Republicans can’t handle the truth as they complete their transformation into the Greedy Oligarch Party. Since they have little to offer working-class Whites other than affirmation of their biases, the new GOP needs to convince conservative voters that Democrats don’t care what happens to straight White people.
Republicans have been picking Culture War fights with Democrats over the past 40 years, and 20 years ago they were pushing anti-gay initiatives to great effect: Former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman in August 2010 told The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder that George W. Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove had “been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.”
Rove gloated to the New York Times in November 2004 that “moral values” had carried Bush to reelection. “People do not like the idea or the concept of marriage as being a union between a man and a woman being uprooted and overturned by a few activist judges or a couple of activist local officials,” Rove told the Times.
By 2010, the trajectory had changed. Support for marriage equality increased from 31 to 42 percent, Adam Serwer noted at TheAtlantic.com. The military’s ban on openly gay service members was repealed that year. However, three justices on the Iowa Supreme Court were ousted in a November 2010 retention election, a year after that court struck down the state’s prohibition on same-sex marriages. By 2015, when the US Supreme Court held in a 5-4 decision that the 14th Amendment requires all states to grant same-sex marriages, support for gay marriage had reached 60%. As more Americans came to realize they had gay acquaintances and relatives, support for gay marriage has risen to a record-high 70% support in the US — including 55% of Republicans.
But the Republican Party couldn’t give up gay-bashing, since it is important to their key evangelical “Christian” base, so party leaders continued to oppose marriage equality while looking for a new target, one with fewer political allies. The GOP targeted transgender people, who number an estimated 0.7% of the US population, or 2.3 million. Republicans manufactured crises over transgendered “men” taking over girls’ restrooms and girls’ sports. (The demagoguery is more effective when it purports to protect children.)
The North Carolina legislature in 2016 was first to pass a “bathroom” bill, which limited restrooms transgender people could use and prohibited municipalities from passing LGBT protections. The state backtracked after the NCAA threatened to block North Carolina from holding any tournament in the state for the next six years unless the state repealed the bill, which North Carolina did in 2017.
Republicans fine-tuned their gay bashing to target transgenders. Arkansas in April 2017 became the first state to ban medical treatments for transgender minors. The state’s Republican-dominated legislature overrode Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s veto of House Bill 1570, which prohibits doctors from providing gender confirming hormone therapy, puberty blockers or gender-confirmation surgeries for youth under 18, or from referring patients to other health care providers. Similar bills were filed in other states.
In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have issued edicts not only banning kids from getting gender-affirming health care, but also sending Child Protective Services investigators to threaten parents who support their trans children.
Florida Republicans took it to another level with legislation to ban discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms up to third grade, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, in defending the measure Democrats referred to as the “don’t say gay” bill, suggested that opponents of the bill were enabling those who “groomed” children for sexual abuse.
Other Republicans made similar accusations. “The Democrats are the party of pedophiles. The Democrats are the party of princess predators from Disney,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga,) said.
The language echoes that of QAnon conspiracy cultists, who fantasize that powerful Democrats run a secret child sex trafficking ring that Donald Trump was supposed to expose. It’s a classic case of projecting imagined behavior onto others to divert attention from disgraced Republican officials, such as Dennis “Coach” Hastert, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker, who was sent to prison six years ago for child molesting. He’s just one of hundreds of GOP sex offenders compiled online at #RepublicanSexualPredators.
But facts haven’t stopped Republicans from slandering Democrats, in the hope of diverting attention from Democrats’ accomplishments since they gained control of the White House and Congress.
President Biden was popular in the first seven months of his presidency, particularly after Democrats in Congress passed the American Rescue Plan in March 2021 over the unanimous opposition of Republicans. In addition to providing for COVID vaccines and treatment and reopening schools, that $1.9 trillion bill jump-started the economy with relief to low- and middle-income Americans, who benefitted directly from direct payments of $1,400 per adult, plus $300 weekly supplements to state unemployment benefits through September 2021, as well as expansion of low-income tax credits, child-care subsidies, expanded health-insurance access, extension of expanded food stamps, and rental assistance programs.
Biden signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package that passed with 13 Republican senators who voted with the Democrats. The bill pays for construction and repairs to roads and bridges, renovates ports and public transportation, expands broadband access and replaces lead pipes in the US, among other initiatives. This will bring more jobs to rebuild our long-neglected infrastructure.
The Build Back Better Bill would have extended economic relief programs and added provisions to control climate change. The House passed a $2 trillion version of the bill in November but Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., joined all 50 Republicans in opposition, blocking the bill in the Senate. So Democrats need more votes in the Senate.
Even with the Build Back Better plan blocked in the Senate, Biden has presided over the gain of 7.9 million jobs that were lost during the Trump recession. The unemployment rate has dropped to 3.6%, down from 6.4% when Biden took office. But many Americans, fixated on inflation (a global phenomenon for which Republicans offer no solution), are unaware of Biden’s success in reviving the economy. The progressive consortium Navigator Research, in a poll conducted April 14-18, found only 30% of voters realized the US had gained jobs. The Navigator poll found Biden was 15 points “underwater” on his handling of the economy as 41% approve and 56% disapprove. The president’s overall job approval was 6 points underwater, as 46% approved and 52% disapproved in that survey.
Even with Biden’s approval stuck at 42.2% on April 26 in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls, the Democrat was still 1.6 points above Trump’s 40.6% approval rating at a similar point in his term.
Given the electorate’s short attention span, Biden should wait until Sept. 1 to honor his pledge to forgive at least $10,000 in student loans per debtor. He might as well forgive $50,000. Loan payments have been suspended through August anyway. Then, two months before the election, let Republicans sue to stop the debt forgiveness. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2022
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