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Dear Group, There is something happening among folks who call themselves Republicans in Spokane County. A friend is on the emailing list for “Republicans of Spokane County.” They have a short endorsement list I’ve reproduced below from their recent email. (Their website isn’t quite so up-to-date.) In the email they wrote: “There are many other Republican candidates on the ballot. However, the above are the ones who asked and are endorsed by the Republicans of Spokane County Body.” Susan Hutchinson for U.S. Senate Cathy McMorris Rodgers for Congress Dave Lucas for 3rd District State Representative Jenny Graham for 6th District State Representative Ozzie Knezovich for Spokane County Sheriff Larry Haskell for Spokane County Prosecutor Al French for Spokane County Commissioner Mary Kuney for Spokane County Commissioner Tim Fitzgerald for Spokane County Clerk Leonard Christian for Spokane County Assessor Richard Leland for Judge Jennifer Fassbender for Judge Patrick Johnson for Judge Shelley Szambelan for Judge The thing I find notable is not whom they endorsed, but whom they did NOT endorse. I have a theory, a suspicion. I don’t see any of the Republican candidates I identify as the belligerent flapping far right fringe of the Party. Those folks include Matt “The Red Pill-State of Liberty” Shea and McCaslin Junior of District 4 (Spokane Valley plus), Jeff Holy, Mike Volz (of District 6), Rob Chase, Michael “the general election is going to be a door-to-door knife fight” Baumgartner, or any of the State District 7 incumbent reactionaries, Kretz, Short, or Maycumber. Even Ozzie Knezovich, hardly a progressive, is on record worrying about the direction of the local Republican Party influenced by white supremacists and conspiracy theorists. He has a running feud with Matt Shea. Is this a developing rift? Did the fringe not ask for endorsement from the Republicans of Spokane County out of disinterest or because they sensed they were unwelcome? What’s going on? Are the confusingly named Republicans of Spokane County longing for the day when the Republican Party actually stood for at least a few principles worth admiring? Contrast the Republicans of Spokane County with the “Spokane County Republican Party.” The latter note on their webpage they are the “Official Spokane County Republican Party.” They’ve made some pretty unflattering news. First they said they wouldn’t…and then they auctioned off an assault rifle at their Lincoln Day dinner fundraiser at which McMorris Rodgers spoke in June. You can read about that here. They invited that paragon of empathy, former Congressman and current FOX commentator, Jason “if-they-just-didn’t-have-to-have-that-new-iPhone-they-could-afford-healthcare” Chaffetz to speak at the same gathering. (Read here.) Then Cecily Wright, their new chairwoman and purveyor of conspiracy theories with NW Grassroots, resigned over her laudatory hosting of the white supremacist, James Allsup. (Read here and here and here.) As for endorsements, the Spokane County Republican Party endorses every Republican candidate running for an office in any district that touches on Spokane County, no matter how far off on the flapping fringe. (Read Matt Shea and the Red Pill) (For some unknown reason they don’t endorse candidates for judgeships. Certainly after Kavanaugh it is pointless for them to pretend they don’t consider electing judges a partisan act.) McMorris Rodgers tries to keep a foot in both Republican camps. A product of the fringy Stevens County Republicans of which her father was once the chairman, she tries to clothe herself in the garb of a moderate Republican mom. Surely she would not want you to catch her giving an excited interview to a Breitbart reporter or attending a Republican event where an assault rifle is auctioned off to the faithful. McMorris Rodgers and many other Republicans this election season are desperately trying to survive, hoping to remain attractive to…and energize…the conspiracy theorists, the State of Liberty devotees, and their white supremacist base to vote for them while they pretend to adhere to the principles of a Republican Party that no longer exists. The GOP has become a dangerous cult of personality. From Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, October 7, “Why I’m Leaving the Republican Party:” Politics is about the exercise of power. But the new Trumpist GOP is not exercising power in the pursuit of anything resembling principles, and certainly not for conservative or Republican principles. Free trade? Republicans are suddenly in love with tariffs, and now sound like bad imitations of early-1980s protectionist Democrats. A robust foreign policy? Not only have Republicans abandoned their claim to being the national-security party, they have managed to convince the party faithful that Russia—an avowed enemy that directly attacked our political institutions—is less of a threat than their neighbors who might be voting for Democrats. Respect for law enforcement? The GOP is backing Trump in attacks on the FBI and the entire intelligence community as Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in on the web of lies, financial arrangements, and Russian entanglements known collectively as the Trump campaign… The Republican Party, which controls all three branches of government and yet is addicted to whining about its own victimhood, is now the party of situational ethics and moral relativism in the name of winning at all costs. It is time to clean house of all of them. It is time to send a loud message to the demagogue-in-chief and his sycophants. I have some sympathy for Republicans edging away from the fringe of their Party, but they need a trouncing this November. Our nation depends on it. Keep to the high ground, Jerry |
A Tale of a Drug and What it Means
Dear Group,
The chemical 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) was patented originally in 1956. It came into medical use only six years later in 1962. As a drug It interferes with DNA production, fouling up the machinery necessary for rapidly growing cells to divide and multiply. 5-FU is used in the treatment of systemic cancers, including cancer of the breast, ovary, and colon. It is NOT a fancy new drug requiring expensive research and development.
