There is no mystery why Republicans are willing to sit back and watch a demented self-serving boob exert the awesome powers of the presidency, someone who did not as much “win” the office as acquire it despite losing the popular vote by a historic 3 million votes. They are euphoric at winning a tax code that shifts $1.5 trillion from working people to the wealthiest individuals and corporations they could only dream of over for 30 years, happy they have a president willing to overturn consumer protections, public health, environmental protections and worker safety.
Republicans are also salivating over the prospect of dismantling the Great Society, the New Deal and every progressive policy going back to Teddy Roosevelt, altogether. Next up: ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, welfare and the final nail in the coffin of Obamacare.
This is despite the bombshell revelations of the Michael Wolff book, “Fire & Fury,” in which he describes the monumental unfitness of Trump and his administration.
Why would the Republicans who have railed against the national debt as the biggest threat to American power in the history of the world and then accept adding $1 trillion to the deficit?
Because they knew it would give them the justification to go after so-called entitlements (you know, the programs that working Americans pay into for their entire lives, while the wealthiest are able to shelter their income due to the low cap), even as they pad the defense budget by $700 billion.
They have the pro-fossil fuel energy policy (climate change is a hoax), the deregulation (nursing homes no longer responsible for residents’ deaths; oil companies not responsible for cleaning up spills or safety of workers), the tax policy, the judges (even those rated wholly “unqualified” but they are loyal to Trump and right wing ideology; they are reversing progress in criminal justice reform, environmental protection, conservation. You think that the 2008 fiscal collapse was something? Wait for the Trump/McConnell/Ryan Great Recession, which of course will be blamed on Obama and the Democrats.
But they need a patsy in the White House with no scruples, no intellectual grasp or consideration for the ramifications of a policy, no concern for the impact on ordinary people, to do it. Someone who doesn’t care to read studies and can barely get through reading a speech off a teleprompter that has been written for him without mangling the words or expressing clear surprise.
They will propose that they are looking next to a big infrastructure bill and pretend that they want to work in a bipartisan fashion (only because 51 votes in the Senate won’t be enough).
But what Trump and the Republicans see is a means of steering billions of dollars of federal money into Republican districts: turning the U.S. Treasury (funded by donor states like New York and California) into a political slush fund.
It is clear from the fact that the Trump Administration ended its participation in the $30 billion New York-New Jersey Gateway tunnel project. If that wasn’t a project worthy of federal support, what would the standard be?
“We’re going to be looking for areas of bipartisan agreement because that’s the way the Senate is,” Mr. McConnell, the majority leader, declared. LOL
But the reality is apparent in the way funding for disaster relief is channeled to Texas and Florida (red states), but not to Puerto Rico (which is being further punished in the new tax code, as if it were a foreign country), and California (blue state) that has suffered billions in losses because of the wildfires.
You see it in the way the tax law hamstrings blue states from undertaking its own infrastructure projects – New York State under Gov. Cuomo has implemented the most ambitious infrastructure program in the nation, but now will face extraordinary challenges in delivering.
“No state contributes more to the federal government and gets back less than New York State,” Gov. Cuomo declared in his State of the State address.
On top of that injustice, Washington’s tax plan now uses New York and California as piggy banks to finance tax cuts for Republican states.
New York will pay an additional $14 billion on top of the $48 billion that we currently pay. Remember the old adage robbing Peter to pay Paul. Well they changed it. You’re now robbing the blue states to pay for the red states….
“It is crass, it is ugly, it is divisive, it is partisan legislating, it is an economic civil war,” Cuomo said. “And make no mistake, they are aiming to hurt us. This could cause people to leave the state of New York. And it could reduce our ability to attract business. We must take dramatic action to save ourselves and preserve our state’s economy.”
The Congressional Republicans’ level of tolerance, of ostrich-like sticking heads in the sand to pretend there is not a national catastrophe occupying the Oval Office, is remarkable – encapsulated in the way Sen. Lindsey Graham went from calling Trump “a kook…crazy… unfit for office,” to extolling Trump’s praises. “In my view, he is my president, and he’s doing a really good job on multiple fronts.”
Of course he is.
You have to wonder, if the offenses, the erratic behavior, the corruption (money laundering, likely tax fraud, sexual assault) and collusion with a foreign adversary that Donald Trump has already demonstrated are not sufficient to warrant (1) impeachment or (2) Article 25 removal, what would be the standard?
Lying about adultery? Trump has already been the subject of more than a dozen credible accusations of sexual harassment and assault, but even a sex scandal isn’t sufficient, apparently, in his case.
“You’d need huge majorities in the House and Senate, plus a cabinet uprising to do the deed, and with Trump’s crew they’re just as likely to declare him emperor,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote.
If impeachment is only a remedy when the opposing party is in control of Congress, that is truly sad.
And if impeachment or some other means to set aside an election is used willy nilly by an opposing majority party to remove a legitimately elected President (ie. the next Democrat), that is also wrong.
But I have to continue to wonder about the Original Sin: this election was corrupted. Rigged does not even begin to describe.
If there is no consequence for outright stealing an election, the same techniques will only become the new modus operandi of political campaigns in the future.
The fact that our elections are managed locally (widely touted as the protection against stealing an election) is not a safeguard for the kinds of manipulations that Russia (and who else) proved capable of and now the Mercers and Cambridge Analytics, Facebook and Twitter also can wield: they realize you only have to tilt the count in specifically targeted districts by small amounts – after all, Trump won the Electoral College by only 70,000 votes spread among three states (which canceled out the 3 million popular votes that Clinton won by).
With today’s data mining technology, it isn’t hard to figure where to tilt the vote or flip a few switches.
And next time, it could be North Korea, which has already proved itself adept at cyberwarfare, even penetrating top-secret government sites, doing the hacking, especially when our voting systems are no more sophisticated than a desktop PC.
Instead of investigating how to protect the integrity of voting machines and the election process, the Republicans are investigating the FBI investigators, demeaning Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, and instead of subpoenaing financial records of the Trump and Kushner enterprises, they are going after FusionGPS, and looking to expand their powers for gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Instead of seriously examining the reports of demented behavior and cognition on the part of Trump (at minimum, it should be part of his upcoming physical and the results released to the public), Republican senators plan to investigate Christopher Steele, a former British M16 spy who gathered the intelligence for the infamous dossier documenting ties between Trump and Russia operatives and was so horrified, informed US authorities.
This all points to the importance of the upcoming Women’s Marches on Jan. 20, with a major one here in New York City (11-3, Columbus Circle, see https://womensmarchalliance.org/2018-womens-march-on-nyc/2018wm-faq/).
