The GOP Are All Complicit in Treason

It wasn't just Donald Trump who dismissed and rejected charges that Russian spies hacked the election last year.

Now we know that pretty much the entire Republican party team did so, too – from the Republican congressional leadership down to GOP Secretaries of State in the states whose local electoral systems were under attack. They blithely served as Vladimir Putin's defense team, even as President Obama's national security aides were uncovering a vast Russian conspiracy to undermine America's electoral process.

That's just one conclusion from a blockbuster investigative piece published Friday by the Washington Post, telling the inside story of the Obama administration's effort to grapple with the evolving Russian hack-and-leak effort in 2016.

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What we learn from the Post is that it wasn't just the U.S Conspiracy-Theorist-in-Chief, Donald Trump, who denied, deflected and ridiculed charges that Russia was a secret supporter of his (perhaps unwitting, perhaps not) electoral team.

We learn that, in August, when the Obama administration quietly approached Capitol Hill to seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders about the growing evidence of Russian involvement, CIA Director John Brennan couldn't even get top Republicans to meet with him. We learn that when a caravan of top U.S national security officials finally sat down with members of Congress, the GOP – led by Senator Mitch McConnell – flatly refused to cooperate. We learn that when Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, contacted people in charge of elections in various states whose election data had been possibly compromised, the Republicans in those states blew him off.

And we learn that Denis McDonough, Obama's chief of staff, toyed with the idea of a bipartisan commission to take on the Russia spy effort, the White House concluded that it would be impossible to get the GOP on board.

The GOP Authoritarian Nightmare Is a Twin Threat

Ever since Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, critics worried about his authoritarian tendencies. He’s done much to justify those fears. At his rallies, he whipped crowds into such a frenzy that protesters were beaten. As president, he’s flouted elementary rules about nepotism and conflict of interest; undermined the independence of the judiciary by impugning judges overseeing cases involving him or his administration; obstructed justice by firing James Comey after he refused to pledge loyalty to him; and arbitrarily limited media access by, for instance, replacing daily White House press briefings with off-camera gaggles where recording is banned.

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 By Frum’s definition, Trump is indeed an aspiring autocrat. But he’s only one wing of the anti-democratic trend in American politics—in the Republican Party, to be specific. Equally dangerous, and intimately connected with Trump’s mode of authoritarianism, is the degradation of democratic norms in the Senate under Mitch McConnell. The majority leader and a dozen other senators—all of them male—wrote their Obamacare repeal bill in secret, concealed not only from the public and Democrats, but even their Republican colleagues. Now, having finally released his version of the American Health Care Act on Sunday, McConnell is trying to force the bill through the Senate as quickly as possible.

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Trump’s authoritarianism and McConnell’s are two very different strains. The president is a narcissist who gathers power for personal gain self-gratification. He cares little for the specifics of policy outcomes, and merely wants victories that he can boast about.

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This is the authoritarianism of pure spectacle. McConnell, by contrast, is withdrawn and diffident in his public. (He’s jokingly likened to a turtle because of his appearance, but behaves like one, too.) While the majority leader doesn’t crave attention, he does care deeply about a specific policy agenda: advancing the plutocratic preferences of the Republican party’s donor class. Infinitely more knowledgeable than Trump about how government functions, McConnell subverts norms with a laser-like focus on advancing that agenda. His authoritarianism, in other words, is one of procedure.

As different as they are, these two forms of authoritarianism depend on each other. It’s unlikely that the Republican Party would have won a unified government last fall without Trump’s theatrical flair. To judge not only by last year’s election, but also this week’s special congressional election in Georgia, Trump’s tribalist politics have far more appeal with the Republican base than a forthright agenda of tax cuts for the rich and entitlement cuts to the poor. And when it comes to that agenda, all that really matters is that the policies be sold through the lens of negative partisanship. After all, Trump campaigned on a promise not to cut Medicaid, whereas McConnell’s version of the AHCA would slash the program by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

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If the Republican Party needs Trump, the president is equally dependent on the GOP. Given his manifest disinterest in policy and the details of governance, he would be unable to pass anything without crafty leaders like McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. But there is a more sinister dimension to Trump’s alliance with these Republican leaders: Congress has the power to check the president, including impeachment and removal if necessary. Ryan and McConnell are the bulwarks protecting Trump from a wide range of areas where he should be held accountable. If they wanted to, they could push for laws requiring him to reveal his taxes, force him to place his assets in a blind trust, and use nepotism rules to limit the power of family members, among a range of other checks.

