If This Doesn’t Scare You, Nothing Will

Even though they’ve benefited from them, Republicans and other right-wing ideologues have hated the progressive political reforms of the 20th century ever since they were instituted. And they haven’t given up trying to overturn them, even after all these decades. In a piece today in Salon, political reporter Alex Seitz-Wald suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court’s possible overturning of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act might finally give right-wingers a chance to basically erase the social advances of the 20th century. Writes Seitz-Wald:

At the heart of case are two constitutional questions. First, whether Congress has the authority to require Americans to purchase health insurance under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. And second, whether the federal government can compel states to expand their Medicaid funding.

In a white paper published by the American Constitution Society last year, Lazarus argued that if both go down, “[it] will call into question the constitutional bases for, and hence could trigger copycat challenges to, provisions of other landmark laws and programs, including safety net programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program); civil rights law guarantees against private discrimination by places of public accommodation or in the workplace; federal grant programs in education, transportation, and other large-scale cooperative federalism initiatives; and environmental protection.”

This line of argument assumes that the individual mandate is valid, as many legal scholars agree it is, and so for the Court to overturn it, they would have to invalidate other progressive reforms going back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, as they are all built on an expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause. This wouldn’t happen right away, but would come piecemeal through lawsuits against specific regulations over time. As courts applied the Supreme Court’s new precedent, they would chip away at labor, environmental and other regulations, and unforeseeable other programs.

A negative ruling on the Medicaid expansion could be even more consequential. This provision of the Affordable Care Act increases the number of people who are eligible for the federal low-income healthcare program, and is the means by which the law covers the bulk of today’s uninsured population. Under the new law, the federal government provides some of the funds for the expansion, and makes states pony up the rest by threatening to rescind all federal Medicaid funds if they don’t comply. Congress has used this same basic principle to do everything from increasing the drinking age to 21 to implementing Title IX, the gender equity in education law.

“The collateral damage is huge,” Lazarus told Salon. “The Medicaid expansion would have farther reaching consequences [than the individual mandate], especially immediately. It would be more possible to contain the implications of the mandate than the Medicaid expansion.”

The full article can be found here.

Naturally, right-wingers deny that the Supreme Court’s actions might given them this opening to kill off Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other social programs that have proved invaluable to Americans over the last 80 years.

But even presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt “Flip-flopper” Romney, by endorsing a budget plan put forward by Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), is now solidly in the camp of Republicans wanting to undo those progressive reforms. And if Romney--with the help of his self-interested corporate backers--wins the White House in November, and he gains significant backing in Congress, he’ll undoubtedly start the dismantling process, no matter what public opinion says.

The bottom line: Vote Democratic in November in order to save the nation’s most cherished social programs.

READ MORE: “Social Security Bankrupt? Not So Fast!” by Nathaniel Downes (Addicting Info).

GOP Losing Medicare Argument

This is good news, if hardly unexpected. The results of a new survey:

A new national poll indicates that a majority of Americans don’t like what they’ve heard so far about congressional Republicans’ plans to change Medicare.

According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, a majority also don’t think the GOP has cooperated enough with President Barack Obama and, for the first time since they won back control of the House last November, the number of Americans who say that Republican control of the chamber is good for the country has dropped below the 50 percent mark.

The poll indicates that 58 percent of the public opposes the Republican plan on Medicare, with 35 percent saying they support the proposal ...

“Half of those we questioned say that the country would be worse off under the GOP Medicare proposals and 56 percent think that GOP plan would be bad for the elderly,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Opposition is highest among senior citizens, at 74 percent, suggesting that seniors are most worried about changes to Medicare even if those changes are presented as ones that would not affect existing Medicare recipients.”

There’s more on this poll here.

READ MORE: “Does McConnell Want the GOP to Win the White House in 2012?,” by Stan Collender (Washington Monthly).

Shameless!

Facing fierce resistance to their “Kill Medicare” plan from the general public and congressional Democrats, Republicans are now hoping to undermine Medicare during negotiations over the necessary debt-ceiling increase:

“McConnell Puts Medicare Into the Ransom Note,” by Steve Benen (Washington Monthly).

“You’re on Your Own”

“No matter how hard you’ve worked your whole life, no matter how severe your medical hardship, the Republican motto is clear: you’re on your own. This lays bare the ideology behind their goal of ending of Medicare as we know it.”—Senator Charles Schumer (D-New York), responding to GOP Representative Rob Woodall of Georgia’s suggestion to a constituent that Medicare recipients whose employers don’t supply insurance for retirees should be required to fend for themselves.

More Republican callousness toward Americans can be found beneath this headline in Steve Benen’s Political Animal column: “Cantor Demands Spending-cut Ransom for Missouri Aid.”