Some of my readers may have used this drug as a topical treatment for the precursors of skin cancer. As a topical 5% cream 5-FU is remarkably safe and effective, and, until recently, was quite inexpensive. Never heard of 5-FU, you say? How about the trade names Efudex, Carac, or Fluoroplex?
I visited my dermatologist recently and received a prescription for Efudex Cream 5% to “Apply to Scalp BID [twice a day] until red, raw, irritated.” Along with the prescription came some non-medical advice. “Your price point is around fifty dollars,” she said.
“Fifty dollars!” I exclaimed.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “A while ago patients started calling me back to say they couldn’t afford the Efudex I’d prescribed. Some of them told me of charges up to $300 for a 40 gram tube. Now I spend a portion of every day explaining how to avoid paying ridiculous prices for a drug that used to be cheap. If I don’t spend the time explaining, some of my patients will simply skip the treatment and show up later with invasive skin cancer requiring major surgery.”
I was stunned. This is a drug I heard about in medical school in the early 1980s. The last time I bought a 40 gram tube of Efudex (5-FU), maybe ten years ago, it was about twenty dollars.
Forewarned, I called my usual pharmacy to ask what it would cost me to fill the prescription.. “Your net cost after insurance will be $100,” I was told.
“After insurance?” I asked. “What would it cost me if I bought it outright?”
“Two hundred and eighty-four dollars.” she said. I wanted to scream…but it wasn’t her fault. She’s caught in the same un-free market that I am.
Let’s think about this a minute. I could hand over my credit card and accept the $100 cost. If I weren’t a physician myself and if my dermatologist hadn’t prepared me, I probably would have just grumbled and paid, just like a lot of busy people. But what are the consequences to the whole cost of medical care in an un-free market like ours?
I don’t know how much of the quoted $284 goes to the pharmacy, how much to the drug company and how much to the stockholders, but I can guarantee we feel the economic effect in our health insurance bills. Consider: as this scenario is repeated across all the subscribers to my health insurance, the insurance company has to ramp up the premium by some amount to cover the payment to the pharmacy. Insurance, you recall, serves to smooth out unexpected cost over all the subscribers. As long as their money-making business model is not threatened, insurance executives have little reason to try to micromanage ridiculously inflationary drug costs. Why should they bother? Just pass through the average extra cost to the whole pool of subscribers. The drug company and the insurance company both make a profit and the subscriber is none the wiser.
While the patient/consumer understandably complains about the ever rising cost of insurance, McMorris Rodgers and her Republican/Libertarian colleagues blame the Democrats and the Affordable Care Act, intoning “free market,” “personal choice,” and the evils of “government intrusion” into our personal lives.
A free market requires symmetry of information for supply and demand to establish the proper price for an item, but in the drug and insurance world the corporations have a massive advantages they wield in their pursuit of profit. First, the patient/consumer often feels as though there is no choice about whether or not to buy the drug. To add to the asymmetry, pharmaceuticals are marketed under multiple brand names, a generic name, and multiple sizes and formulations. Sorting out the history, side-effects and efficacy of any given drug can be a time-consuming task. The doctor prescribing the drug and the pharmacist filing the prescription have dozens of other things they should be spending their time on besides trying to make the patient/consumer aware of the price structure for every medicine.
