For the people, and against the people

Last week, House Democrats introduced and passed the For the People Act (H.R. 1). The New York Times describes it as “a package of proposals aimed at rooting out political corruption and shoring up the electoral system.”

For the People is not perfect, nor comprehensive, nor tough enough, but it’s a good start. What could be wrong with that? Didn’t Donald Trump campaign on the very purpose of H.R. 1, draining the swamp in Washington? So how come that not a single Republican member of the House, who as a group have slavishly supported the President’s every move and whim, voted in favor of the For the People Act?

This week President Trump introduced what should be called an Against the People Budget. What’s wrong with it? At $4.75 trillion, it’s the biggest budget ever, and it comes at a time when the federal government’s deficit is soaring. It increases an already grotesquely bloated military budget, plagued by waste and corruption, by an additional 5 percent. It cuts $1.9 trillion from the tattered safety net, including cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (the successor to the food stamp program), and other programs for the poor and elderly. What is wrong with this that this a budget better suited to an imperial plutocracy than to a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

This is a spartan budget in the classical sense. No money for human needs. All resources for war. It’s worse than that, though. Not only are the priorities against spending even a meager amount for life, as incarnated in people and their physical needs like nutrition, and in favor of death—through unlimited spending on the most baroque means of producing it.

Worse, the sacrifices that come with war are not shared. Those in the lower 90 percent of the economic pyramid get shafted in the budget but must put up the bucks and the bodies in the name of the imperial delusion of absolute domination. Spartans by necessity at the bottom. Rome in decline debauchery at the top.

Those who benefited richly from the tax cut—to a different degree according to if they are in the 1 percent, the 5 percent, or the 10 percent—are not being asked to pay anything for the costs incurred by the cuts. Instead, the GOP intends the vulnerable who did not benefit from the deficit-busting tax cut to pay for it. 

This is rich. The GOP swore up and down that the cuts in taxes for the rich would somehow pay for themselves. They were lying and they knew it. That scheme has never, ever worked and not even Republicans are so ignorant they can’t do the math. So now somebody must pay, and the Republicans have decided to pass on the bill, through savage benefit cuts, to those who did not get anything from the tax cut and have the least ability to pay. It’s a master class in Republican “philosophy,” with a special emphasis on the Republican idea of fairness.

All this helps explain why the Republicans cannot possibly vote in favor of the For the People Act. H.R. 1, and according to the Times, “seeks, among other reforms, to strengthen ethics laws for lawmakers and lobbyists, to increase voter access, improve voting security, tighten campaign finance laws and create an alternative campaign-finance system geared toward small donors.”

How could the GOP support this agenda, the complete opposite of their own?

The main problem for the Republicans that the new rules would present is not that they would be more likely to run afoul of them because they are more corrupt, although they are, and that would be a problem. (I won’t go far into why I think Republicans are more corrupt than Democrats, at least as of 2019. I will only say that the GOP is even deeper in bed with business than Democrats, and from Enron to the 2008 crash, to Trump, Cohen, and Manafort, we have all had a crash course in what business ethics consists of).

No, the main problem for Republicans is that, when you govern for the 10 percent and against the interests of the 90 percent, in order to stand a chance you must practice all the dark arts H.R. 1 seeks to ban, and many others as well. You need your voter suppression and your gerrymandering. You need to distract part of the 90 percent whom you are screwing by making racism, fear, and hate the controlling emotions. You must lie, lie, lie; small lies, medium lies, big lies, and double whoppers. Then when you lose despite all this dishonesty, you may be able to rely on the antidemocratic Electoral College to rescue you. Where would Republicans be if they could no longer do this stuff, if chicanery were banned, if voters counted more than location?

Nowhere, and that’s exactly where I hope they will be someday soon.