There is so much to loathe in the new tax bill Republicans are mislabeling as health care reform that it is easy to point to piece after piece and marvel at the sheer cruelty of it all.
But that’s better left for the experts, of which there are many right on these very pages. What I’d like to point out is a bit more contextual; namely how the Republicans have embraced scavenging and looting as a means of ruling the nation achieving their ends of dismantling the nation. The 2000 presidential election in Florida was an early example of this new style. The results were truly up in the air, so one party went into Defcon mode, staging the Brooks Brothers riot, saturating the airwaves with disinformation, and using the US Supreme Court as a political weapon. The other party sat politely by and waited “for the process to complete itself”. Who can forget that scene from Farenheit 9/11 when nobody in the Senate would even raise an objection to the stealing of a presidency? Needless to say, the complete lack of consequences for this behavior emboldened the perpetrators immensely.
Republican voter suppression, gerrymandering and suspect voting machines are ongoing versions of this same mentality; you can’t get enough votes in the marketplace of ideas? No problem; there are other ways to ensure your side gets disproportionate power. Success has been over the top; despite garnering fewer votes than democrats in most statewide as well as federal elections, Republican hegemony has proceeded with breakneck speed, and they now control the overwhelming majority of elected positions in the country. This after a decade in which they mired the US in two unendable wars, broke the worldwide economy, drowned a major US city, and solved exactly zero problems faced by the American people.
There’s more; in February 2016, Antonin Scalia keeled over and the Republicans in the Senate unanimously decided to steal the seat he left vacant in the travesty we all witnessed as that seat remained empty until March of 2017. This was only accomplished by a brazen and dishonest stonewalling and dereliction of duty by the entire Republican caucus, and then compounded by the removal of judicial filibusters to get an ideologue on the Court with a fifty vote threshold, forever tarnishing the already battered confirmation process with even more ideological rigidity and rancor. This action broke the Supreme Court, make no mistake. Future nominations are going to be repulsive in the extreme.
All of this is unprecedented, goes directly against the norms, traditions, and understanding of the function of the US Senate as the upper chamber in the US legislative body, and sets ugly precedents for the future.
The newly revealed act of class warfare dubbed the AHCA is yet another example of republicans scavenging and looting from the democrats, this time to the tune of $900 billion. It should be common knowledge here that the entire exercise was set up as a tax cut plan for the wealthy. 13 Republican men went into that room with a mission; find as much money as possible to give to the rich, by any means necessary.
And they did. They took the money that Obama and the democrats had squeezed out of rich people and corporations (who had been on a roll with repeated tax cuts going back decades, and hold an obscene and increasing proportion of the nation’s wealth to prove it), as well as all the other revenues that were laboriously forged into creating a revenue-neutral health insurance reform initiative that has seen the lowest uninsured rate in decades as well as a precipitous drop in personal bankruptcies, and looted it. That $900 billion is stolen money, period. Stolen from its purpose of doing good for the American people and redirected to musty, overstuffed offshore bank accounts.
Sure, there’s so much to hate in this monstrous bill, but to me, the very way it was created is fundamentally wrong and belies the true nature of Republicans. They are scavenging and looting Obama’s legacy, co-opting all the hard work of making the ACA workable, just to pay off their patrons to keep those donations coming.
Obama and the dems went to hell and back to make sure the ACA was able to financially stand on its own (though hurt by repeated sabotage by, yes, the looters), not increase the deficit, not bankrupt the insurance companies, and even marginally improve the health of the people of America. All the Republicans see is free money to give to people who know no other kind of money. These bastards couldn’t bother to help craft the ACA, did nothing to ‘earn’ the money they are now appropriating for themselves and their donors, and will STILL not be satisfied once they’ve finished looting this pile of 900,000,000,000 dollar bills. Because “tax reform” is next up, and there might be a buck or two held onto by a democrat or poor person somewhere that could be in some rich guy’s Caymans account.
I was too kind. They’re not just scavengers and looters. They’re parasites.