How much time is there in a life for every patient/consumer to dig around the way I did with 5-FU to figure out the least expensive method of obtaining a drug? “It’s my health! The doctor prescribed it. I must buy it, if I can’t come up with that kind of money, well, I’ll just have to make do without it.” Life goes on…until a vastly more expensive and dangerous surgical procedure might be required to treat the disease easily dealt with by the original prescription.
The ridiculously inflated price of 5-FU has another unintended effect: For a caring doctor trying to provide treatment for pre-cancer that a patient can afford there is another option, an in office light treatment that is often fully covered by health insurance. Never mind it is not quite as effective and never mind it requires repetitive monthly $200 visits. But, voila! the patient/consumers out of pocket cost (the $100 I was quoted for a tube of Efudex) might be less or nothing. Never mind the overall accumulated cost to the health care system is more…
Run this economic scenario through your head again and again with different drugs and different patients and you will have a hint of how broken our system is, why it is so ridiculously expensive, and why we, as a country, have worse health outcomes and pay more for health care than much of the developed world.
Meanwhile, McMorris Rodgers’ solution to the problem? Here’s her full statement from her essay published September 30 in the Spokesman:
I also believe we need to address skyrocketing prescription drug prices. I’ve led on legislation to bring transparency to Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) who are the middlemen between drug companies and local pharmacists and are often the source of pricing increases. Just this week, I supported legislation to ban gag clauses – contractual provisions that bar pharmacists from informing patients when it’s cheaper for them to pay out-of-pocket for their prescriptions than go through their insurance. If our pharmacists, health insurers and PBMs can know the real cost of prescriptions, so should our patients.
What?? We’re going to control drug prices in a hopelessly rigged and complex market by empowering (not mandating) middlemen to tell patients about drug prices? This is going to result in cost reduction? Even if she grasps some part of the problem of the lop-sided un-free market, this is barely the beginning of a solution.
In contrast, Lisa Brown wrote in her essay of the same day:
I will work to lower the cost of prescription drugs – the federal government can and should use its buying power to negotiate lower costs.
That comment suggesting government intervention is unthinkable to a doctrinaire “free” market Republican/Libertarian like our incumbent. McMorris Rodgers offers to tinker with an un-free market problem that is beyond tinkering. Have her pharmaceutical sponsors convinced her that to have huge government volume buyers like Medicare use their bargaining power in the marketplace would be unfair to them and their stockholders?
By the way, that $284 tube of 40 grams of 5% Efudex for my scalp? I’m getting it through a Canadian pharmacy for $51.58 USD. I took time out of my life and I had the resources to play the game. Not everyone has that time and resources–nor should they be expected to. It should be a function of government to guard our health care system from profit driven predation in an un-free market.
Read Lisa Brown’s whole essay here. It is a breath of fresh air and comprehension. Lisa gets it.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Is the Electoral College Sacred?
Dear Group,
I borrow from a New York Times opinion piece from Friday, October 5, “The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Crisis” by Michael Tomasky:
In the entire history of the court, exactly one justice has been
a) nominated by a president who didn’t win the popular vote and
b) confirmed by a majority of senators who collectively won fewer votes in their last election than did the senators who voted against that justice’s confirmation.
Who was it?
Tomansky goes on:
…it turns out you don’t have to go back very far at all. The answer is Neil Gorsuch.
Donald Trump won just under 46 percent of the popular vote and 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. And Judge Gorsuch was confirmed by a vote of 54-45. According to Kevin McMahon of Trinity College, who wrote all this up this year in his paper “Will the Supreme Court Still ‘Seldom Stray Very Far’?: Regime Politics in a Polarized America,” the 54 senators who voted to elevate Judge Gorsuch had received around 54 million votes, and the 45 senators who opposed him got more than 73 million. That’s 58 percent to 42 percent.
Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed the next day, October 6, by a vote of 50 to 48, surely making Kavanaugh even more of a minority justice than Gorsuch.
With this Republican/Libertarian minority takeover of the judicial branch of government we should not be surprised to find the Electoral College has become an article of faith for the Republican Party, even an article of religious faith among a extreme segment of “evangelical” Christianity. It should also come as no surprise this same segment wants to present itself as representative of all Christians.
