Are Democrats Poised to Put Republicans on the Defensive?

For years now I have critizied the Repubican Party for having no long term plan to attract more voters in the rapidly changing population of America.   Rather than changing the party's agenda, the party leadership and candidates have doubled down in pandering to a shrinking base of white voters with constant catering to right wing Christian extremists and white supremacists.  Instead of expanding the party base, the sole effort has been to gerrymander districts and make it more difficult for non-white and younger voters to vote.  Stacking the U.S. Supreme Court with a majority of religious zealots to end abortions rights - other rights to privacy are also likely to be rescinded - has been part of this agenda to appeal to the extreme right seemingly with no thought as to the potential consequences that might flow from repeatedly ignoring the will of the majority of Americans. The strong vote in Kansas to protect abortion rights may be the first of a series of wake up calls the GOP may be about to receive confirming that appealing to an extreme ignorance embracing minority may not be a good long terms strategy.  In addition, Republicans continue to oppose facing the reality of climate change and the need for a new approach to the nation's infrastructure and clean energy initiatives. A piece in the Washington Post looks at how Democrats are poised to put Republicans on the defensive in terms of the latter.  Here are article highlights:

Now that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema appears supportive of the climate and health care bill that Democrats have unveiled, this fact mustn’t get lost: Democrats are set to unilaterally launch the country’s biggest effort yet to combat our planetary climate emergency — without the participation of a single Republican.

All 50 Senate Democrats are close to uniting behind legislation, fully endorsed by President Biden, that would direct hundreds of billions of dollars toward spurring our transition to a cleaner energy future, while Republicans sit the whole thing out.

The deal contains $369 billion to combat climate change. That includes tens of billions for incentivizing the production, manufacture and consumption of renewable energy sources and their technologies. Studies say this will help reduce emissions to 40 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030.

At its core, the bill constitutes industrial policy that would invest in the creation of clean-energy manufacturing jobs, including in former coal communities. As I’ve argued, this would allow Democrats to shift the debate: Rebuilding jobs in the industrial and Appalachian heartlands requires accepting realities of global warming and technological change — and harnessing them to our advantage — rather than remaining mired in backward-looking nostalgic fantasies.

The opening to shift that paradigm may have actually grown.

So far, Republicans have struggled to attack the bill’s tax provisions. They include funding to bolster IRS enforcement toward high-income tax manipulators, and a minimum tax on huge corporations that currently game down their tax rate. (Sinema wants to tweak the latter.)

As Paul Krugman notes, the usual GOP attacks look particularly absurd: The result of targeting such provisions is to “defend the interests of tax evaders and avoiders,” many of whom are extraordinarily wealthy.

The buyback tax in the package makes those attacks even sillier. The provision would reportedly place a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, in which corporations repurchase stocks to enrich shareholders. . . . . taxing buybacks would also “encourage corporations to invest in America rather than buy back stocks from foreign owners tax-free.”

Will “America First” Republicans really attack that?

All this gives Democrats an opening to seize the populist mantle from the Trumpist wannabe types. And here’s a tell: Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democrat challenging self-proclaimed populist J.D. Vance for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, supports the bill expressly because it would create good jobs.

The bill will “set us on the path to dominate the clean energy industry by creating millions of good-paying jobs here at home,” Ryan told me in a statement, calling it “a major win for working people in Ohio.”

This is the paradigm Democrats can shift. University of Massachusetts professor Robert Pollin, who has modeled the bill’s economic impact, says it could have just that impact.

“There’s no question that the job creation generated by clean energy investments is going to be far in excess of job losses resulting from the phaseout of fossil fuels,” Pollin told me. “Current energy-intensive regions of the country should, in my view, receive a disproportionate amount of those investment funds.”

[I]f this bill passes, Democrats will have an opportunity to show democracy can work, by reorienting our national trajectory away from climate catastrophe while helping revitalize areas that are easy prey for Vance-like populist demagogues. They should seize it.