The GOP's Real Agenda
Since last fall, Republicans have pretended to be more moderate but their politics are harsher and more destructive than ever. The Republican Party is like a wounded beast rarely has it been more dangerous.
After watching voters punish the GOP in the 2012 elections, Republican elites have been talking a brave game about reforms that would make the party less repulsive to Latinos, women and gay-friendly millennials.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the GOP's hip-hop-quoting young standard-bearer, is pressing conservatives to back an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Dozens of party stalwarts, headlined by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, renounced their opposition to gay marriage in a Supreme Court brief. GOP bigwigs have even launched New Republican a group modeled after Bill Clinton's centrist Democratic Leadership Council which seeks to rebrand the party as "colorblind," "not anti-government" and dedicated to "ending corporate welfare."
Don't be fooled. On the ground, a very different reality is unfolding: In the Republican-led Congress, GOP-dominated statehouses and even before the nation's highest court, the reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda – which seeks to impose job-killing austerity, to roll back voting and reproductive rights, to deprive the working poor of health care, and to destroy agencies that protect the environment from industry and consumers from predatory banks – is moving forward under full steam.
As a result of the GOP's refusal to negotiate in good faith, America is now being subjected to austerity-by-a-thousand-cuts. Budgetary sadists like Paul Ryan will delight in the sequester's blows to vital anti-poverty programs: $285 million a year from heating assistance to keep the poor from freezing to death in their own homes. Another $543 million will be cut from nutrition assistance throwing as many as 750,000 at-risk kids and moms out of the WIC program. California and Texas alone likely will be forced to lay off more than 2,000 teachers leaving some 350,000 students in the lurch. Tens of thousands of preschoolers will be kicked out of Head Start.
A budget bill passed in December by the House would have protected defense contractors by restoring all Pentagon spending and delivered the $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction on the broken backs and empty stomachs of low-income Americans – hollowing out social programs, decimating food-stamp benefits, even abolishing Meals on Wheels for hundreds of thousands of hungry seniors. Speaker Boehner praised his caucus for endorsing these "common-sense cuts.
But for anti-government Republicans, simple belt -tightening isn't enough. Since 2009, the party has fetishized the kind of draconian cuts to social services that have been practiced in Europe in recent years – and that have failed spectacularly to revive economies there. And today, with the imposition of the sequester $1.2 trillion in across-the-board budget cuts divided between domestic and military expenditures the Republicans have finally succeeded in bringing shock-and-awe austerity to America.
Paul Ryan's budget embodies a kind of savage violence that makes clear that those who occupy the bottom rungs of American society - whether they are low-income families, poor minorities of color and class or young failed consumers - are to be considered disposable, removed from ethical considerations and the grammar of human suffering.
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