Is Trump Leading Republicans to Slaughter?

It is Thanksgiving Day - a day for family and friends and hopefully a little bit of love for one's fellow citizens.  Yet even as families gather, Congressional Republicans are taking only a brief respite from the effort to harm countless middle and working class families and the elderly through a tax plan that benefits the very wealthy and large corporations. Most Americans oppose the plan and groups like AARP - which represents the most dependable voters - are condemning the savaging of Medicare and other social programs.   Der Trumpenführer - who estimates show might enjoy a billion dollar benefit - is of course supporting the effort and is supporting alleged child molester Roy Moore because Moore's vote is "needed for the tax bill."  A lengthy piece in Newsweek raises the question of whether Trump is leading the GOP to a slaughter.  I for one, hope that such is the case.  When I left the GOP as the Christofascists (and the white supremacy they brought with them) were ascendant I concluded that only the ruin of the party could excise the cancer.  Here are article highlights:

The prophet led the faithful into the jungle, where he promised they would find salvation. . . . That place was called Jonestown, a village hacked out of the jungle of Guyana. The Reverend Jim Jones did not manage to turn the settlement into the earthly paradise he’d promised his parishioners. In 1978, after a shootout that left visiting U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and four other members of a visiting delegation dead, Jones ordered his followers to perpetuate one of the most grotesque acts of mass murder in American history. “How very much I've tried my best to give you a good life,” he opened his final sermon, laden with dark grievance, as 900 people prepared for their deaths. “But in spite of all of my trying, a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible.”

 Time now for the necessary and obvious caveats. Jonestown was a horrific act of homicide. No matter how much you dislike Trump, he is not Jim Jones. His impolitic tweets at North Korean despot Kim Jong Un notwithstanding, he does not harbor a death wish, either for himself or for the country. He probably has more compassion than his critics are willing to concede. And yet his influence on the party he now leads may well prove the political equivalent of Jonestown. Having assumed control of the GOP, Trump may now destroy it: its national infrastructure, its fundraising capacity and, most of all, its support from the American public. A Gallup tracking poll in early October found that only 24 percent of respondents identified as Republicans. That’s the lowest level of affiliation for the party in two years, a lack of popularity that is especially remarkable because Republicans control both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. But whatever the case, the GOP appears to have made a fatal mistake in allowing itself to be seduced by his populism. All the glories of Trumpism will belong to Trump, while all the failures will be passed off to a hapless band he sometimes calls “the Republicans.” “Republican leaders have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump,” says Will Marshall, founder of the centrist organization New Democracy. . . . . Attempts by others to mimic his convictions have been pathetic, transparent and unsuccessful. In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, a creature of K Street boardrooms, ran a campaign of Southern racial grievance and anti-immigrant fearmongering. He lost by 9 points to Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam a few weeks ago. Many prominent Republicans believe their party has come to resemble the adherents of Jones, drifting ever further from reality. Trump, meanwhile, has shown no interest in reconciling the disparate factions of the GOP, hectoring leaders of his own party on Twitter as if they were obscure backbenchers . . . .

The GOP “will face obliteration in 2018,” says Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who served as chief strategist on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. When we spoke recently, Schmidt blamed the party’s fortunes on McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, a duo that he says “make Neville Chamberlain look like Churchill,” a reference to the British prime minister famous for capitulating to Adolf Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938.  “You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” Churchill said in response to Chamberlain’s cowardice. “You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

Bruce Bartlett, who served as a senior adviser to Ronald Reagan, told me he wishes there were a Republican who’d utter a basic truth: “Our party is being killed by these idiots” in the Trump administration. And a few have, including Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee. They have both chosen to retire, however, aware that their anti-Trump positions would likely engender a ferocious primary battle.

Bartlett thinks fears of electoral defeat shouldn’t discourage critics. “It’s better for us to lose power for a generation than to continue this fraud.”

