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Republicans Betray America's Children Again

The cavalcade of Republican hypocrisy is nearly endless especially when it comes to the party's false "family values" and "pro-life" claims as we were reminded this week.  Among the reminders of how deep the hypocrisy runs, we saw the impeachment trial of GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton whose mistress invoked the 5th Amendment to avoid testifying, the disclosure of GOP South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's and Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski's years long affair (both are married to other people), and a column in the New York Times that looks at how GOP policies have driven millions of American children into poverty.   God forbid that children be exposed to the existence of LGBT people and drag queens or books that offend white supremacist sensibilities, but it is perfectly fine for children to go hungry and live in poverty - something which ultimately bears a high cost to society and in the long term costs more than the programs that the GOP has blocked.  Sadly, America is one of the few wealthy, advanced nations that views its children as disposable, especially if they are non-white.  Vast amounts are spent on the elderly or tax cuts for the super wealthy, but to Republicans in Congress (and at the state level) children get short shrift.  Here are column highlights that show that the GOP worships fetuses but cares nothing for children once they are born: 

I’ve been writing about economics and politics for many years, and have learned to keep my temper. Politicians and policymakers often make decisions that are simply cruel; they also often make decisions that are stupid, damaging the national interest for no good reason. And all too often they make decisions that are both cruel and stupid. Flying into a rage every time that happens would be exhausting.

But the latest census report on income and poverty made me angry. It showed that child poverty more than doubled between 2021 and 2022. That’s 5.1 million children pushed into misery, for it really is miserable to be poor in America.

And the thing is, this didn’t have to happen. Soaring child poverty wasn’t caused by inflation or other macroeconomic problems. It was instead a political choice. The story is in fact quite simple: Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats blocked the extension of federal programs that had drastically reduced child poverty over the previous two years, and as a result just about all of the gains were lost.

The cruelty of this choice should be obvious. Maybe you believe (wrongly) that poor American adults are responsible for their own poverty; even if you believe that, poor children aren’t to blame. Maybe you worry that helping low-income families will reduce their incentive to work and improve their lives. Such concerns are greatly exaggerated, but even if you worry about incentive effects, are they big enough to justify keeping children poor?

Why do I say that this policy choice was stupid as well as cruel? Two reasons. First, avoiding much of this human catastrophe would have cost remarkably little money. Second, child poverty is, in the long run, very expensive for the nation as a whole: Americans who live in poverty as children grow up to become less healthy and productive adults than they should be. Even in purely fiscal terms, refusing to help poor children may, over time, actually increase budget deficits.

About the immediate budgetary costs: The thing about helping low-income Americans is that precisely because their initial incomes are so low, fairly modest amounts of aid can make a huge difference to their well-being.

More than half of the rise in child poverty could have been avoided by extending the 2021 enhancement of the child tax credit. Such an extension would probably have had a direct budget cost of about $105 billion a year.

[I]t’s actually a modest sum. It’s less than half a percent of the country’s gross domestic product. It’s a small fraction of what we spend on Social Security ($1.3 trillion) and Medicare ($800 billion). It’s only a bit more than half the annual revenue loss from the 2017 Trump tax cut.

Furthermore, we could have significantly blunted the rise in child poverty by retaining just one piece of the child tax credit enhancement, the part that made the credit fully refundable — that is, allowed the lowest-income households to get the entire $2,000 credit. The estimated cost of doing this would be around only $12 billion a year — pocket change in the context of the federal budget.

But we didn’t do any of these things, again, because of conservative opposition. And the nation as a whole will pay a steep price.

The proposition that helping poor children makes them healthier, more productive adults isn’t hypothetical. On the contrary, it’s backed by solid evidence — better than the evidence that spending on physical infrastructure is good for the economy (although I believe that too) and infinitely better than the evidence that tax cuts promote growth, which is nonexistent.

How so? Historically, anti-poverty programs like food stamps and Medicaid weren’t introduced uniformly across America. Instead, they were rolled out gradually across regions, so we can compare the life trajectories of Americans who had access to these programs as children with those of Americans who didn’t. The results are clear: Aid to low-income children is a “highly cost-effective investment.” Those who received such aid ended up healthier, better educated and more economically self-sufficient than those who didn’t.

Since adults who aren’t productive or healthy are, among other things, a fiscal burden, this may well mean that even in purely budgetary terms cutting off aid to poor children is self-destructive. Yet here we are.

Unfortunately, children can’t vote and poor adults tend not to vote either. So politicians can get away with policies that harm poor children.

Realistically, the political will to undo our terrible mistake doesn’t exist at the moment. But there’s always hope that we’ll eventually do the right thing.

