Today's GOP – Bereft Of Ideas And Morally And Intellectually Bankrupt

Way back in 2009 and 2010, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. For only a brief period, 72 days to be exact, Democrats also had veto-proof control of the Senate, despite the widespread belief that total Senate control extended for the full two year period. In that that two year interval, however, Democrats managed to pass an economic stimulus, regulate the financial industry via Dodd-Frank, bail out two of the largest US automakers, and pass the ACA, the largest advancement in American health care since the 1960s. And yet there were Democrats who bitterly complained that those accomplishments weren’t enough, that the stimulus was insufficient, that the crackdown on Wall Street wasn’t hard enough, and that the public option never was really considered, much less passed. 

That debate will never be fully resolved but, when compared to legislation that Republicans will have passed in the first two years of the Trump administration, it is a remarkable list of accomplishments. After spending a year trying and failing to repeal the ACA, which only managed to highlight the legislation’s widespread success and increase its popularity to levels not seen since its passage, the Republicans managed to pass a horrendous tax cut which even Republican legislators admit and the GOP base views as a simple giveaway to the rich.

Mitch McConnell has basically signaled that there will be no other major legislation that will be considered before the 2018 midterms. Instead he seems focused on confirming federal judges, with his office pushing back on criticism that this shows exceedingly limited ambition, saying, “Confirming judges to lifetime appointments…is not a ‘minimalist approach.’ No one is advocating a ‘minimalist approach.'” Admittedly, the second year of a President’s term is often not the most productive one but the lack of almost any legislative agenda is striking. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan, the actor who for years has played the role of a policy wonk in the same way as those TV doctors in a currently running ad, is virtually silent, except, of course, for warning about the always-coming debt crisis that will require cutting spending further. And now, having served his corporate masters so well with the latest tax cut, Ryan has decided to simply walk away and collect the lucrative reward from his paymasters rather than risk facing the catastrophe he has largely helped create.

Basically, then, the legislative accomplishments of total GOP control will consist of packing the federal courts, including filling a critical and stolen Supreme Court seat, and passing an unpopular tax cut. Even their major legislative failure, namely repealing the ACA, created a backlash from the party’s own supporters not because of its failure but because of the realization that there was no replacement plan at all, only an attempt to take health care away from millions, and has turned the issue into a winning one for Democrats.

Now, Republicans have really had just two policy priorities for the last forty years, namely cutting taxes for the rich and cutting spending on everything else except the military, and then complaining about deficits those policies created when Democrats gained any political power. That agenda has often been overwhelmed and somewhat hidden by lots of sturm and drang about various culture war issues ranging from abortion to marriage equality. Immigration and the border wall will fill that culture war position in this election year.

But GOP Presidents over these last four decades have also managed to actually pass other legislative priorities, often on a bipartisan basis. Reagan passed immigration reform; George H. W. Bush passed the Americans with Disabilities Act; and George W. Bush passed No Child Left Behind. Importantly, those pieces of legislation also helped obscure the awfulness of the core, underlying GOP policies. The obvious place for Trump and the Republicans to accomplish something similar would be a real infrastructure plan, but there appears to be no appetite within the Republican caucus for such an effort as of now, yet another example of Republican policy timidity.

Considering the electoral success that Republicans have had over the last four decades, it might seem that simply moving forward on tax and spending cuts would still be sufficient. But it appears that particular tactic may have finally run its course. The siren song of the supply side sham now seems to fall on deaf ears. As noted above, the tax cuts that were supposed to lift Republicans’ fortunes in the midterm elections has turned out to be an albatross. That was similarly shown to be the case in the Pennsylvania special election where the GOP pulled back on their ads touting the tax cut simply because it had no resonance with the electorate even in that relatively red district.

Part of the reason that the tax cuts are having so little impact this time around is that, unlike Reagan and George W. Bush who were able to push theirs through during a recession where there was at least a rationale for additional economic stimulus, these cuts are taking place in the middle of relatively decent economic growth. Because of that, the impact on the deficit and the national debt can be directly linked to the tax cuts themselves, rather than blamed on runaway Democratic spending. More importantly, however, is the fact that the tax cuts do virtually nothing for anyone who is not in the top 1%. The temporary payroll tax cut passed in 2010, yet another accomplishment for Democrats and Obama in that aforementioned two year window, arguably provided greater tax relief to ordinary Americans than Trump’s tax cuts will.