WeBeleiveWeVote.com is the glaring, Stevens/Spokane County local example. Their voter guide advertisement appeared this year on yard signs at homes and churches, complete with their cross and flag logo. Any hurried Christian who feels a lack of time to research actual candidates is invited to vote the WeBelieveWeVote slate of candidates as exclusively representative of Christian values. From their website: “The vision of We Believe We Vote is to see our Cities, States and Nation receive more of God’s blessing because we are honoring His laws and Biblical principles in government.” [For more background and funding information for WeBelieveWeVote, click here.]
Ah, so easy! If you consider yourself Christian…vote with us! Only the curious and the diligent will dig deeper on the website to find the Evaluation Criteria under the menu item “About Us,” the last option in the menu bar. I invite you to visit the Criteria to see if they represent your Christian values.
You will look in vain for the Christian values with which I grew up in the United Methodist Church. There is no mention of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” no empathy, no mention of rich men and needles’ eyes, only pronouncements concerning the regulation of other people’s lives according to a particular literal interpretation of the Bible.
Way down the page of “Evaluation Criteria” as the eleventh point of evaluation we find: “Our Position: The Electoral College System was written into the US Constitution to assure proportionate representation for rural citizens and smaller states. We agree in [sic] the Electoral College system.”
Since when is the Electoral College System considered a tenet of Christian faith? Check out the complete list of “values” on the Evaluation Criteria webpage of WeBelieveWeVote. As a Christian or as one brought up as a Christian, do you recognize any of the evaluation criteria as your Christian values? At the top of the page they leave no doubt: “Below are the issues and position statements used to determine candidate alignment with We Believe We Vote values.”
The We Believe We Vote criteria are about political power, not Christian values. Fealty to the Electoral College System is simply code for the maintenance of minority-control government, the minority government that just stole two Supreme Court seats from the majority of voters.
It is no coincidence McMorris Rodgers hails from Stevens County, the likely origin of We Believe We Vote, a place where auctioning off an AR-15 at a Republican fundraiser seems completely natural, a place where far right fundamentalist Christianity and Republican/Libertarian politics have melded into a seamless whole. WeBelieveWeVote rates McMorris Rodgers as “Highly aligned with WBWV.”
Both McMorris Rodgers and the folks behind We Believe We Vote would like you to believe your Christian values and theirs are the same, avoiding any need to consider what their values really are. Encourage your friends to take a closer look. These “values” are not my parent’s, my grandparent’s, or my Christian values.
The Electoral College System is not neither a Christian value nor is it sacred.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. As a friend observed, a visit to WeBelieveWeVote.com can serve a useful purpose: clearly identifying those for whom NOT to vote, once you understand the criteria.
P.P.S. On the positive side of the equation check out the ProgressiveVotersGuide.com.
Guide to the Archive
Dear Group,
These 5AM Monday through Friday emails are also archived on the web, a feature of which many of my readers may be unaware.
Please visit at jxindivisible.org. Perhaps the most useful feature is the SEARCH function in the upper righthand corner. Sliding down on the righthand column you find CATEGORIES near the end of the column. CATEGORIES is less useful than SEARCH, but if you’re trying to find an article you remember it might help.
Visitors may also SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY EMAIL by entering their email and first and last names in the appropriate boxes in the righthand column. It is a two step process, though. The program sends a confirmation email to the address provided. The person signing up must find the email (which sometimes goes to Junk or Promo) and acknowledge it to complete the signup process.
I am not writing today. I urge you to visit the archives at jxindivisible.org and see what’s there. In the daily emails I sometimes use links to prior individual writings contained in the archives. Some of my favorites are:
Who is She Really? Factual background on McMorris Rodgers
Matt Shea and the Red Pill Background on this flapping fringe Republican legislator up for re-election in Spokane Valley (State Legislative District 4). Vote for Ted Cummings, the reality based Democratic challenger. If the incumbent remains in office after November I’m convinced it is because District 4 voters haven’t done their homework.
In Her Own Words explores McMorris Rodgers’ excitement and endorsement of the Republican one-party steamroller as expressed to a Breitbart reporter. [Breitbart was Steve Bannon’s mouthpiece after Breitbart died.] Listen to McMorris Rodgers’ slightly breathless unguarded words spoken to what she believes is a receptive audience.