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How the "MAGA Doom Loop" Is Harming the GOP

America faces a government shut down come the end of the month yet, rather than pass a budget or continuing resolution to fund the government and critical programs important to the American people, the GOP controlled House made moves toward and impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden even though their own many months long investigation has turned up no wrongdoing.  Nowadays, EVERYTHING the GOP members of congress is performance politics aimed at pleasing a minority of the population and the orange menace at Mar-A-Lago.   Funding infrastructure, health programs, supporting America's military - the list goes on and on - is nowhere on the GOP radar. Things are no better in many of the red states where extremism is the party's hallmark.  In the process one can only hope the GOP is reminding the larger public that the party is a threat to democracy and individual rights for all but Christian extremist.  One columnist at the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon - he calls it the MAGA doom loop - and how the GOP has given up all efforts to serve the majority of citizens.  It's dangerous and as popular support is further eroded, the chances of the GOP taking extreme measures grows.  Here are column highlights:

For almost three years now, Republicans have defended or embraced Donald Trump’s authoritarianism — from lies about his 2020 loss to inciting an insurrection — which backfired as Americans proved unexpectedly eager to vote in defense of democracy in the 2022 elections as well as in contests this year.

But Republicans aren’t giving up — they’re going even further. To an unappreciated degree, they have responded to these electoral losses with even more flagrantly anti-democratic maneuvers all around the country.

The pattern is becoming clear: Even as voters are mobilizing to protect democracy at the ballot box, Republicans are redoubling their commitment to the former president’s anti-majoritarian mode of politics. And this, in turn, is motivating voters even more.

Call it the “MAGA doom loop.” It’s playing out in state after state.

Let’s start with Michigan, where Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 led MAGA loyalists to reshape the state Republican Party around devotion to the “big lie.” Then Democrats resoundingly captured full control of the state’s government in the 2022 midterms, in which election-deniers across the country lost races up and down the ticket.

Now, the Michigan GOP is in shambles. Just this month, the chairman again called for scrutiny of supposed 2020 fraud, prompting infighting over debunked conspiracy theories. And as the New York Times reports, the party’s descent into MAGA mania is alienating donors, draining volunteer enthusiasm and driving away swing voters.

Or take Wisconsin. The GOP-controlled state legislature is threatening to impeach state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who won her seat earlier this year by 11 points, handing liberals a majority. Democrats ran ads about protecting democracy to boost Protasiewicz, arguing that her ascent would thwart attempts to overrule the state’s 2024 outcome.

Given that this message already proved successful with Democrats and swing voters, it’s all the more striking that Republicans want to respond with impeachment. Rather than causing introspection, their landslide election loss has them dredging up comments that Protasiewicz made about abortion and gerrymandered maps during her campaign — a concern dismissed by a nonpartisan state panel — as grounds for removal.

But that absurdity aside, Democrats will surely be able to use those MAGA-approved tactics to mobilize voters against Trump and Republicans in 2024. “The threat to overturn an election through impeachment pushes MAGA attacks on democracy to the top of voters’ minds,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me.

Then there’s North Carolina, where the GOP legislature is attempting to strip Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s control over the State Board of Elections and to pass new voting restrictions. . . . “They know North Carolina is getting bluer and more college educated,” Morgan Jackson, a Democratic consultant in the state, said of Republicans.

And in Ohio, after watching numerous pro-choice ballot measures pass last cycle, state Republicans recently pushed a referendum to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution to 60 percent of votes. The tactic was rejected by a decisive majority, suffering a crushing 14-point defeat.

Despite President Biden’s unpopularity, recent Times polling shows his surprising resilience in swing states — and Cohn suggests this partly reflects backlash against MAGA-fied state parties in these places. By embracing Trump’s efforts to nullify his loss, they are only reminding voters that democracy is once again in peril, including whether their own votes will be counted next time.

Issues become salient for voters when elites talk about them a lot. That has certainly been the case with democracy and that will surely continue next year. Big events — such as Trump’s prosecution for Jan. 6, 2021-related offenses and the GOP’s continued devotion despite those criminal charges — will only reinforce what’s at stake.

“As long as the MAGA-Trump faction remains a threat to free and fair elections, a consequential slice of the electorate will continue to vote on this issue,” political scientist Lee Drutman told me.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the MAGA doom loop might keep on working its magic — all the way through 2024.

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Republicans' Word Games on Abortion Will Fail

One dumbfounding aspects of today's Republican Party is that rather than evolve and advance policies appealing to a majority of Americans, GOP efforts are focused instead on disenfranchising voters, disseminating endless lies, and playing semantic word games to dupe voters - who are viewed by Republican leaders as stupid and gullible.   The latter tactic of word games to hide the truth is on open view now as leading Republicans grasp for a new term to replace "pro-life, which has become toxic to the majority of Americans.  Rather than change the GOP agenda that views women as quasi-chattel and seeks to control women's bodies and sex lives, leading Republicans merely want to change the term to "pro-baby" or something equally disingenuous and rely on the perceived stupidity of voters to have them vote against their own best interests and vote for GOP candidates.  Not only is this approach condescending at best, but, as a piece at Salon points out, it is doomed to fail.  Semantics word games aside, the majority of will figure out the GOP duplicity and punish them at the ballot box.  Here are column highlights:

Republicans are getting increasingly desperate over the issue of abortion. On one hand, they cannot cross the religious right, their main source of energy and funding, from wealthy fundamentalists to everyday evangelical foot soldiers. But after the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year, the rigidly anti-abortion views of the GOP have become a major electoral liability, with close elections breaking blue as voters turn out to protect the right to terminate unwanted or unsafe pregnancies.

