Steve Benen confesses to perplexity when it comes to the mid-term election strategy of GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):
A week ago, for example, McConnell spoke out against congressional oversight of Donald Trump’s White House, dismissing presidential accountability as “presidential harassment.” Earlier this week, the Kentucky Republican said he hopes to address the deficit he grew by cutting social-insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security.
And yesterday, the Senate GOP leader told Reuters that if his party can hold onto power after next month’s congressional midterm elections, Republicans are likely to try again to repeal the Affordable Care Act …
In a separate interview with Bloomberg News, McConnell also expressed support for a GOP lawsuit that would gut protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions.
It does seem like madness, doesn’t it? But I think you have to remember, or at least assume, that as the Republican Party has fled rightward, it has also fled deeply into the arms of earnest religious absolutists. These are folks who have chosen to believe their religion’s precepts without exception and without notice to the problems they raise.
I am not suggesting that any particular sect’s theology has an opinion on the ACA or social entitlement programs. It’s not nearly that simple.
Rather, the culture of those sects pervade the great majority of the Republican base. The attitude in particular is that God is with us, so we are never wrong. This has infected the Party and now lends its weighty authority to
- The free market is always right.
- Taxes are evil.
- Regulations are evil.
- Democrats are evil.
- Big Government is evil.
- America is great and doesn’t make mistakes. (A bit of a
- etc
So McConnell is showing his plans as a clarion call, confident they’re based on the Holy Tenets of the Party, and, because of that, the true Americans will flock to the Republican banner.
This is the ossification of a political party, rendering it deeply inflexible, which may sound appealing until we realize that circumstance does change, and that requires changes in response. Just as morality is not the timeless set of inflexible dictates that many might like to believe, so must political parties be willing to change their specific responses to contextual changes, such as war & recession, as well as embrace the simple fact that their tenets just might be wrong. So far, the Republicans have shown only limited awareness, insofar as I can tell, of these facts: when Kansas’ budget deficit became unmanageable, the moderate Republicans overthrew extremist Governor Brownback’s strategy, but the Governor didn’t go down apologizing.
He called for President Trump to replicate his disastrous approach to taxation and budgeting in the Federal budget. Unrepentant, he was. It’s worth noting he has a strong religious background, beginning with an Evangelical church, before moving on to Catholicism.
When God is with you, you’ll scrabble for any interpretation of the results which will show that you, and God, were right. Don’t think so? From the same Kansas City Star article linked to above:
Kansas cut taxes in a move Brownback celebrated as a “real-live experiment.” It was the move that could have cemented the legacy of a man who once ran for president.
The Kansas cuts slashed income tax rates and created an income tax exemption for the owners of limited liability companies and other pass-through businesses.
What followed were revenue shortfalls and budget cuts. School funding became even more difficult. Brownback’s standing among Kansas Republicans deteriorated.
Yet he continued to stand by the tax cuts. He bemoaned the policy’s death when the GOP-dominated Legislature rolled it back in June.
He was still championing his policy on a recent trip to Washington, saying “it actually worked for our target.”
“Our target wasn’t revenue, it was growth,” he said. “And it did that.”
If you’d had the meteoric growth you were expecting, the revenues would have followed. Neither happened. And Kevin Drum has a helpful chart on comparative employment growth in Kansas and its neighbors:
That’s fairly much full & final condemnation.
