Will we?
People think that Donald Trump is responsible for blowing up the democratic system of checks and balances but he was actually a late comer to that game. It was former senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also known as the “gravedigger of democracy” who can take credit for that. From the moment he became leader in 2007, he set out the roadmap for the modern GOP to achieve its goals by throwing bipartisanship on the trash heap and setting it on fire. When he was in the position as minority leader he believed in one thing: obstruction. In the majority, he pushed the Republican agenda through by any means necessary, norms, rules, even laws be damned.
McConnell ended up having his differences with Trump over the years but this past week, as the senate grappled with a bloated omnibus bill under Trump’s arbitrary July 4th deadline, McConnell shared a bit of tactical wisdom he’d obtained over years with his colleagues. When asked about the danger of massive cuts to vital government programs to their re-election prospects, McConnell reassured them by saying, “they’ll get over it.”
In the long run they probably will. Americans have a short attention span. But to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes’ famous quip, in the long run Mitch McConnell will be dead. There is no reason to believe that he is right about it this time any more than he was when he vowed to make Obama a one termer. Nonetheless, with the exception of two (one of whom, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, was compelled to retire because of it) all the senate Republicans agreed to hold hands and take the plunge together.
Just as they did in 2001, 2003 and 2017, they immediately betrayed their allegedly most cherished value, fiscal responsibility, in order to achieve their most priceless goal: tax cuts for the wealthy. And throwing caution to the wind, high on Trump’s supply, this time they’ve checked off as much of their long standing wish list as they could cram into a thousand pages. Their cuts to the safety net, health care in particular, don’t even come close to closing the deficits they are causing with their tax cuts and swollen Defense and Homeland Security budgets, but they don’t care. They figure “they’ll get over it” apparently meaning the people who will die as a result of their handiwork.
This isn’t a Trump thing. It’s a standard issue conservative movement thing. These ideas have been articles of faith for so long now that I don’t think the modern Republicans even know why they believe it.
It started out as an anti-communist, free market ideology but that’s obviously no longer operative on the American right. Today it’s pretty clear, as Atlantic writer Adam Serwer memorably wrote, “the cruelty is the point.” Whether they think that will build our character or simply make us bow to their will, they do it because it hurts. But we’ll get over it…
The person who can take the deepest bow today as we watch the Republicans cut taxes for the richest Americans while decimating huge portions of the safety and exploding the deficit is anti-tax activist Grover Norquist whose most infamous quote is, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
In a profile for 60 Minutes back in 2007, journalist Steve Kroft said, “Norquist has been responsible, more than anyone else, for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party” and the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that’s working its way through the congress right now shows that for all of the talk of MAGA populism, that dogma is still driving the Republican Party.
Trump is not a doctrinaire Republican in this way. Yes, he loves the ideas in his big bill like those killing all the climate change and green energy initiatives because he has a weird personal antipathy for the way they look. But it’s not about saving money or shrinking government. For instance, he’s happy to spend more money subsidizing coal:
Perhaps he’s just feeling nostalgic for his youth growing up in New York when the air was so polluted your eyes and lungs burned.
Sure he’s adopted the trite “waste, fraud and abuse” rhetoric that has become the mantra among Republicans trying to weasel out of responsibility for harming their own voters, but he knows that these cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are a problem. On Fox news on Sunday he lied saying the bill cut the deficit by 1.7 trillion but then said this:
But we can grow our country so much more than that and we’re not gonna have to do… and you also have to get elected. When you do cutting, you have to be a little bit careful, because people don’t like necessarily cutting if they get used to something. And what I wanna do is do it through growth.
This was his line throughout the campaign. Yes, he said they’d cut the waste but he didn’t dwell on that. It was always that tariffs and “growth” were going to fuel the new gilded age and everybody could have everything.
In his TIME 100 day interview he even came out for raising taxes for the wealthy:
I certainly don’t mind having a tax increase, and the only reason I wouldn’t support it is because I saw Bush where they said, where he said “Read my lips” and he lost an election… I would be honored to pay more, but I don’t want to be in a position where we lose an election because I was generous, but me, as a rich person, would not mind paying and you know, we’re talking about very little. We’re talking about one point. It doesn’t make that much difference, and yet, I could just see somebody trying to bring that up as a subject, and, you know, say, “Oh, he raised taxes.” Well, I wouldn’t be, really, you know, in the true sense, I wouldn’t. I’d be raising them
He repeated that later, suggesting that his rich pals would be happy to kick in more as well, if only the Democrats wouldn’t hold it against them. It’s fatuous nonsense, of course, but it does show that Trump understands that tax cuts for the wealthy are not popular.
He loves his Big Beautiful Bill because he’s shown that he can rule the GOP with an iron fist to pass a massive piece of legislation on his orders within a short amount of time. He has some hobby horses in it that he loves but for the most part this isn’t really his bill at all. It’s a Republican fantasy bill of everything they ever dreamed of short of eliminating Social Security and medicare which they will just let go shrivel and die on their own once the government goes down the drain. But if Mitch McConnell is wrong and people don’t “get over it” this is his legacy as much as it is the Republican Party’s and on some level he knows it.
Salon