Many Americans dislike Trump’s vision for the nation, but they like the Republicans’ vision even less. Only 17 percent of Americans supported the Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. While the Republicans refuse to enact any tougher gun laws, Gallup finds that 60 percent of American support stricter gun laws. The vast majority of Americans rejected the Republican tax cut plan, with support as low as 25 percent in some polls. . . . It fell to Bartlett, the former Reagan adviser, to admit that correlations between tax cuts and economic growth were “a myth.” But once you’re in the jungle, the way out isn’t easy. The vacated Republican seats may entice Bannon-funded candidates who are true believers in Trumpism. That could turn the marriage of convenience between DJT and GOP into a suicide pact. Insurgent candidates such as former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore, who has been accused of child molestation and sexual misconduct, could prove far more devastating than establishment incumbents who may not share Bannon’s nationalist vision but will maintain Republican majorities in Congress.

Speaking last weekend in Arizona, unaware that a microphone had been turned on, Flake admitted to a fear shared by most of his establishment peers: “If we become the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, we are toast.”

“It's increasingly hard to see how they recover from this,” says Charles Sykes, the onetime conservative radio host who has left the party and written about it in How the Right Lost Its Mind. “By pandering to the Trumpists, they have isolated themselves from the majority of voters. And this association with Roy Moore will be radioactive.”

Trump may do for conservatives what Stalin did for American radicals, forcing them to re-evaluate their convictions. The onetime eager socialists of City College in the century’s first decades became the neoconservatives who formed the backbone of the Republican Party through the George W. Bush presidency . . . . Trump may try to blame Democrats for this dour national mood, but voters aren’t likely to be fooled. “The Republican brand is shattered for the millennial generation and young people,” Schmidt told me. “It’s shattered for all time for Latinos, with African-Americans. And it’s shattered not because of Trump’s terrible behavior, but because of the absolute cowardice of the leaders of the Congress”. Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, wrote on Twitter that he intends to remain part of the loyal opposition to Trump. “I am staying a Republican,” he wrote. “Will not let GOP be taken over by Russian collaborators, racists, pedophiles and outlaws. Will oppose all elected officials who do not stand up for the rule of law.”

In response to that tweet, someone replied with the image of a tombstone for the Republican Party. The cause of death, the doctored tombstone declared, was Donald Trump.

Today's GOP: Cruelty, Incompetence and Lies

As I note frequently, I am a former Republican.  Once upon a time I held a city committee seat for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  I even was the original incorporator of that entity as filings at the Virginia State Corporation Commission confirm.  Yet now I find myself embarrassed to ever have been a Republican give the hideousness of today's Republican Party.  A hideousness starkly revealed by the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill currently in the U.S. Senate which would have millions of Americans and leave those with pre-existing conditions without coverage.  Virtually every part of the healthcare industry opposes the bill as does AARP which will hopefully go on a rampage against Republicans in the 2018 election cycle if this travesty passes (if it does, it will be based solely on Republican votes).  So why is the GOP leadership pushing so hard for this bill?  Two main factors, in my view: thanks to Citizens United, the big money players in the GOP donor class want its passage and will punish the GOP if this massive tax cut for the wealthy disguised as "reform" is not passed.  The other factor is the make up the GOP base which is controlled by Christofascists and racists, groups best defined by their hatred of others and their hatred of Barack Obama.  In their warped and hate-filled minds, this bill will punish minorities and others they despise.  The irony will be, of course, that they themselves will end up suffering greatly when many find themselves without health care at some point down the road.  A column in the New York Times looks at the cruelty, incompetence and lies behind this foul bill.  Here are excerpts:

Graham-Cassidy, the health bill the Senate may vote on next week, is stunningly cruel. It’s also incompetently drafted: The bill’s sponsors clearly had no idea what they were doing when they put it together. Furthermore, their efforts to sell the bill involve obvious, blatant lies.

Nonetheless, the bill could pass. And that says a lot about today’s Republican Party, none of it good.

The Affordable Care Act, which has reduced the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low, created a three-legged stool: regulations that prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, a requirement that individuals have adequate insurance (and thus pay into the system while healthy) and subsidies to make that insurance affordable. For the lowest-income families, insurance is provided directly by Medicaid.

Graham-Cassidy saws off all three legs of that stool. Like other Republican plans, it eliminates the individual mandate. It replaces direct aid to individuals with block grants to states, under a formula that sharply reduces funding relative to current law, and especially penalizes states that have done a good job of reducing the number of uninsured. And it effectively eliminates protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions.

[E]veryone, who knows anything about health care warns [the bill] would cause chaos.  It’s not just progressives: The American Medical Association, the insurance industry and Blue Cross/Blue Shield have all warned that markets would be destabilized and millions would lose coverage.

