Republicans: Friend of the Rich, No Friend to Seniors

Today's news says that Mitch McConnell (a Republican senator from Kentucky and the U.S. Senate majority leader) wants to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. The reason? To alleviate the deficit in the US budget. And the reason for the deficit? Because Donald Trump's (and Republicans') tax cut has benefited corporations and the ultra-wealthy but reduced the government's income (i.e., worsened the budgetary deficit).

McConnell, not unreasonably, feels that the loss of revenue due to the tax cut should be made up somewhere, somehow. But it should be clear to anyone that cutting taxes on the very rich and corporations, if that loss of revenue has to be made up by cutting programs like Medicare and Social Security, is favoring the rich at the expense of the elderly for whom Social Security may be a chief, or only, source of income, and who also greatly benefit from Medicare.

The moral is this: If you are a recipient of Social Security and/or Medicare--or even if you are not but are simply someone other than a member of the "One Percent" (that is, the very richest in our society)--you should not be voting Republican, because you are not voting in accordance with your own interests.

The Republicans have long been the party of and for the rich. For people who have not seen that, it should be more obvious now.

If you're one of the One Percent, I'm actually going to tell you that you should vote Republican; it's in your interests. If you're not, remember that the Republican philosophy is help the rich and screw the poor. And, they have huge amounts of money with which to influence elections. So--support the other side.

Copyright © 2018

The Nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court

There was a post here about then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh; but I've deleted it because there's been so much water over the dam since I wrote that. (So this displays with an incorrect date and was actually posted on 10/11/2018.)

There was a complex and emotional story leading up to Kavanaugh's eventual (last Saturday) confirmation to the Supreme Court by the US Senate Judiciary Committee and then the whole Senate--as required by the US Constitution.

Since the story was well reported, even in international news, I will recap it briefly: Kavanaugh was accused of sexually attacking a woman, going back more than 30  years. Both Kavanaugh and his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, testified in a special Senate hearing. Kavanaugh got very emotional, particularly in relating how the accusations have taken a toll on him and his family--and this probably earned him a good deal of sympathy.

However, he segued into a rant in which he claimed that the whole business was a plot by Democrats to exact revenge for Trump's defeat of Hilary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016. (Had he been coached in this by Trump? Because it sure sounds like one of Trump's paranoid hoax/conspiracy claims.)

Anyway, an FBI investigation was ordered. However, the problem with that is that Trump ordered the investigation and thereby was able to set the parameters and limits of the investigation, and limited it such that the FBI was allowed only a week for the investigation and interviewed only nine people. Probably it was a foregone conclusion that the bottom line to the FBI report contained nothing earth-shaking and was in fact entirely trivial.

(In the Senate vote, Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine widely regarded as a moderate who frequently did not follow Republican or Trump ideology; and Democratic Sen. Manchin from Tennessee, both voted to confirm. This was a surprise (a disappointment, if you were on one side of the issue). So the vote was 50 Yea, 48 No. If one of those two had voted No, there would have been a 49-49 tie; and then Vice President Pence, acting as Senate President Pro Tempore, would have cast the deciding Yea vote--again, all according to the Constitution.)

So Mr. Trump in the end got his extremely conservative nominee confirmed and now, we are told, we have the most conservative Supreme Court in many decades, one which may well reverse such landmark Supreme Court decisions as Rowe v. Wade (which legalized abortion) and Obergefell (which legalized same-sex marriage). The only hope that these decisions will be left alone is if the Court keeps in mind a judicial principle called stare decisis ('let the decision stand').

Copyright © 2018.