credits pegged not to people’s income but to their age. Poorer people would get less than they do now, while richer people would get more; even Bill Gates would get a tax credit.
  • Allows insurers to charge dramatically higher premiums to older patients.
  • Allows insurers to impose yearly and lifetime caps on coverage, which were outlawed by the ACA. This also, it was revealed today, may threaten the coverage of the majority of non-elderly Americans who get insurance through their employers.
  • Allows states to seek waivers from the ACA’s requirement that insurance plans include essential benefits for things such as emergency services, hospitalization, mental health care, preventive care, maternity care, and substance abuse treatment.
  • Provides hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for families making over $250,000 a year.
  • Produces higher deductibles for patients.
  • Allows states to try to waive the ACA’s requirement that insurers must charge people the same rates regardless of their medical history. This effectively eviscerates the ban on denials for preexisting conditions, since insurers could charge you exorbitant premiums if you have a preexisting condition, effectively denying you coverage.
  • Shunts those with preexisting conditions into high-risk pools, which are absolutely the worst way to cover those patients; experience with them on the state level proves that they wind up underfunded, charge enormous premiums, provide inadequate benefits and can’t cover the population they’re meant for. Multiple analyses have shown that the money the bill provides for high-risk pools is laughably inadequate, which will inevitably leave huge numbers of the most vulnerable Americans without the ability to get insurance.
  • Brings back medical underwriting, meaning that just like in the bad old days, when you apply for insurance you’ll have to document every condition or ailment you’ve ever had.

One significant item Waldman’s list omits: the measure also defunds Planned Parenthood.

Every single Indiana Republican voted to do this to the American public and the citizens of Indiana.

I expected those votes from Rokita, Walorski, Banks and Bucshon, and I’m disappointed but not surprised by Messer and “Tennessee Trey.” But I am disgusted by Susan Brooks, because I’ve known her a long time; unlike her colleagues, she’s highly intelligent–and she knows better. I’ve watched her abandon integrity in vote after vote (during her first two years, her voting record was virtually indistinguishable from that of Michelle Bachmann.) I’ve watched her hide from her constituents during the recent Congressional recess. And now, I’ve watched her obediently vote with the lunatic caucus of her party for legislation that is not only absolutely indefensible, but will disproportionately harm women. It makes me physically ill.

Again, Waldman says it best:

Perhaps this bill will never become law, and its harm may be averted. But that would not mitigate the moral responsibility of those who supported it. Members of Congress vote on a lot of inconsequential bills and bills that have a small impact on limited areas of American life. But this is one of the most critical moments in recent American political history. The Republican health-care bill is an act of monstrous cruelty. It should stain those who supported it to the end of their days.

If Hoosiers (and other Americans) don’t begin working right now to defeat every single Representative who voted for this cynical assault on decency and basic humanity, we deserve what we get.

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