Republicans in the House and Senate have implicitly made a devil’s bargain with Trump, giving him a free hand to indulge his kleptocratic and autocratic tendencies in exchange for what they want: stalwart conservative judges for the Supreme Court, and a presidential signature on whatever bills Ryan and McConnell manage to pass. And make no mistake: He will sign any major legislation that crosses his desk.

It IS the Right's Fault

Reactionary demagogues have effectively programmed millions in their audiences to argue in this willfully — indeed, proudly — ignorant manner. Hence the demonic, furious, malicious, sneering comments that routinely populate right-wing blogs and comments sections, not to mention social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Based on their language, often incoherent and always full of rage and indignation, one would think that President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi march into their homes every day, steal their money and food, and then — on the way out — ridicule them for all their adversity.

Needless to say, such baseless, inflammatory comments do not measure up to the kind of rational political dialogue envisioned by our Founding Fathers and encouraged by academic institutions. Just the opposite, they are the odious residue of minds poisoned by exposure to thousands of hours of manipulative, deceptive, McCarthyist filth. This kind of cynical indoctrination and the divisions it has caused not only among citizens but also among family members are vividly captured in Jen Senko’s brilliant but tragic movie, The Brainwashing of My Dad.

The Senate GOP hid the meanest things very deeply in its Obamacare repeal bill.

The Affordable Care Act repeal bill unveiled Thursday by Senate Republicans has aptly drawn universal scorn from healthcare experts, hospital and physician groups and advocates for patients and the needy. That’s because the bill is a poorly-disguised massive tax cut for the wealthy, paid for by cutting Medicaid — which serves the middle class and the poor — to the bone.

Yet some of the measure’s most egregious, harshest provisions are well-disguised. They’re hidden deep in its underbrush or in the maze of legislative verbiage. We’ve ferreted out some of them and present them here in all their malevolent glory. In this effort we’ve built on ace detective work by Adrianna McIntyre, Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan, David Anderson of Duke University and balloon-juice.com, Andy Slavitt, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid in the Obama administration, and others.

Some of these provisions match those in the House Republicans’ repeal bill passed May 4, and some are even harsher — more “mean,” to use a term President Trump himself applied to the House bill. That bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cost some 23 million Americans their health coverage by 2026. The Senate bill wouldn’t do much better, and might do worse.

—States will have more authority to reimpose lifetime and annual benefit caps and eliminate essential health benefits. This may be the most insidious provision of the repeal bill, and certainly is the most deeply hidden.

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—Protection for people with preexisting conditions is destroyed. Senate Republicans claim in their talking points that the measure protects people with preexisting conditions from being denied coverage or priced out of the market. Don’t believe them. As Gene Sperling, a former economist for the Clinton and Obama administrations, and Michael Shapiro observe, “the Republican plan may not allow insurers to discriminate … through the front door, but they’ve created a backdoor way in.”

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Older Americans would get socked with much higher premiums and costs. The Senate bill changes the ACA’s premium subsidies in ways that severely hurt older customers. The bill expands the permissible range of premiums for older buyers compared to younger from a ratio of 3 to 1 in the ACA to 5 to 1. In other words, older buyers could be charged much more. It reduces subsidies for older buyers in other ways. The ACA’s subsidies are based entirely on income, and are provided to households with income up to 400% of the federal poverty line. That ceiling is $48,240 for an individual.

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—The biggest tax cut for the rich is retroactive. As we’ve reported before, the repeal measure delivers an estimated $346 billion in tax cuts over 10 years, all of it going to households with income over $250,000. But the biggest component of the cut — repeal of a 3.8% surcharge on capital gains and dividends for those taxpayers — would be retroactive to the beginning of this year. That turns it into more of a free handout for wealthy people who already had sold securities or collected dividends since Jan. 1.
Even the Wall Street Journal is aghast. “Retroactive tax cuts like this don’t create an incentive and can yield windfall gains for people who already made decisions,” the paper observed. A millionaire who already had booked a $1-million gain on a stock sale, for example, would collect a $38,000 benefit.

This provision in particular is heavily loaded toward the richest of the rich. According to the Tax Policy Center, 90% of the cut goes to the top 1% (those with income of $699,000 or more); they’d get an average tax benefit of about $25,000. And almost two-thirds goes to the top 0.1% (with income exceeding $3.8 million); they’d get an average $165,000.

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—The fight against opioid addiction is crippled. Opioid addiction has emerged as perhaps the worst public health crisis in America. But as much as 40% of the cost of treatment of addicts has been paid by Medicaid. The harsh cuts in that program imposed by the Senate bill would force more of that expense onto states that simply can’t afford it. Meanwhile, the projected loss of medical coverage by as many as 23 million Americans under repeal will keep many victims of the epidemic from finding treatment.

