The CBO report on the GOP healthcare proposal was another Mitt Romney 47% moment, and together they reveal a Republican party that not only holds tens of millions of their fellow citizens in contempt, but is actively committed to doing them unprecedented harm.
We’ve all heard the brutal facts laid out by the CBO’s assessment of the Republican healthcare tax-cut proposal. (Greg Sargent deserves kudos for this perfect headline: “The CBO report demolishes the GOP’s edifice of deception”) I want to talk about something different that was revealed by the CBO report: What American politician would want to take away health insurance from 24 million or more Americans? What kind of person harbors such contempt and malice for tens of millions of his fellow citizens? Who votes for these miscreants?
All the talk about premiums, deductibles, sign-ups, actuarial assumptions, etc. obscures the horribly immoral and disgusting truth that many Republicans deeply want to cause an unprecedented humanitarian crisis for their fellow countrymen. Crucially, the CBO report laid bare this truth to the public; Trump and the House Republicans already knew the devastating consequences (and worse) of their proposal, and only pushed forward with more urgency. The real headline story of the GOP proposal is that we have one of two major political parties that holds wide swaths of the electorate in deep contempt and is intentionally committed to doing them serious damage on a level not recently seen in U.S. history.
It remains to be seen whether enough Republicans have the courage of their convictions to follow through on this plan. Depriving millions of Americans access to medical care would impose pain more directly and widely than any legislative act in modern U.S. history. — Jonathan Chait
The last time we had such a prominent public reveal of the sinister beliefs held by the Republican party was Mitt Romney’s secretly taped 47% comments:
All right, there are 47 percent who are with [Pres. Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
. . . . [M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Mitt Romney’s scurrilous admissions and the recent CBO report reveal the same alarming problem. What we have is not a dry public policy debate, no matter how important, but a genuine national crisis — with internal enemies holding a ruinous agenda of many items directed towards millions of U.S. citizens.
That truth is shocking and alarming. It is also very uncomfortable and so is not generally reported as such. Yes, I hope that this Republican healthcare proposal goes down in flames. But the Democrats need to force the country and the press to connect the dots. These are not random, one-off events. This does not reflect merely bad policy planning.
There is a cancer at the heart of the Republican party and it will not be defeated until it is unambiguously confronted.