Devin Nunes in Spokane/What He Said relieves any doubt as to the length to which McMorris Rodgers and her Republican/Libertarian hoard will go to maintain their grip on power.
And many more.
Back tomorrow.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
The Tribalism of the Kavanaugh Nomination
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Dear Group, Below is an excerpt from a New York Times opinion piece by Tom Friedman entitled “The American Civil War, Part II” It is well worth reading the whole thing, but, if you hit a paywall, here is the part that captures my growing desperation. Friedman’s words are particularly pertinent in light of the imminent elevation of a blatant partisan to the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell, as I’ve said before, deserves a special place in hell. Tom Friedman [the bolding is mine]: In essence, we’ve moved from “partisanship,” which still allowed for political compromises in the end, “to tribalism,” which does not, explained political scientist Norman Ornstein, co-author, with Thomas Mann, of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.” In a tribal world it’s rule or die, compromise is a sin, enemies must be crushed and power must be held at all costs. It would be easy to blame both sides equally for this shift, noted Ornstein, but it is just not true. After the end of the Cold War, he said, “tribal politics were introduced by Newt Gingrich when he came to Congress 40 years ago,” and then perfected by Mitch McConnell during the Barack Obama presidency, when McConnell declared his intention to use his G.O.P. Senate caucus to make Obama fail as a strategy for getting Republicans back in power. They did this even though that meant scuttling Obama’s health care plan, which was based on Republican ideas, and even though that meant scuttling long-held G.O.P. principles — like fiscal discipline, a strong Atlantic alliance, distrust of Russian intentions and a balanced approach to immigration — to attract Trump’s base. Flake, the departing Arizona Republican, called this out this week: “We Republicans have given in to the terrible tribal impulse that first mistakes our opponents for our enemies. And then we become seized with the conviction that we must destroy that enemy.” The shift in the G.O.P. to tribalism culminated with McConnell denying Obama his constitutional right to appoint a Supreme Court justice with almost a year left in Obama’s term. As NPR reported: “Supreme Court picks have often been controversial. There have been contentious hearings and floor debates and contested votes. But to ignore the nominee entirely, as if no vacancy existed? There was no precedent for such an action since the period around the Civil War.” In a speech in August 2016, McConnell boasted: “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’” That was a turning point. That was cheating. What McConnell did broke something very big. Now Democrats will surely be tempted to do the same when they get the power to do so, and that is how a great system of government, built on constitutional checks and balances, strong institutions and basic norms of decency, unravels. My friend retired Marine Col. Mark Mykleby stopped by for a chat after the Kavanaugh hearing last week, and as we bemoaned this moment, he remarked: “When I walked out of the Pentagon after 28 years in uniform, I never thought I’d say this, but what is going on politically in America today is a far graver threat than any our nation faced during my career, including the Soviet Union. And it’s because this threat is here and now, right at home, and it’s coming from within us. I guess the irony of being a great nation is the only power who can bring you down is yourself.” Every vote will matter in the election just a month from now. If Kavanaugh, the nakedly raw partisan, gets a seat on the Supreme Court the only protection the America I thought I lived in has against the depredations of the Republican Party for the next two years is the Congress. On Wednesday in Spokane Pence said, “Retaining Republican majorities in the House and Senate would enable the White House to continue pushing for conservative judges like embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.” For exactly that reason we need to elect Lisa Brown to replace the Trump sycophant that Pence came to Spokane to support. Keep to the high ground, Jerry |
Lisa Brown’s Clarity v. CMR’s Fuzzy Thinking on Health Care
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Dear Group, On Sunday, September 30, the Spokesman Review ran a Round Table page in the Business Section entitled “Health care in America” presenting McMorris Rodgers’ “My Goal is Quality and Affordability” and Lisa Brown’s “We Need Solutions, Not Slogans.” Each is worth the time to read. (To do so either click on each individually or, if you have access to the online Spokesman, read here with both on the same page as presented in the paper.) McMorris Rodgers leads off by revving up her base. For them the ACA is “Obamacare,” the Republican word-meister’s way of deprecating the ACA by linking it to a man they’ve been primed to despise. She writes O….care “isn’t working.” No small wonder there. She and her party have fought hammer and tong legislatively, through the courts, and through right wing media to block every essential provision of the