The GOP's Three Big Lies About Trumpcare

One thing that has been noteworthy about the Christofascist takeover of the Republican Party base is that as the power of the Christofascist has grown, so has the dishonesty of the Party.  Sadly, as a number of analyses of the Christofascists have shown, they have no compunction about lying.  Anything that furthers their theocratic, largely white supremacist agenda is perfectly fine in their minds.  The Commandment against lying is treated as if it simply doesn't exist.  The Senate GOP's health care "reform" bill underscores how Mitch McConnell - never one for truth and veracity - and his cronies have embraced the tactic of lying without shame.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the three big lies being marketed to the public at the moment by Senate Republicans. Here are highlights:

To succeed in gutting health coverage for millions of Americans, Senate Republican leaders need to get a series of lies accepted as truth. Journalists and other neutral arbiters must resist the temptation to report these lies as just a point of view. A lie is a lie.

Lie One: Democrats and progressives are unwilling to work with Republicans and conservatives on this issue. “If we went and got the single greatest health-care plan in the history of the world, we would not get one Democrat vote,” President Trump told an Iowa crowd last Wednesday.

In fact, Democrats, including President Barack Obama when he was in office, have said repeatedly that they would like to work with Republicans to improve the Affordable Care Act. Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer’s office put out a list of such offers, including a June 15 letter from Schumer to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calling for a cross-party meeting to “find a way to make health care more affordable and accessible.”
 This first lie is important because it rationalizes the Republican claim that the bill has to be draconian because it can’t pass without support from the party’s most right-wing legislators. 

This brings us to Lie Two: This bill is primarily about improving health care for American families. No, this effort is primarily about cutting taxes. When it comes to health care, the main thing the bill does is take money away from providing it to pay for the tax reductions it contains and for future bonanzas the Republicans have promised.

The tax cuts in this legislation alone would amount to some $700 billion over a decade, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. About $33 billion of this would go to tax cuts conservatively averaging $7 million every year to each of the 400 highest-income families in the country. What could $33 billion buy? The CBPP reports it would be enough to pay for the expansion of Medicaid in Nevada, West Virginia, Arkansas and Alaska. Talk about income redistribution.

If this bill were truly about health care, Republicans would take all the tax cuts out and use that money to ease the pain their bill would cause. But they won’t, because the tax cuts are the thing that matters to them.

Lie Three: The Senate bill is a “compromise.” Really? Between whom? The House wants to destroy Obamacare quickly, the Senate a bit more slowly while also cutting Medicaid more steeply over time. This is only a “compromise” between two very right-wing policies.

I hope I never have to write about Lie Four, which would be Republican senators who surely know better — including Susan Collins, Dean Heller, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Shelley Moore Capito and Rob Portman — justifying their votes for this monstrosity by claiming that it’s the best they could do. . . . . I would like to believe they are too decent for that. I hope I’m not lying to myself.

The GOP's Continued War on Workers

In the wake of their 2012 election losses many Republicans through their actions are making it clear that their real goal is to return America to the Gilded Age - a time when unions did not exist, working conditions were dangerous and employee benefits like health insurance were unknown.  Indeed, it seems that they would embrace working conditions that resulted in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory inferno a hundred years ago.  Why else would the GOP be pushing for so-called "right to work" laws that guarantee that corporations can pay workers less, strip away benefits, and send more workers on a road to serfdom?  While some in the GOP are figuring out that the GOP war on workers, women, gays, immigrants and minorities isn't going to lead to improved electoral results in the future, most seem only too happy continuing to trying to drag America back to the often brutal 19th Century.  An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

There is, unfortunately, another school of thought on the right that rejects adjusting to a new electorate and to circumstances very different from the ones that Ronald Reagan inherited in 1980. Strategies for future victories are based on a naked use of government power to alter the political playing field in a way that diminishes the political influence of groups likely to be hostile to the conservative agenda.

The tea party movement cast itself as an authentic grass-roots expression of democracy, and in some ways it was. But the conservative legislatures it swept into office in so many states in 2010 took decidedly anti-democratic actions aimed at reducing the size of the electorate through a variety of voter-suppression measures — hard-to-obtain voter IDs, shorter early-voting periods, new barriers to voter registration drives and long ballots that slowed the lines on Election Day.

Now comes Michigan’s new right-to-work law, passed Tuesday in a travesty of normal democratic deliberation. This effort to weaken unions would be problematic in any event. The moral case for unions is that they give bargaining strength to workers who would have far less capacity to improve their wages and benefits negotiating as individuals. Further gutting unions is the last thing we need to do at a time when the income gap is growing.

But beyond that, the way Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and the Republican Michigan Legislature rushed right-to-work through a lame-duck session was insidious. The anti-union crowd waited until after the election to pass it.

The political motivation here is obvious. Union families are the premier cross-racial Democratic constituency. Nationwide, President Obama carried union households by 18 points but non-union households by only one point — a “union gap” of 17 points. In Michigan, the union gap was an astonishing 32 points: Obama won union households 66 percent to 33 percent, the rest of the electorate by 50 percent to 49 percent.

But the most disturbing aspect of the Michigan power grab is what it says about where the conservative argument may go. Those willing to expand the appeal of conservatism by refreshing it will face opposition from those who would try to make new thinking unnecessary. They’d simply rig the rules to chip away at the political capacity of groups that don’t buy into conservative orthodoxy. 

Increasingly, I do not see how a truly moral person can be a part of today's GOP.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised, however, since no one is more lacking in true morality than the Christofascists in the GOP base who talk about moral values but are best defined by their contempt for and hatred of others.