Dear America,
As The Senate continues to thrash about--its Republican leader kidding himself that he is showing the nation that Republicans can govern by bringing up the same bill over and over for the dubious purpose of abrogating President Obama's immigration reforms--the world watches and scratches its collective head. It seems that every lesson that the Democrats learned over the four years since they took over the House of Representatives was not wasted just on the Democrats, but on the Republicans too. The same rule that thwarted the Democrats in The Senate for six years continues with regard to all but a few legislative initiatives is the one that is thwarting the Republicans. The filibuster is the enemy of all legislative progress, and everyone in The Senate knows that. Yet, on the first day of each session of Congress, when it is possible to change the rules of that body so as to vitiate or even eliminate the pernicious practice, the party that has retained or assumed control declines to do anything, and thus seals its own fate as a feckless leader in a process that has ceased to be a process at all. But the Republicans still think that a little slight of hand can reflect the inability of the ruling party to accomplish anything back onto the opposition Democrats, and in that vain effort, they have not "introduced" a healthcare plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. They seem to think that this recycling of ideas that couldn't fly before will be more acceptable than it has been in the past just because they dressed the pig up and put lipstick on it.
The supposedly new package that the Republicans are trying to float comprises nothing more than three or four regressive ideas consolidated into just two, which actually led to Obamacare, as the Republicans pejoratively call it, but they have no more appeal now than they had when they galvanized the Democratic opposition to the ACA into voting for it. They knew that if they didn't pass the law we would all get the Republican version, which is as usual a giveaway to the members of our economic society who already have what they need. Specifically, the core of the Republican plan is three ideas that go back a long way...though not quite as far back as the Republican proposal of what became "Romneycare" in Massachusetts and Obamacare on the national level, which they now oppose, mostly because they didn't pass it when they had control of both bodies of Congress during the first six years of the George W. Bush administration. The first is one that has been purported to be a new alternative to the ACA on two or three occasions when it came from the mouth of two or three Congressmen: taxing the cost of health insurance that employers give to employees as income to those employees. In other words, the Republicans want to raise money by taxing the middle class, which lives on salary, while protecting the tax advantages of corporations and the rich. The second idea--it is multi-faceted but it comes down to using states' rights to prevent any form of universal healthcare from occurring--is to give the states discretion as to whether they want to have insurance exchanges and to roll back the expansion of Medicaid, thus decreasing federal budget deficits by making healthcare less accessible to the poor and disadvantaged. And the third is to protect the tax deduction that employers get now for the premiums they pay...another sop for the business community in the name of proliferating business activity as if the $3 trillion that it already has in the bank can't be spent unless it is compounded with tax breaks.
So here is the scenario that the Republicans want to foist on the American voter as governance. They propose to prevent an increase in the minimum wage, deport as many of the workers who will do the work that Americans refuse to do as they can, continue to allow the rich to pay less on their capital gains than the working people of this country pay on their earned income, and see to it that healthcare continues to be rationed along lines that correspond to economic prosperity. All in all, the Republican platform can be summed up this way. We will give to, and protect the wealth of, the plutocracy of the United States, and we will keep our foot on the collective neck of the working majority in this country, but we will tell everyone that what we want to do is best for them and they will believe it even though their lives will not improve while the rich get richer. That's the Republican plan...it seems.
So, Paul Ryan will continue to blame the less fortunate for not being more fortunate and he will call their wish to be fairly compensated for their work and to see the doctor when they are sick "envy." He will claim that the rich are paying too much in taxes without explaining how if that is the case and it is truly inimical to economic growth the wealth of our nation gets more and more concentrated in the hands of those who do not do the work that creates that wealth. And his reward will be that he will be reelected, and frankly, in Ryan's case that has been a pretty good plan. He continues to get reelected in his mid-western district while he spews supply-side economics shamelessly. He peremptorily denies the reality that his type of Ayn-Rand-inspired economic policy has prevented the working people of this country from improving their standard of living for three decades...ever since his patron saint, Ronald Reagan, unleashed those policies on us all. And simultaneously, more congressional districts have sent more Ryans to The House. So in the end, you've got to hand it to the Republicans. Contrary to any rational notion, they have found out that we Americans are masochists, and as long as they continue to inflict pain on us, we will continue to send them to Washington and allow them to make their friends richer.
Your friend,
Mike
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