How many people would lose insurance? Republicans are trying to ram the bill through before the Congressional Budget Office has time to analyze it — an attempt that is in itself a violation of all previous norms, and amounts to an admission that the bill can’t bear scrutiny. But C.B.O. has analyzed other bills containing some of Graham-Cassidy’s provisions, and these previous analyses suggest that it would add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the uninsured.

Both Cassidy and Graham insist that their bill would continue to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions — a claim that will come as news to the A.M.A., Blue Cross and everyone else who has read the bill’s text.

Independent analyses find that most states would, in fact, experience serious cuts in federal aid — and everyone would face huge cuts after 2027.

So we’re looking at an incompetently drafted bill that would hurt millions of people, whose sponsors are trying to sell it with transparently false claims. How is it that this bill might nonetheless pass the Senate?

One answer is that Republicans are desperate to destroy President Barack Obama’s legacy in any way possible, no matter how many American lives they ruin in the process.

Another answer is that most Republican legislators neither know nor care about policy substance. This is especially true on health care, where they never tried to understand why Obamacare looks the way it does, or how to devise a nonvicious alternative.

I’d add that the evasions and lies we’re seeing on this bill have been standard G.O.P. operating procedure for years. The trick of converting federal programs into block grants, then pretending that this wouldn’t mean savage cuts, was central to every one of Paul Ryan’s much-hyped budgets. The trick of comparing dollar numbers over time to conceal huge benefit cuts has, as I already noted, been around since the 1990s.

In other words, Graham-Cassidy isn’t an aberration; it’s more like the distilled essence of everything wrong with modern Republicans. . . . even if the handful of Republican senators who retain some conscience block it — we’re looking at you, John McCain — the underlying sickness of the G.O.P. 

I again find myself how any one morally decent vote Republican given what the GOP has become both at the state and at the federal level.  It epitomizes moral bankruptcy and cruelty towards others. 

Hospitals and Health Groups Denounce GOP Healthcare Bill

Ready to screw over working class families

To the surprise of few, the Republican Party's proposed replacement for the Affordable Health Care Act is a true abortion and despite the bloviating - translate lies - of Republicans, the plan would leave millions without the ability to secure coverage.  Two of the components Congressional Republicans blather about the most are basically worthless to lower income Americans: (i) tax credits, and (ii) health savings accounts ("HSA").  If you aren't making much money and are paying little in taxes, giving you a tax credit goes nowhere near providing the funds to purchase healthcare coverage.  The same more or less goes with having an HSA.  If you don't have the funds to fund the account - and most working class Americans don't - you are left with nothing.  In short, the GOP message to many Americans is that if you get sick, just go ahead and die.  As Congressman Joe Kennedy III noted, the plan is the reverse of the Gospel message Republicans falsely claim to honor.  The New York Times looks at the condemnation coming from hospitals - some of which would likely go into bankruptcy under the GOP plan - and other health care groups.  Here are excerpts:

Influential groups representing hospitals and nurses came out on Wednesday against a Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, joining doctors and the retirees’ lobby to warn that it would lead to a rise in the uninsured.

In a letter to lawmakers, major hospital groups wrote, “As organizations that take care of every individual who walks through our doors, both due to our mission and our obligations under federal law, we are committed to ensuring health care coverage is available and affordable for all.”

The groups, including the American Hospital Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Catholic Health Association of the United States and the Children’s Hospital Association, said they could not support the bill “as currently written.”

The hospitals and the American Nurses Association joined the American Medical Association and AARP, which rejected the bill on Tuesday.

Squeezed between wary health care providers and angry conservatives who believe that the bill leaves too much of the Affordable Care Act in place, the Republican leadership and President Trump appear to be facing an uphill climb.

But the White House appears increasingly confident about the prospects for a health care overhaul to pass in the House. In a meeting with conservative leaders in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he anticipated the most trouble in the Senate, where moderate and conservative lawmakers are opposing the plan for different reasons. He said he was prepared to pressure holdout senators by holding the kind of stadium-style rallies he led during his presidential campaign.

The array of groups taking strong positions against the bill is evidence that its potential consequences extend far beyond health insurance coverage, to much of the nation’s economy.