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—Salaries for health insurance chief executives can go through the roof. This provision matches one that was buried in the House bill, and is similarly obscured in the Senate version. It removes a limit on the deductibility of CEO pay in the health insurance industry written into the ACA.

Trump seeks sharp cuts to housing aid, except for program that brings him millions

President Trump’s budget calls for sharply reducing funding for programs that shelter the poor and combat homelessness — with a notable exception: It leaves intact a type of federal housing subsidy that is paid directly to private landlords.

One of those landlords is Trump himself, who earns millions of dollars each year as a part-owner of Starrett City, the nation’s largest subsidized housing complex. Trump’s 4 percent stake in the Brooklyn complex earned him at least $5 million between January of last year and April 15, according to his recent financial disclosure.

Trump’s business empire intersects with government in countless ways, from taxation to permitting to the issuing of patents, but the housing subsidy is one of the clearest examples of the conflicts experts have predicted. While there is no indication that Trump himself was involved in the decision, it is nonetheless a stark illustration of how his financial interests can directly rise or fall on the policies of his administration.

Republican Healthcare Bill Gives Tax Cuts to the Rich by Gutting Safety Net for Poor & Middle Class

The whole thing is a horror show:

AMY GOODMAN: After weeks of secret deliberations, Republican senators Thursday released a healthcare bill that would reduce key benefits for millions of Americans. The Better Care Reconciliation Act would fund a large capital gains tax cut for the rich by removing millions of low-income and disabled people from Medicaid. According to the Center on Budget [and] Policy Priorities, $33 billion of the tax cuts would benefit the 400 wealthiest U.S. households. The Senate bill would also reduce subsidies to individuals to purchase health insurance, and would allow states to eliminate protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The measure would defund Planned Parenthood for a year, making breast cancer screenings and basic reproductive services more difficult for women to secure.

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SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: This is a bill designed to strip away healthcare benefits and protections from Americans who need it most, in order to give a tax break to the folks who need it least. This is a bill that would end Medicaid as we know it, rolling back Medicaid expansion, cutting federal support for the program even more than the House bill, which cut Medicaid by $800 billion.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as scores of disabled protesters held a sit-in outside Senator Mitch McConnell’s office on Capitol Hill Thursday and demonstrators gathered at Washington, D.C.’s National Airport to target Republican lawmakers as they left town for their home states.

Also on Thursday, Barack Obama weighed in on efforts to scale back his signature healthcare law. He posted a scathing statement on Facebook that said, quote, "The Senate bill, unveiled today, is not a health care bill. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America," President Obama said.

Evil Healthcare Legislation from the GOP

13 white male Republicans bought off by insurance companies are deciding the fate of health insurance & 1/6th of the economy in SECRET 

And there's no doubt they will cut medicare deeply and take away insurance from millions.

Mick Mulvaney and Trump's Psychopathic and Cruel Budget

Trump’s budget is ruthless to disabled and poor people. This budget would set the clock back for the rights of people with disabilities by 50 years, experts say.

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Mulvaney went on to say “you have to have compassion for folks who are receiving the federal funds, but also you have to have compassion for folks who are paying it.”
The budget offered by the Trump administration aims to cut Medicaid by $800 billion, nutritional assistance by $192 billion, and $272 billion from welfare programs overall. Critics have pointed out that the plan is unworkable because it’s paid for by a “$2 trillion is a double-counting error”

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John Oliver showed that a president's budget is a moral document, a window into the 'soul' of the President and his administration. Trump's budget reveals him as a soulless monster (who likely has no idea exactly what's in this budget).

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Longtime federal budget experts quickly slammed the White House’s proposed 2018 budget on Tuesday. Its $1.4 trillion in cuts over the next decade would endanger tens of millions of households, especially the poor and vulnerable, while rewarding the wealthy with unneeded tax cuts and giving contracts to military contractors and others to privatize many government functions.

But inside the right-wing bubble that is the Trump White House and GOP-majority Congress, what’s taken as serious policy ideas, spending principles and rationales for the president’s 2018 budget is reality-averse craziness.

Even as budget watchers say there’s no way Trump’s blueprint will make it through Congress, the starting line—before compromises, concessions and deals begin—is not just mean, cruel and uninformed; it’s delusional. Not only would the budget hit working-class white voters who bet on Trump like a lottery ticket, but the budget also shows a White House living in a land of make-believe.

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EPA Chief Pruit Refuses to Say Whether He and Trump Discussed Climate Change Before Withdrawing from Paris Accords

What a pair of massive assholes.

Trump the Psychopath

Jerk. Liar. Bully. Thug. Con artist. Scumbag. Asshole.