Affordable Care Act since its inception in 2009. One of her proudest achievements was the repeal of the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act (as part of the infamous Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of December 2017), a repeal that assures that health insurance premiums under the ACA will rise. Now she laments that it “…isn’t working?” Mission accomplished. You broke it, you own it. She goes on, “Right now we are continuing to see the cost of health care and insurance soar.” That is re-statement of problem. The next paragraph begins with, “…I’ve supported and will continue to advance real solutions.” I’m waiting…waiting…what are these solutions? She moves on to a series of “what I’m for” statements to fill out the paragraph…no solutions there. So what does McMorris Rodgers propose? Here’s the stripped out list of “solutions” from the rest of her essay: 1) By making Medicare and Medicaid pay a higher percentage of what rural hospitals bill she’ll fix the fiscal crisis in rural health care. Really? Read Mike Bell’s analysis (candidate in State Legislative District 7) and my puzzlement over McMorris Rodgers fuzzy economic thinking. 2) By blaming the “high population of Medicare and Medicaid patients” for whom rural hospitals struggle to provide care. Does she wish to limit reduce their numbers? The problem is not Medicare and Medicaid patients, it is the un-reimbursed cost of caring for patients forced to seek care in rural Emergency Rooms, people priced out medical insurance, a problem you, McMorris Rodgers, have helped make worse. 3) By “…leading in advancing solutions that make health care more affordable and accessible” as co-chair of the Rural Health Coalition. What solutions? That is yet another restatement of the problem, not a solution. 4) By extending the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) [but only after holding the renewal of the program hostage]. CHIP was established in 1993 in a strong bi-partisan effort. There are no Democrats who oppose it. Republicans act as though it were an act of sacrifice on their part to extend the program. 5) By supporting residency programs. [That is a nice, rare, bi-partisan effort. It does not address the cost of health care OR health care insurance.] and, finally, McMorris Rodgers proposes to bring down drug costs By 6) Leading on legislation to bring transparency to Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs). [leaving it to consumers to spend even more time researching the prices of each drug they’re prescribed in a rigged and hopelessly distorted market]. Oh, yes, and in the second to last paragraph McMorris Rodgers is going to foster innovation through the 21st Century Cures Act. 21st Century Cures’ main thrust is to strip away regulations around the testing and approval of drugs and medical devices. These regulations help ensure that drugs and medical devices are safe and effective before they get tested out on us, the “consumers.” She is promoting a Republican effort to make drug companies even more profitable and suggesting that will unleash “innovation.” These are NOT solutions. It does not require a Ph.D. in Economics to recognize McMorris Rodgers’ fuzzy thinking. There is nothing in her essay to suggest she even understands health care economics, much less that she can formulate a solution to a problem she has only made worse. Lisa Brown’s essay is a breath of fresh air. I encourage you to read it. I quote below just three examples her clear thinking: I will work to lower the cost of prescription drugs – the federal government can and should use its buying power to negotiate lower costs. We should not seek to lower prices by bringing more insurance companies into the market. Competition among private companies isn’t the answer – companies can change their coverage rules on a whim, resulting in more substandard insurance plans which don’t offer what families need for health care security. Additionally, I strongly support the principles of universal coverage and recognize there are a few different paths to getting there – something we should do. In fact, we already have costly universal coverage in this country: the emergency room. Hospitals can’t turn away people in need of care, and end up with overwhelming costs. There are more effective ways of treating more people, notably by expanding eligibility for Medicare, which is a universal system. In November let the voters of eastern Washington reject McMorris Rodgers’ mentally blinkered Republican thinking. Let us elect Lisa Brown, a leader with the mental bandwidth to both understand the problem and offer real solutions. Let each of us go forth, knock on doors, and proclaim the good news to dispirited, disengaged voters! Join in canvassing. Keep to the high ground, Jerry |
CMR’s Tax Backfill Attempt
