We begin today’s roundup with Jesse Lee’s excellent post at The Huffington Post on what’s at stake in the midterms:
If Republicans squeak by in both chambers and have another two-year runway to do whatever they want, to grab whatever they can and to rig the 2020 election, we don’t have to imagine what will happen. They have already told us. [...] Progressives have spent the last year turning out, running for office and winning special elections on a positive message. Candidates have become causes by embracing an aspirational vision of a government that looks out for all of us.
That’s how it should be. But if anybody needs another motivation, there is also plenty to fear — not just more of the same, but much more and much worse. Now is the chance to take a stand.
Paul Krugman highlights one such prospect — the GOP’s gutting of Social Security and Medicare:
Whatever they may have said, they never actually believed that the tax cut would be deficit-neutral; they pushed for a tax cut because it was what wealthy donors wanted, and because their posturing as deficit hawks was always fraudulent. They didn’t really buy into economic nonsense; it would be more accurate to say that economic nonsense bought them. [...] Dishonesty about the sources of the deficit is, however, more or less a standard Republican tactic. What’s new is the double talk that pervades G.O.P. positioning on the budget and, to be fair, just about every major policy issue.
Over at The New Republic, Alex Shephard explains how the Republicans are running away from the economy:
In the weeks and months after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was narrowly enacted, Trump and other Republicans relentlessly flaunted the law as evidence of the party’s fiscal bona fides. The message was supposed to be simple. [...] While the tax cut appeared to add rocket fuel to a booming stock market, Republicans were never able to connect it to perceptions about the overall health of the economy. Most voters, a recent Gallup poll show, do not discern any change in their economic well-being tied to the tax cut, while an internal GOP Bloomberg poll found that voters, by a two-to-one margin, believed the cuts favored corporations and the wealthy. Democrats were more effective in messaging and instead reframed the law as what it (mostly) was: an unnecessary giveaway to corporations and the rich.
On the topic of immigration, Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post explains how the administation is going after legal immigrants:
From his earliest days in office, President Trump has sought to reinterpret — that is, massively expand — something called the “public charge” rule. It’s a relatively vague part of federal law used to screen whether an immigrant is likely to be financially self-sufficient or end up on the dole.
Under long-standing federal policy, this rule primarily meant seeing whether more than half of an immigrant’s income came from cash welfare assistance.
But based on multiple, confusing, ever-changing, leaked proposals, the Trump administration has long wanted to multiply the list of red flags. Sometimes Head Start and the Children’s Health Insurance Program were listed in a draft; sometimes not. Sometimes if a U.S.-citizen child was on Medicaid, that could disqualify the immigrant parent; sometimes not.
Eugene Robinson focuses his column on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the loss of America’s standing on the world:
When the United States does not stand up for human rights and freedom of expression, there are tragic consequences. The apparent torture and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is one of them.
On a final note, don’t miss USA Today’s editorial on voter suppression:
The GOP’s cheap tricks don’t stop with gerrymandering. They are also evident in state laws that restrict some people from registering to vote or kick them off the rolls if they area already registered.
While these techniques might be effective in the short run, they will help cement the Republicans' reputation as a party with a serious problem with democracy, a hard reputation to live down. [...]
The rationale for these laws and measures is need to clamp down on voter fraud, which is at such minuscule levels as to be practically nonexistent.
The real fraud here is the efforts to keep those with every right to vote from exercising one of their most fundamental liberties.