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation issued estimates this week showing how much revenue the government could lose starting in 2018 under the Republican bill, which the party has called the American Health Care Act, as a result of repealing taxes on drug makers (nearly $25 billion over 10 years), insurers (nearly $145 billion), makers of medical devices (nearly $20 billion), and high-income households (more than $270 billion from taxes on earned income and investment income).

The A.M.A., which has nearly 235,000 members and calls itself the voice of the medical profession, sent a letter to leaders of the two committees on Tuesday saying it could not support the Republican bill “because of the expected decline in health insurance coverage and the potential harm it would cause to vulnerable patient populations.”

In particular, the group said it opposed a plan to replace the sliding, income-based premium tax credits provided under the Affordable Care Act with fixed credits based on age. The current system, it said, “provides the greatest chance that those of the least means are able to purchase coverage.”

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the health insurance lobby, released its own lengthy statement on Wednesday. In a letter to the leaders of the House committees that drafted the bill, Marilyn B. Tavenner, the group’s chief executive, warned Republican leaders that their plans to change Medicaid financing, among other things, could harm coverage and care.

A day earlier, AARP — the association of middle-aged and older Americans that is another crucial supporter of the Affordable Care Act — declared its opposition to the bill and even started running an ad against it. In a letter to Congress, the group said the bill would increase health costs for people ages 50 to 64, could lead to cuts in Medicaid coverage of long-term care and would allow insurers to charge older people five times as much as younger ones.

There was also a creeping concern about how quickly the bill was moving. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, essentially promised to move the bill to the Senate floor without the hearings and other processes that are normal for such a far-reaching piece of legislation. He had promised when Republicans took the majority that they would honor normal Senate processes and traditions.

“I think if that’s the approach they take,” Mr. Rubio said, “they won’t have the votes in the Senate.”

Note the $270 billion tax cut to high income households and huge cuts to insurance companies.  That is what this bill is really all about.  Working class whites who fell for the GOP's appeals to racism, bigotry and religious extremism are about to learn that the GOP cares nothing about them and is going to f*ck them over thoroughly.  I have no pity for these people if this happens.  They did this to themselves and deserve to suffer greatly.

Hate Group Attacks AARP’s Support For the "Homosexual Agenda"

There apparently are few groups that the far right elements of the GOP will not attack, including AARP.  Of course, AARP opposes the GOP push to dismantle the social safety net and to restrict Medicare funding and to dismantle Social Security.  But AARP's real sin seems to be that it doesn't treat LGBT individuals as diseased vermin and supports policies that would make the senior years of LGBT Americans more secure.  That is simply heresy to the knuckle dragging, spittle flecked "godly Christian" crowd at American Family Association, a SPLC designated hate group.  An article in Think Progress looks at the far rights war against AARP.  Here are highlights:

AARP strives to serve the interests of all people over the age of 50, and that includes members of the LGBT community. The organization has a webpage dedicated to AARP Pride, with resources related to issues like marriage equality’s legal benefits, nondiscrimination protections in nursing homes, and unique health concerns like HIV. Because of AARP’s inclusiveness, the American Family Association is specifically targeting the retirement group for contributing money to the “homosexual agenda.” AFA Executive Vice President Buddy Smith offered this warning:

SMITH: When you reach the age of a person like myself and you begin to get information from the AARP saying that they will represent you and your values and standards, you’d better be careful. This group is a very, very powerful Washington lobby, and you just may be very surprised and disappointed to see those things that they are promoting and those things they are opposing.

Be very careful that you know what your fees are going for because the AARP is not on your side. If you are a Christian and believe in Biblical values, you can pretty much count on the fact that everything that you are in favor of, the AARP is opposing.

LGBT older adults face many unique challenges, especially in regards to their very economic well-being. Because of discrimination and alienation throughout their lifetime, as well as their inability to claim partner benefits like Social Security, LGBT older adults are much more likely to be living in isolation and poverty. It makes perfect sense that AARP would recognize that a segment of its constituency experiences particularly troubling circumstances and could use additional support. Conservatives, like AFA’s own Bryan Fischer, have long claimed that gay men die early because of HIV and other supposed consequences of “homosexual behavior,” so perhaps Smith thinks AARP should be a straights-only organization because he believes it already is.  If AARP is supporting the “homosexual agenda,” then that agenda is merely survival.