In Defense of Human Scum

President Donald Trump thinks we’re “human scum” for making our principled Republican arguments against some of his policies and pronouncements, which hurts our feelings something awful, but on the other hand he also thinks he’s building a border wall in Colorado, which makes us feel slightly better about not having to defend everything the man does and says.

There’s a lot to defend these days, and a lot of it requires a strenuous effort. Few Republican politicians dare to criticize the president, except on his most obviously egregious foreign policy mistakes, but fewer and fewer of them seem willing to defend him against the charges that seem hurling at an increasingly rapid rate toward his impeachment. The allegation that Trump withheld congressionally appropriated aid from Ukraine until he won help in his election campaign has been corroborated by the White House’s own rough transcript of a telephone call, the chief of staff’s bold assertion that “we do it all the time” and anyone bothered by it should just “get over it,” and testimony by the ambassador to the Ukraine appointed by the guy Trump appointed as Secretary of State, and so far “get over it” seems the president’s best defense.

Two dozen of Trump’s most loyal followers in the House of Representatives are arguing “shut up,” and attempted to force the Democrats to do just that when they walked uninvited to a House oversight committee’s questioning of another civil servant with first-hand knowledge of America’s dealings with Ukraine. They held up the proceedings for about five hours, during which they had a pizza party and a grand old time, but eventually the impeachment inquiry continued toward its inevitable conclusion. The Republicans were insisting that their party’s members be allowed to question witnesses, which they already were, and that all the testimony be made public, which it eventually will be to the Republicans’ ultimate chagrin.

Trump has famously boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters, and his lawyer was arguing with a lawyerly straight face in federal  court on Wednesday that even if he did he couldn’t even be investigated by any authorities, and we’re eager to hear what the loyalists say when Trump eventually gets around to doing that. Probably something along the lines of “get over it,” “shut up,” and “what about Hillary’s e-mails?”

This will give the talk radio talkers something to work with and suffice to rally much of the faithful, but all the polls indicate that it’s not winning any new converts to the faith, and each day slightly fewer Republican politicians and pundits are rushing to the president’s defense on each and every policy and pronouncement. Each day slightly more Republicans even sign up with we “human scum” who dare to voice any disagreement, and are less intimidated by Trump’s “tweets” and presidential rhetoric.

Two-thirds of the House Republicans voted to rebuke Trump’s retreat from Syria and abandonment of our Kurdish allies, and the usually loyal Senate Majority leader wrote a critical op-ed in the hated Washington Post, and even such an obsequious Republican as South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham has said he might support Trump’s impeachment and removal if confronted with indisputable proof of a quid pro quo with Ukraine, which is a perfectly reasonable position we expect he will have trouble wriggling his way out of when it comes to down to his impeachment trail vote.

When Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called Trump’s supporters “deplorables” they gladly embraced the slur and started wearing it on their t-shirts, and lately they’ve been buying t-shirts emblazoned with “Get over it.” So far we haven’t seen any “human scum” t-shirts, but if we could only play three chords on an electric guitar we’d start up a punk rock band by that name and screech NeverTrump Republican protest songs all night at Kirby’s Beer Store.

This all comes at a time when polling by Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service shows that 67 percent of Americans fear the nation is heading to another civil war, which does not surprise us. Trump and his followers are clearly ready to rumble, and so are a lot of those damned Democrats. We’d like to think there are still enough of us “human scum” Republicans and those corporate sell-out centrist sorts Democrats to work things out according to facts of the matter of the Constitution and its divisive impeachment clauses, but if it comes to worst we’ll try to stay out of it and help rebuild in the aftermath.

— Bud Norman

In Praise of America’s Least-Popular Man

The news has slowed down in the frigid holiday air, as it always does and always should, so we’ll seize the opportunity to say a few kind words about Kentucky’s Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. He’s probably the most hated politician in America, which makes our contrarian selves all the more warm to him, and we’re sure he could use some holiday cheer.

All the Democrats hate him, of course, because he’s not only a Republican but also the party’s Senate majority leader and thus bears the most blame for everything the Republicans did to thwart President Barack Obama during the eight years he was in office. Most Republicans also hate him, though, because all the talk radio hosts and the opinion journalists on Fox News have convinced them that McConnell and the rest of the dat-gummed Republican establishment didn’t do nearly enough thwarting. All the independents have a healthy suspicion of anyone from either party, so they also don’t bolster his horrid poll numbers.

We take a more pragmatic measure of man’s public service, on the other hand, and by our accounting McConnell’s done about as well as can be expected.

All those Democrats should be grateful for McConnell’s restraints on the Obama administration. For the first two Obama years there were big Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and there wasn’t much McConnell could do about it when they went for such big moves as Obamacare and that trillion-dollar “stimulus package” and various other budget-buusting do-goodery, which of course led to the not only a Republican majority in the House but a “tea party” majority at that. With the Democrats’ whittled-down Senate majority vulnerable to shrewd filibustering that soon led to half-trillion budget deficits of the George W. Bush administration, and although the Democrats lost the Senate and a lot of governorships and statehouse and county commission seats we suspect it would have been worst if the Democrats had been able to finish their to-do list.

