Desperate Men In a Race Against Time
The Senate’s sad, desperate bid to pass a tax bill succeeded last night. It’s not fair to call it a tax bill, since it touches almost every aspect of American life. And since it was produced in haste with little review or input by a group of men best known for their moral and intellectual bankruptcy, it’s unsurprisingly disastrous.
In addition to funneling even more wealth from America’s dwindling middle class to it’s billionaires the bill also blows up the deficit, repeals the Obamacare individual mandate thus undermining healthcare markets, opens land in Alaska for private companies to plumb for fossil fuels. In just about every meaningful way the bill is bad, unless you’re a billionaire. If you’re surprised that the GOP could produce such a bill you haven’t paid much attention to politics recently.
What’s most notable about the bill is just how many bad things the GOP crammed into it. Portrayed as a legislative victory, the bill is a mark of desperation. It is a manifestation of narrow, ideologically-driven, paranoid minds who know they have no time to waste, and wouldn’t have any better ideas even if they did have time to build legislation through the traditional democratic processes.
Republicans know that Trump’s presidency will soon end as a result of the Russian investigation. What happens when Trump leaves office I cannot say. Constitutionally Pence would succeed him, but the country has never experienced a Constitutional crisis quite like this one either. But it is evident that the GOP’s desperate race to pass a bill so obviously full of bile that they were scribbling “fixes” into the margins hours before the vote. It’s no surprise that Republicans produced something bad, but in the past they’ve at least been able to build something coherently bad.
But no longer. Today’s Republicans are so intellectually inept that even with full control of government they can’t pass their own bills. This was apparent during the healthcare debacle; Republicans spent years demeaning Obama’s effort to reform healthcare, but produced no ideas of their own. Forced to actually think about the issue, the found themselves incapable of imagining solutions to the nation’s problems. Thankfully, their efforts collapsed, and America was spared the disaster of Trumpcare.
This time we won’t be so lucky, and Trump is the reason why. His impending demise rattled the ideological rigidity of Republican Senators just enough to secure votes on a bill hastily cobbled together from a variety of bad ideas. Few senators, if any, know what they just voted for, they simply know that they are running out of chances to undo the progress of the Obama presidency. The Trump tax bill is their pandora’s box for America, a grab-bag of backwardness designed to subvert the normal democratic processes and deliver Republicans what is likely to be their only “victory” of the Trump presidency. The silver lining of this illogical and destabilizing legislation is the underlying admission that the days of Trump will soon be done. Perhaps then we can start to correct the flaws in this bill that America’s illegitimate president will soon sign into law.