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Dear Group, As we approach the midterm elections McMorris Rodgers (and the Republican/Libertarians in general) are firing up the machinery for some serious backfilling. On September 28, while the entire nation (and quite a lot of the rest of the world) was glued to the spectacle of the Kavanaugh hearings, McMorris Rodgers and her ilk in the House of Representatives quietly passed a bill, H.R. 6760: Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018. The Republican Policy Committee’s summary of the bill states: “H.R. 6760 would make permanent the tax provisions for individuals and pass-through entities in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that otherwise be [sic] sunset after 2025…” There is no mention this would add to the budget deficit and there is no discussion of an offset. (See the P.S. below.) With H.R. 6760 the Republicans are trying to establish plausible deniability for a grievous error of their own making with H.R. 1, the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” in December 2017. They are trying hard to backfill a hole they dug for themselves. Let me explain. McMorris Rodgers and her Republican colleagues were really excited over their partisan success in ramming the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” through the U.S. Senate. To do so they used a legislative loophole to avoid needing to compromise with Democrats. Trump was delighted to sign it. McMorris Rodgers immediately began talking up her accomplishment at every opportunity with the words, “Money in your pocket.” The trouble is, the money that was supposed to appear in “your” pocket was only about 20% of more than a trillion dollars the Act is expected to add to the federal deficit in the next ten years. The other 80% went to to corporations and the already wealthy. Worse, the Republicans started talking to their base about how the deficit (which they just exploded) was going to require them to “tackle entitlements,” i.e. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. This has not played well to a angry electorate—and it shouldn’t. There was another glaring flaw in the Act. Belatedly, the Republican leadership (including McMorris Rodgers) has realized their disingenuous “Money in your Pocket” sales job convinced almost no one outside their loyal base. Worse, they realized they were nakedly vulnerable on another point. In their haste to get the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed (while completely shutting out Democrats from the deliberations) they had to use the “budget reconciliation” loophole to avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Using budget reconciliation required they balance the numbers. They chose to do so by making the corporate tax cuts permanent while letting the individual “money in your pocket” provisions (for the common folk) expire in seven years. Their corporate donors wouldn’t stand for the “uncertainty” of having it the other way around. “Uncertainty,” after all, is bad for business… Here’s the twist: It turns out it’s pretty hard to convince Americans you’re being fair when you hand a huge permanent benefit to corporations and a temporary pittance to the common folk, the “money in your pocket” people. I recall Republican talk at the time suggesting this expiring benefit was really no problem, since they had backed Democrats into a corner where later they could be forced to vote to rescue the common folk before their meager tax benefit expired. That pissed me off at the time and still does. They were saying, “We’ve got the power. You have to dance to our tune. We don’t need to even consider your viewpoint as we blow up the deficit to pay off our donors. We can count on you weak, lily-livered Democrats to vote with us to save your vulnerable constituents from the law we crammed down your throats.” Now they are having second thoughts, so while we were all distracted by the Kavanaugh spectacle the House Republicans cynically passed H.R. 6760: Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018 on a party line vote (all WA Republican representatives voted for it, all Democrats against). In so doing the Republicans are counting on the ignorance and distraction of the electorate. The bill has zero chance of passing the Senate before the close of this “115th Congress” at year’s end. It is not a “budget reconciliation” bill, so it would require sixty votes to avoid a filibuster. On top of that, if made law, it would further explode the deficit. (Remember when the Republicans preached “fiscal responsibility”??) I guarantee McMorris Rodgers will be singing to her base about her vote on this bill. You can bet she will blame Democrats for not joining her in voting for a bogus solution to the problem of her own making. She will trot out this doomed bill as a debating point, “I voted to make the tax cuts permanent for the workers of eastern Washington.” I can hear it now. She’s counting on voters to forget it was she who made it a problem in the first place. Don’t let her get away with it. Keep to the high ground, Jerry P.S. The text of H.R. 6760 specifically states in its full text in Sec. 301 (the very last lines of the Bill) “The budgetary effects of this Act shall not be entered on either PAYGO scorecard.” I read that as legalese stating the Republicans want to make sure that no one takes notice of the fact by passing this measure they are further exploding the deficit. How cynical is that? P.P.S. I find it a bit odd to note that at govtrack.us one is presented with a two summaries of this H.R. 6760, one from the Republican Policy Committee and one from the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan division of the Library of Congress. Are the Republican/Libertarians so partisan they have to publish their own spin on this bill? Is the non-partisan CRS Summary somehow not good enough? |