All those Republicans, especially the Trump-loving ones who get their news exclusively from Fox and talk radio, should also give McConnell his due. There wasn’t much McConnell could do to stave off Obamacare and the “stimulus package” in those darks days of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi regime, but he somehow managed to convince the notoriously individualistic Republicans to stand together to deny those abominations a single Senate vote of bipartisan support. Even when the Republicans won a Senate majority to go along with a House majority there wasn’t much McConnell could do about Obama signing executive orders, but McConnell did play a key role in preventing hard-to-undo legislation and forcing Obama to sign executive orders that could just as easily be undone by any old future Republican president, and he did take a lot of heat for cooling a seat on the Supreme Court until any old future Republican president could make the appointment.

Those Trump-loving sorts of Republicans like to boast about all the Obama-era executive orders Trump has undone and that great Supreme Court pick he made, but they’re also the first to spit and cuss at the mention of McConnell’s name. They seem convinced that only Trump would have done what any old Republican president would have done, and that up until Trump the Grand Old Party was q quisling.

All those independents with their healthy of suspicion of anyone from either party should also acknowledge some gratitude to McConnell. He was a restraint on the excesses of the Democratic party during the Obama years, and in subtle but significant ways he’s also been a restraint on the worst excesses of the Trump years. He somehow managed to to herd all the Republican cats in the Senate to get on the big tax cut bill Trump wanted, which is probably going to bust the budget but maybe not to Obama-Reid-Pelosi levels, and he’s put all but Trump’s most egregious judicial nominees on a quick approval process, but he’s also had a more centrist influence. So far the Senate hasn’t authorized anything more than symbolic sums for Trump’s fantasy of a great translucent wall across the the Mexican border, the body remains committed to finding the truth about the “Russia thing,” and whatever quibbles you might have about his policies McConnell you will have to admit McConnell has carried them out in a quite gentlemanly way without any unnecessarily insulting “tweets.”

These days our healthy suspicion of anyone from either party is such that we find ourselves rooting for the effete establishments of both. We’re rooting for those Democrats who won’t go whole hog for Bernie Sanders-style socialism, rooting against the Trumpist Republicans, and hoping that the likes of Mitch McConnell and the rest of the gat-dummed establishment will stick around a while.

— Bud Norman

Health Care and the Waiting Room

Republicans have been waiting for seven years to repeal and replace the hated Obamacare law, and it looks as if they’ll have to wait a while longer. The Senate’s majority leader has postponed a vote on a Republican alternative until after the summer recess, which will likely include some encounters with constituents that won’t make them any more eager to take up the matter when they return.

The Republicans have a president in the White House and a large majority in the House of Representatives and a slight majority in the Senate, the same advantage the Democrats held back when they rammed Obamacare through without a single Republican vote, but their revenge was never going to come easy. That Republican president ran on promises of no cuts to Medicaid and coverage for everybody, that House majority is largely comprised of more doctrinaire conservatives, and slim Senate margin includes both doctrinaire conservatives and more pragmatic sorts of Republicans from purplish states. Although they all ran on promises of repeal and replacement, the Republicans never did agree on what that should look like.

Back when the Democrats had the House and Senate and the White House they were all in general agreement on the basic principles that the government should be interfering more thoroughly in the health insurance market, consumer choices should be restricted, and more government spending should be allotted, so they had an easier time getting their bill passed. Even with a president boasting approval ratings in the 60s and plenty of support from support from the establishment media, however, the Democrats took until just before Christmas and had to resort to some bare-knuckle politics to ram through what was already an unpopular law.

Although the eponymous President Barack Obama won re-election three years later, the Obamacare law was unpopular enough that it was largely responsible for a Republican president and Republican majorities eight years after his supposedly transformative election. Such are the consequences of ramming unpopular legislation down the public’s throat on a strictly partisan vote, along with all the skyrocketing premiums and punitive mandates and other pains that have been inflicted on so many Americans, so the Republicans should count themselves luck for the delay.

Obamacare remains unpopular yet, and even its more honest defenders are admitting that some serious tweaking is required, both the House bill that was passed after an embarrassing delay and the Senate bill that’s currently delayed are polling far worse. Both cut back on planned increases in Medicaid, and they not only don’t cover everyone but leave an estimated 22 million looking for other options in coming years, and there’s no getting around that the tax implications tend to favor the wealthier taxpayers, so the politics is at least as tricky as the policy.

To our old-fashioned Republican way of thinking both the House and Senate bills represent a slight improvement on Obamacare, but come nowhere near the long-promised full repeal and replacement, we expect that whatever compromise version they might reach and pass on a partisan vote will prove unpopular enough to arrive at a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in at least one house in just three years or so. There’s a conservative case to be made for the the Republican bills, and a conservative case to be made against them, but the Republican president who promised no cuts to Medicaid and coverage for everyone and the free-market ideologues and the more pragmatic sorts of Republicans seem likely to persuade the public.

All of them promised their voters something like a repeal and replacement of Obamacare, though, and all of them are itching for something they can call a legislative win. We hope they get it, but we hope they take their time about it, and come to some agreement on the true principles that underlie a free and efficient health care system, and make that hard-to-explain case to the American people, and use the impending implosion of Obamacare to get recruit a couple of symbolic Democratic votes. They’ll probably take some short-term hits for that, but it’s the best plan for the long run, which will take a lot of time.

— Bud Norman