There was a time when Republicans and their conservative think tanks actually produced serious, if not popular, policy ideas, primarily focused on “free market” solutions to real-world problems. Cap-and-trade was primarily a Republican policy that was used by Reagan to phase-out leaded gasoline, Bush to address air quality, and proposed by McCain as recently as 2008 to deal with climate change. Using the individual mandate to address universal health care originated at the Heritage Foundation. Now, however, those think tanks have devolved into “political hit squads”, churning out bogus analyses to support their candidate-du-jour and producing junk science to validate their racist policies, rather than building any new policy ideas.

Today, for Republicans, policy, evidence, and science are so old-fashioned. The solution to climate change is to deny it. Having had eight years to come up with a replacement for the ACA, the best that Republicans can come up with is to offer fake plans that they can’t even legally call insurance, essentially the equivalent of a Trump University diploma. Scott Pruitt’s rollback of environmental regulations, much lauded by conservatives, are far less effective that most believe simply because he can not produce the science to back up his decisions, making them easy to block in even Republican-dominated courts.

And now, at last, it seems the bankruptcy of Republican policy has started to come home to roost in the areas of the country that provide the party with its greatest support. Having starved their states of revenue, teachers in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma have finally had enough. Not only are they demanding better pay but also improved funding for their decaying schools.  Some states don’t provide enough money to even keep the schools open five days a week. In a majority of red states, the probability of an early, middle aged death has risen sharply, primarily due to “strongly linked to the burden of substance use disorders, cirrhosis, and self-harm.” States have been unwilling or unable to maintain their infrastructure, exemplified by the 27 states now converting pavement to gravel roads  and the refusal to maintain and upgrade the salt-ravaged rail tunnels between New Jersey and New York, the most important rail connection in the entire Northeast.

The Republican answer this problem is essentially more of the same. In Kentucky, Governor Matt Bevin vetoed the bill passed by the Kentucky legislature that addressed some of the teachers’ concerns, citing “fiscal reality”, in other words the unwillingness to actually raise revenue. In Kansas, ground-zero in the supply-side fantasy, conservatives were trying to pass the “windfall” from the Trump tax bill through to its citizens as an additional tax cut, even as the state was mandated by the courts to fully fund its education system which faced a multi-hundred million shortfall. In addition, GOP legislators were pushing constitutional amendment that would give exclusive control of education funding to the legislature alone, eliminating any chance for judicial oversight.

Today, the Republican party is bereft of ideas, run by the charlatans, grifters, and fraudsters who were specifically recruited to get elected by deceiving the public about the unpopular core agenda to begin with but who have now taken over the party. Their main policy objective these days seems to be simply to maintain power by whatever means necessary, even if that means turning over leadership of the party to someone who Paul Waldman says “may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America”. It is a party that refuses to defend the United States from a direct attack by a foreign power. It is a party that relies on gerrymandering and voter suppression to win elections and is now admitting that its top policy priority is appointing judges who will not restrain that activity and attempting to impeach judges that will. And its fealty to its own power has accordingly become so warped that a sitting GOP Senator dismisses the possibility that Trump will fire Robert Mueller because “the Democrats would have a good issue in this upcoming election” rather than being disturbed by the fact that it would subvert the rule of law, essentially establish Trump as an authoritarian ruler, and effectively end our democracy as we know it.

Mitch McConnell has been in the Senate since 1985, a 33 year career so far. You would think in that time that he would be able to point to a signature piece of legislation that benefited the country as a whole as a highlight of his long and powerful tenure. But no, the other day McConnell said this: “You’ve heard me say before, that I thought the decision I made not to fill the Supreme Court vacancy when Justice Scalia died was the most consequential decision I’ve ever made in my entire public career.” That’s right. Mitch McConnell’s proudest moment was a decision to destroy an important governmental norm, arguably abrogate his constitutional duties to advise and consent by not even holding a hearing for Merrick Garland, and further poisoning the partisan climate in the Capitol and in the country.

McConnell’s brag is reflective of a sclerotic, dying party. It now relies on subverting the democratic process and the very concept of democracy in order to maintain power. It has two, now largely unpopular policies, namely tax and spending cuts, that it has used as the square peg to bang into every round hole for the last two generations, and virtually no other policy answers to any societal problem. And those policies have not only now bankrupted its own supporters but also, ironically, highlighted the intellectual and policy bankruptcy of the Republican party itself.