Exposing the closeted MAGAts in Congress

There is a lot of crazy people in the Republican party these days. But in terms of their visibility, most of the attention has been focused on people like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz. But there are others who share the same extreme views but have kept a much lower profile, trying to pass themselves off as more mainstream politicians. The group known as Indivisible has decided on a campaign to identify 18 of those crazies who managed to get elected in districts that Joe Biden won in 2020 and make their extreme views well-known to the electorate so that they have a better chance of being defeated in their swing districts at the next election. (I have coined the term ‘MAGAts’ (pronounced ‘maggots’) to label those who are loyal to the Trump MAGA cult. UPDATE: My claim to fame was premature as larpar points out in the comments. Oh well, back to the drawing board!)
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Robert Reich on why he loves Bernie Sanders

As longtime readers know, I supported Bernie Sanders in both of his runs for the presidency in 2016 and 2020. But I started supporting him much earlier ever since I became aware of how, in his long political career, he has been so consistent and passionate in his support for those who are less well off and his excoriation of the greedy wealthy people who make obscene amounts of money while using every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes that come anywhere close to being a reasonable fraction of their income. His relentless advocacy for a single-payer health insurance system and his attacks on high drug prices in the US, especially for essential ones like insulin, while the drug companies make huge profits and pay lavish salaries and bonuses to its top executives, has resulted in those issues becoming part of mainstream political discussions and undoubtedly has paved the way for the recent drops in the prices of insulin drugs. He has been a supporter of civil rights from the days when as a college student he was arrested in 1963 for taking part in demonstrations. He was found guilty for resisting arrest and fined.
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Is there any limit to the silliness that the MAGA world will accept?

The ridiculous efforts to gin up right-wing outrage continues apace. The latest are the proposed regulations to make washing machines more energy and water efficient. Naturally, this has been seized on by right-wing media to suggest that our clothes will come out dirtier. This follows the general manufactured anger over similar developments like low-flush toilets. These are being used as examples of the ‘wokeness’ that is destroying the American way of life. They are even blaming the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on the management being more focused on being woke than financial matters. Yes, really.
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John Oliver on the abuse of TANF

The program known as TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) “provides states and territories with flexibility in operating programs designed to help low-income families with children achieve economic self-sufficiency.  States use TANF to fund monthly cash assistance payments to low-income families with children, as well as a wide range of services.”

On the latest episode of his show, John Oliver describes how this program has been abused so that a lot of the money does not go to the people it was meant for.

Part of the problem is that although it is a federal program, rather than the federal government giving the money directly to needy people, conservatives lobbied to have the federal government give it in the form of block grants to states who were given guidelines on how the money could be spent. But the guidelines were loose enough to allow states to siphon money away to build things like a new college volleyball stadium. This is why proposals to convert federal programs into block grants to states should always be viewed with extreme caution.

Culture wars forever!

Now that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives, speaker Kevin McCarthy is paying off his debt to all those in his caucus who held him hostage in his attempt to become speaker by letting them hold all manner of hearings on culture war issues.

(Non Sequitur)

However, I think that they will never run out of things to be outraged about. Outrage over trivialities serves to distract from their lack of any program of action that can command mass support.

Biden’s budget proposals puts Republicans in a bind

Yesterday Joe Biden released his budget proposals for the next fiscal year. In the ritualistic role-playing that is the annual budget process in the US, a president’s proposals are taken seriously as likely to be implemented only if the president’s party controls both houses of Congress. Otherwise, the opposition party that is the majority will dismiss the proposals outright. Those are the usual opening moves in this dance and it is being followed this time with Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy and others in his party’s leadership dismissing the budget.

In a joint statement, House speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republicans accused Biden of “shrugging and ignoring” the national debt, which they called one of the “greatest threats to America”.

”President Biden’s budget is a reckless proposal doubling down on the same far-left spending policies that have led to record inflation and our current debt crisis,” the statement said.

McCarthy’s statement looked like it might have been written well in advance since he accuses the Biden budget of ignoring the national debt when in fact Biden argues that his budget will lower it by $2.9 trillion over the next ten years. The precise numbers are always subject to debate but it is incorrect that Biden is ‘ignoring’ it when it is the top line item.
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Reducing the cost of insulin is big news

An estimated 26.9 million people of all ages (8.2% of the U.S. population) have been diagnosed with diabetes. A further 7.3 million adults ages 18 years or older (21.4 percent of adults with diabetes) are estimated to have diabetes but are undiagnosed. For people with diabetes, insulin is essential for them to live but in the US, insulin prices have been much higher than elsewhere in the world resulting in crippling costs for users, so much so that some people cannot afford to buy the drug.

One of the major achievements of Democrats and the Biden administration in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) at the end of last year was that it allowed Medicare to negotiate down the price of insulin for those over 65.
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The Republican lane problem

In political analyses of political races in the US, the kids in the media these days like to use the metaphor of ‘lanes’ to signify where candidates stand with respect to their rivals. Traditionally, the lanes had labels such as progressive, liberal, centrist, moderate, and conservative that, while hardly precisely defined, gave one a vague sense of whether that person was aligned with ones own values or not. One could make the distinctions more fine-grained by separating them on economic/fiscal and social polices, so that one could describe someone as a fiscal conservative who is socially liberal and so on. So in principle one could identify many different ideological lanes that people could be pigeonholed into. (Warning: This post is going to overwork the lane metaphor to death.)

But when it comes to current Republican politics, all that has to be thrown out of the window because since Donald Trump, the lanes are no longer defined by ideology. What we have is the Trump lane and the non-Trump lanes. The Trump lane is defined by whatever Trump thinks serves his own interests and will enable him to win and that ideologically amorphous structure makes it harder for his competitors to find their own lanes, since the Trump lane can weave erratically across ideological lines, as he opportunistically seizes on any issue to attack his opponents, even if it involves flat-out lying about them and himself. For example, his stance against cuts to Social Security and Medicare makes those who are on record as favoring privatizing or cuts (such as Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence) vulnerable to attacks from him. He has already started doing so.
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‘Anti-wokism’ as a distraction from the lack of any positive policy proposals

In the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examines Ron DeSantis’s record as governor of Florida and shows that his schtick is entirely based on fighting what he calls ‘wokism’, a word that is undefined but seems to mean anything that he dislikes and can be used to rile up the party base on culture war issues. He does not seem to have done anything that materially improves the lives of Floridians but instead feeds their grievances.