Republicans Lied About Protecting Medicare

When Republicans in Congress voted earlier this month to support a radical government budget plan that eliminated Medicare and replaced it with a voucher program, gutted Medicaid, scrapped President Obama’s history-making health-care reform legislation, and decimated the food stamp program for the poor, yet simultaneously slashed tax rates for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, they had to know that Democrats would club them severely over the head for trying to turn back the clock on the nation’s social-assistance advances. Furthermore, Republicans had previously--and altogether falsely--accused Democrats of seeking to undermine the very same social programs, and many in the GOP had promised unequivocally that they would protect Medicare.

As a powerful new ad from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) points out, Republicans essentially lied about their intentions in order to win election last November.

Will seniors and other Americans stand for such bald-faced betrayals? We’ll see. Here’s the ad:

America’s Coming One-Party System?

My political views have definitely evolved over the years. When I was a young man in the 1980s, I thought that, despite my antipathy toward the policies put forth by Republicans, at least they had to have the best interests of America at heart. They just saw a different way of moving the country forward.

But I can no longer endorse that opinion.

Given the recent unwillingness of right-wingers on Capitol Hill to negotiate in good faith on a federal budget; their zealousness to shut down the government as part of a continuing culture war (just as they did in 1995); efforts by GOP governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere to destroy public and private unions (the backbone of workers’ rights); Republicans’ drive to “essentially end Medicare” and do away with Medicaid, roll back President Obama’s important expansion of health-care coverage, and make us even more dependent than we’ve been on bottom-line-driven insurance companies; their wish to hand out more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and hand the bill for those to the already strapped middle class; their push to eliminate regulations that hold corporations accountable for the health and safety of their employees and anyone else; and House Speaker John Boehner’s 11th-hour insistence that any federal budget win the approval of a majority of his caucus (a pretty ludicrous proposition, when you consider the ideological extremism of so many of its members), I must now accept that Republicans don’t really care about advancing the cause of all Americans.

As right-wing U.S. Representative Mike Pence (R-Indiana) accidentally acknowledged last night during an appearance on Fox “News,” in the battle over the budget “we’re trying to score a victory for the Republican people.” Some in the Beltway media will undoubtedly pass that off as a slip of the tongue, but there’s more truth in Pence’s statement than anything else.

Now, I don’t think that all Republicans share the radical viewpoints espoused by their national leaders. There are certainly decent members of the party, and each of us knows some.

But when it comes to the GOP leadership in Congress, and in at least some of the 50 states, I’ve come to believe that they don’t honestly care about anybody except themselves. No matter what they might say in front of microphones. They don’t care about union enrollees. They don’t care about members of the middle class. They definitely don’t care about the poor or the unemployed. They don’t care about people who believe that women ought to have birth-control choices, or those of us who think that arming more and more Americans (even college students!) can only lead to increased violence. They don’t care about people who don’t attend a Christian church. They don’t care about anyone who’s black or Latino or Asian, or anything but white (except if those same people are willing to swear fealty to GOP causes, and pay big into the party’s coffers). They don’t care about folks who think government plays a vital role in keeping citizens healthy and preventing corporations from taking advantage of their employees. They don’t care about people who endorse public funding of the arts. And they damn well don’t care about anyone who calls him- or herself a Democrat or a progressive. We are, to their minds, the enemy. Not simply people with different ideas of how the nation and the world should operate. We’re the enemy.

“The worldview to which much of the GOP subscribes,” writes MyDD’s Charles Lemos, “is one that we as a nation thought we had long put behind us, but they want to repeal the twentieth century and they don’t mind destroying the country in the process.” The evidence of that seems to abound right now. Today’s Republican Party, led by religious and social extremists, appears anxious to turn the nation over to Big Business, deny clear evidence of global warming, escalate the wealth gap among Americans, and ignore anybody who isn’t pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.

What’s more, as Rachel Maddow laid out last night on her MSNBC show, Republicans have developed a long-term game plan--assisted by now-unregulated corporate funding--to do away with any political opposition whatsoever. To make the United States, in effect, a one-party system. With right-wingers in charge--and to hell with the rest of us. As she explains it, it doesn’t matter that over-reaching GOP governors or other legislators might fall before the wrath of angry voters in the interim; what matters is that laws and practices are slowly but surely bent in favor of the Republican Party and its worst ideologues for decades to come.

This is a frightening and undemocratic proposition, and I hope it’s nothing more than a great conspiracy theory. But after observing the games being played of late by the GOP, I am more convinced than ever that today’s Republican Party stands up only for “the Republican people.” It’s a sad turn for a political party that Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt once hoped would do its best to improve the lot of all Americans.

Watch and learn:



READ MORE: “What’s Really Holding Up the Budget Deal?,” by Ezra Klein (The Washington Post); “New Polls: Tea Party Roadblock to Budget Compromise” (The Huffington Post); “Countdown to the Tea Party’s Comeuppance,” by Steve Kornacki (Salon); “Shutdown Fever” (Think Progress).