The GOP plans to nominate a widely hated chronic criminal for president in 2024, which already dampens their party's odds at the polls. The added headache of abortion is making the situation dire for Republicans indeed. Of course, the solution was never going to be dropping the religious right and going forward as a less fascist, more moderate party. (Which would also require dropping Donald Trump.) Instead, Republicans have latched onto the last resort for a losing agenda: Playing word games in hopes of tricking voters. 

"Republicans are trying to find a new term for 'pro-life' to stave off more electoral losses," reads the headline last week from NBC News. GOP strategists presented polling data to Senate Republicans, the article explains, showing the term "pro-life" has become toxic to voters. But rather than accept that this reflects the larger public opposition to abortion bans, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., insisted voters don't "probably don't" know what "pro-life" means. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind. suggested a rebranding of "pro-baby," claiming he just wants "to demonstrate my concern for babies."

Obviously, there is nothing "pro-baby" about a party that consistently opposes funding for health care, food security, or education. Nor is there anything "pro-baby" about a party that rejects gun safety measures necessary to keep children from getting shot up in schools and grocery stores. But beyond that, really, is the sheer contempt for the voters that radiates off these comments. Hawley and Young really capture how Republicans think voters are stupid enough to be bamboozled with a little bit of linguistic hand-waving.

Ironically, "pro-life" is itself a euphemism, which tries to obscure the sadism at the heart of the forced childbirth movement. Prior to the Dobbs decision that ended abortion rights, however, Republicans saw great success with the "pro-life" framing, often getting half or slightly more than half of Americans to identify with the term. But that's because, with Roe in place, "pro-life" functioned more as a moralizing term than a statement of policy preference. Lots of people who claimed to be "pro-life" meant something like, "abortion is okay for me, but not for some hypothetical woman I think has too much sex." Without Roe, however, people are forced more to worry about their own loss of access. 

This contempt for voter intelligence is evident in the GOP embrace of  the grossly dishonest term "abortion trafficking." At stake is the growing trend of women traveling out of state to get abortion care that's been banned in their own states. Pro-choice states that neighbor anti-choice states are seeing skyrocketing numbers of abortion patients, simply due to this abortion travel.

In response, Republicans are starting to argue that women do not have the right to travel freely. Last week, Alabama's Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, argued he can prosecute people for "criminal conspiracy" if they help women leave the state to get safe abortions. . . . In Texas, GOP-controlled towns and counties are passing laws making it illegal for women to drive through them on the way to an abortion clinic out of state. 

To justify this crackdown on the most basic right of free movement, Republicans are pretending to believe in something they call "abortion trafficking." The term doesn't just equate abortion with sex work. It feeds off this long-standing anti-choice myth that no woman really wants an abortion, and any woman getting one is necessarily being controlled by someone else.

By pretending they're "helping" women escape "trafficking," of course, Republicans are actually cutting women off from necessary support. At a bare minimum, patients getting in-clinic abortions, like anyone getting similar procedures like colonoscopies, are required to have someone accompany them home.

It also follows that the "trafficking" language is an unsubtle attempt to call every abortion patient a "whore." Regardless of how you view sex work (and I certainly believe it should be safe and legal), it's safe to say this rhetoric is an attempt to demonize. It's also likely to backfire since most voters are adult enough to understand that women have minds of their own and that not every woman is ready to have a baby at every moment in time.

The embrace of a misleading and prudish term like "abortion trafficking" also illustrates why Republicans are having such trouble reskinning themselves as "moderate" or "compassionate" on the issue of abortion. They can switch terms all they like — why not go with "pro-crib" if "pro-baby" doesn't work out? — but these word games fail to understand why it is that abortion has become such an albatross for their party.

It's not just that Americans are unsettled by the steady drumbeat of stories of women being denied care for serious medical conditions because of draconian abortion bans, though that certainly doesn't help. It's that abortion has become a symbol for how the GOP is in the thrall of right-wing extremists. It's tied up with other issues, like book banning and anti-democracy organizing. No matter what words Republicans use, when they talk about abortion, they remind voters that they are an anti-democratic party trying to force all Americans to live under a strict set of religious rules that have no relationship to how most modern people live. No minor tweaks to language will distract from that reality. 

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