An editorial is due on the effects of the midterm election, challenged by the timing that this newspaper goes to press hours before the polls close on election day. So here goes:
There is a lot of anxiety about what will happen if the MAGA cultists carry the day. Even if they fall short in votes counted, at least 291 candidates for the US House, Senate and key state offices are election deniers who refused to accept that Donald Trump was legitimately defeated in 2020, and many of them are likely to refuse to accept the decision of the midterm electorate.
Steve Bannon’s closing message to his MAGA acolytes on his podcast, was all about sowing distrust in election outcomes, particularly if Democrats—who he repeatedly called “professional thieves”—win any races at all in the midterms, Dave Neiwert reported Nov. 7. Bannon said in an interview that Democrats are “going to pull every trick in the book” in order to “steal” the elections, adding: “They will not lose graciously. This is going to be very nasty and it’s going to be very tough and we’re going to be gentlemen and gentlewomen about it but steely resolve. There’s no chance they’re going to steal any of this.”
“Misinformation is going to be central to this midterm election and central to the 2024 election,” Bhaskar Chakravorti of Tufts University told the Associated Press. “The single galvanizing narrative is that the 2020 election was stolen.”
The AP reports that baseless rumors about noncitizens voting, along with claims about the security of mail-in ballots, have been circulating in the past two weeks with greater intensity. There also have been claims about dead people casting ballots, ballot drop boxes being moved, or more fantastic claims about voting machines, Neiwert noted at DailyKos.com.
Whichever way the election goes, Joe Biden will still be president for at least two more years and Merrick Garland will remain as attorney general. If Republicans gain the majority in the House of Representatives, they will move to impeach Biden on Trumped up charges yet to be determined, but any impeachments should be easily rejected on party-line votes. The Big Lie Party might knock off a few Democratic senators, but there’s no way they’ll reach a two-thirds majority needed to remove officials.
In the meantime, Garland should proceed with the indictment of Trump on real felony charges of theft and mishandling of classified documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago, and obstruction of justice after a lawyer for Trump falsely certified that all sensitive documents had been returned to the National Archives.
Trump has all-but-declared he will run for president again in 2024, in his effort to evade prosecution for mishandling of documents, and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and organizing the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, in his attempt to obstruct the certification of Biden’s victory. When the true bills come back from the federal grand juries looking into Trump’s actions, Garland shouldn’t hesitate to order Trump taken into custody to face the first of many charges that are piling up against the Big Liar.
If the Democrats keep control of the House and add a couple Democrats to their Senate majority, they should enact the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to restore and revitalize the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) and the For the People Act to roll back voter suppression bills “red” states have passed in the past two years. The Lewis bill would once again require states with histories of voter discrimination to receive approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before enacting voting changes. The voting rights bill passed the House in August 2021 but a Republican filibuster blocked it in the Senate, as at least two Democrats, Krysten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to alter the filibuster rule to allow the voting rights bill to proceed.
If Republicans gain control of the House, they have announced plans to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. They have floated the idea of raising the age to gain full Social Security retirement benefits from the current 67 to 70, raise the Medicare eligibility age from the current 65 to 67, and increase the cost of obtaining medical care through the Medicare program, while imposing “means-testing” to determine who will receive Medicare and Social Security benefits at all. And they would refuse to increase the debt ceiling until President Biden lets Republicans pass the Social Security and Medicare cuts, in effect holding the country’s creditworthiness (and the economy itself) hostage to forced cuts in these programs.
The GQP’s media handlers have played down the threat to the retirement programs, but Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), currently the ranking Republican member on the House Budget Committee, has indicated he would use debt limit talks to extract concessions from Biden on entitlements and spending. He has said Congress must use every tool at its disposal “to right size the federal government” and that “[t]he debt ceiling absolutely is one of those tools.”
And the GQP leadership has bought in. As reported by Jack Fitzpatrick for Bloomberg, the Republican Study Committee, the largest group of House Republicans, released a budget plan in June that called on lawmakers to gradually raise the Medicare age of eligibility to 67 and the Social Security eligibility to 70 before indexing both to life expectancy. It backed withholding payments to those who retired early and had earnings over a certain limit. And it endorsed the consideration of options to reduce payroll taxes that fund Social Security and redirect them to private alternatives. It also urged lawmakers to “phase-in an increase in means testing” for Medicare.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) has proposed amending the Social Security Act to require it be reapproved every five years. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) wants to require Social Security to be subject to annual reapproval.
Biden has declared he would not accept cuts to Social Security or Medicare, insisting that Republicans were “fiscally reckless’ in pushing more tax cuts for the wealthy, and that’s the right approach. Republicans are economic terrorists and Democrats must make sure the GQP gets full credit for pushing the debt ceiling to the brink, betting that the guys who bankroll Republicans’ campaigns will draw the line at causing the first-ever default on the national debt, which would be catastrophic for small businesses and could plunge the nation into a severe recession. And all this should convince previously skeptical seniors that those damned Republicans really were serious about cutting their Social Security and Medicare.
As Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, “A more interesting question is why Republicans think they can get away with touching the traditional third rails of fiscal policy. Social Security remains as popular as ever; Republicans themselves campaigned against Obamacare by claiming, misleadingly, that it would cut Medicare. Why imagine that proposals to deny benefits to many Americans by raising the eligibility age won’t provoke a backlash?”
So much for folks thinking Republicans were better at handling the economy. The debt ceiling hostage-taking scam should get Biden re-elected and a Democratic sweep of Congress in 2024. Whatever happens, keep hope alive. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2022
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