In the four months since the inauguration of Donald Trump, these terms have regrettably become aptly descriptive staples of our political lexicon. We’ve officially arrived at a dystopian moment in our nation's history when our elected officials don’t earn respect because they don't give it.

If it isn’t a flippant remark from a Republican “representative” to his outraged constituents at a health care town hall, it’s Trump shoving another world leader to get to the front of the line, a Republican sailing to victory after publicly assaulting a journalist, or an entire Republican Congress looking the other way as allegations of treason engulf the Trump administration in seemingly never ending scandal.

It feels as though everywhere we turn we are inundated with not just unbridled arrogance and entitlement, but a refusal by the “powers that be” to hold any of the bad actors accountable. In fact, it's as though acting badly has now become a virtue in Trump’s America, and those who behave the worst are being rewarded rather than punished for their misdeeds. Or to quote Donald Trump explicitly, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

So we watch in horror and disgust as the man who bragged about getting away with serial sexual molestation not only fires the very people tasked with leading the investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, but boasts about his efforts to obstruct justice. By day he makes the mundane rounds required of the office, but by night he’s a keyboard commando, hurling defensive accusations and insults at his detractors online in response to the latest breaking corruption allegations.

He has become the social media equivalent of Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, prowling the Twitter streets wielding his cellphone as a makeshift chainsaw. He inhabits the fantasy world of his own self-serving mind, in which nothing he does is wrong or unjustifiable, and his actions are rendered legitimate and lawful simply by virtue of the fact that he took them. He and his underlings spare no expense in defending the indefensible.

Trump the Asshole Withdraws from the Paris Climate Accords

A perfect summation from Charlie Pierce:

I didn't think he could top his ghastly American Carnage inaugural address for sheer fact-free and paranoiac mendacity, but he managed to do it on Thursday. By announcing that the United States was withdrawing from the groundbreaking Paris Accords regarding the world climate crisis, the president* wallowed in rank, xenophobic victimhood while basking in the scattered applause of the otherwise unemployable yahoos whose self-respect is sufficiently low that they still work for him. Any doubt that Steve Bannon is running this White House now, either personally or through his finger-puppet, obvious anagram Reince Priebus, now has evaporated. The transformation of the American government into a Breitbart comments thread is complete.

It was appalling. It was condescending. It was awful content delivered by a dolt who wouldn't know the Paris Accords from a baguette without the shoddy talking points that someone put in front of him. (snip)

The least objectionable element of the speech was its utter internal incoherence.

The United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian economic and financial burden the agreement imposes on our country.

Paris was a non-binding and ineffective agreement, but it was "draconian" nonetheless. The economy is booming under his leadership, but the Paris Accord was destroying it at the same time. This was a speech written by a fool, to be delivered by a fool, with the presumption that a great percentage of its target audience is made up of fools.

But the really noxious stuff was the attempt at transforming a worldwide agreement to combat an existential threat to life on this planet into what he stupidly called a scheme to redistribute our wealth to China, as if we're all not going to be buying our solar panels from China for the next 50 years because of this cluck. The really noxious stuff was all that simpering about how the rest of the world is playing us for suckers and laughing at us, as though the rest of the world doesn't think we've lost our mind as a nation simply by electing a vulgar talking yam. The really noxious stuff was all his crocodile tears about the Forgotten People, as though a lot of them are not suffering through drought, or losing their houses to floods and to landslides, about which he and his people care nothing at all. (snip)

It was a speech written by an angry child, to be delivered by an angry child, with the assumption that its targeted audience was made up of angry children, too. And it was of a piece with that lunatic Wall Street Journal op-ed from Tuesday in which H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn pretty much decided that international diplomacy is nothing more than a larger-than-usual barrel of cannibalistic crabs. (snip)

The idea that these people put together a party in the Rose Garden to celebrate the withdrawal of American leadership in the world leads me to believe that they'd host a barbecue to celebrate a public execution. None of that matters. While the president was speaking, as it happens, a huge chunk of Antarctica was preparing to break off. Meanwhile, Wednesday was the first day of hurricane season, and this president*, who cares so much about the duties of his office and the people of this great land, still hasn't bothered to appoint a FEMA director yet. The nonsense he spewed on Thursday doesn't matter, either, even if it continues to gull the suckers out in the sticks. The oceans are not listening to him.

(emphases added)

This "decision" (which thankfully won't matter too much in the grand scheme of fighting climate change, because most of the US is actually committed to reducing carbon emissions) easily moves Trump into the lead for WORST PRESIDENT EVER. It's just a complete bone-headed, petty move, that cedes any moral authority or global leadership by the US. In his few short months as POTUS, Trump has greatly diminished the stature of the US, much more than Bush, and of course, it must make his boss Vladimir Putin very happy.