Maybe House Republicans got tired of not finding a new Speaker. Maybe they felt humiliated by their inability to agree on a leader. Every one of them finally agreed to endorse one of the most radical extremists in the House as their party’s leader. You know already that Mike Johnson is hostile to abortion and to gay rights. You know that he was a prominent leader in the effort to overturn Trump’s loss in 2020.
What you probably do not know is that Johnson is an extremist on economic issues as well. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economics columnist for the New York Times, wants you to know that his views on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are also radical.
He writes:
There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.
In fact, Johnson is more extreme than most people, I think even political reporters, fully realize.
Much of the reporting on Johnson has, understandably, focused on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Let me say, by the way, that the widely used term “election denial” is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about. Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.
There has also been considerable coverage of Johnson’s right-wing social views, but I’m not sure how many people grasp the depth of his intolerance. Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.
But Johnson’s extremism, and that of the party that chose him, goes beyond rejecting democracy and trying to turn back the clock on decades of social progress. He has also espoused a startlingly reactionary economic agenda.
Until his sudden elevation to speaker, Johnson was a relatively little-known figure. But he did serve for a time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that devises policy proposals. And now that Johnson has become the face of his party, people really should look at the budget proposal the committee released for 2020 under his chairmanship.
For if you read that proposal carefully, getting past the often mealy-mouthed language, you realize that it calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.
Start with Social Security, where the budget calls for raising the retirement age — already set to rise to 67 — to 69 or 70, with possible further increases as life expectancy rises.
On the surface, this might sound plausible. Until Covid produced a huge drop, average U.S. life expectancy at age 65 was steadily rising over time. But there is a huge and growing gap between the number of years affluent Americans can expect to live and life expectancy for lower-income groups, including not just the poor but also much of the working class. So raising the retirement age would fall hard on less fortunate Americans — precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.
Then there’s Medicare, for which the budget proposes increasing the eligibility age “so it is aligned with the normal retirement age for Social Security and then indexing this age to life expectancy.” Translation: Raise the Medicare age from 65 to 70, then keep raising it.
Wait, there’s more. Most nonelderly Americans receive health insurance through their employers. But this system depends greatly on policies that the study committee proposed eliminating. You see, benefits don’t count as taxable income — but in order to maintain this tax advantage, companies (roughly speaking) must cover all their employees, as opposed to offering benefits only to highly compensated individuals.
The committee budget would eliminate this incentive for broad coverage by limiting the tax deduction for employer benefits and offering the same deduction for insurance purchased by individuals. As a result, some employers would probably just give their top earners cash, which they could use to buy expensive individual plans, while dropping coverage for the rest of their workers.
Oh, and it goes almost without saying that the budget would impose savage cuts — $3 trillion over a decade — on Medicaid, children’s health coverage and subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
How many Americans would lose health insurance under these proposals? Back in 2017 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Donald Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage. The Republican Study Committee’s proposals are far more draconian and far-reaching, so the losses would presumably be much bigger.
So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery.
I think it’s safe to say that these proposals would be hugely unpopular — if voters knew about them. But will they?
Actually, I’d like to see some focus groups asking what Americans think of Johnson’s policy positions. Here’s my guess, based on previous experience: Many voters will simply refuse to believe that prominent Republicans, let alone the speaker of the House, are really advocating such terrible things.
But they are and he is. The G.O.P. has gone full-on extremist, on economic as well as social issues. The question now is whether the American public will notice.
It is my opinion that in this nation we have very few, if any, moderate liberals or conservatives in leadership positions, be it city, county, state or federal. Liberal and conservative leaders find it very, very hard to come to a consensus on anything anymore. It is “Either my way, or the highway.” All to often they act like a spoiled child that always has to have his/her way.
We, the general public who all these elected officials are supposed to be serving, are paying a heavy price because they only care what is important to them or what will keep them in office. We are paying a heavy price in the world. This nation’s position of leadership on the world stage has deteriorated to the point that we are the laugh stock of many countries. I have family that live in European counties to hear first hand how we have become a joke as a nation.
I have not seen the unwillingness of liberals to “reach across the aisle” as you seem to indicate. Right now, the Republican party seems to be intent on driving any moderates out. On a national level the exit of Republicans, who have worked with the Democrats in order to govern, are being or have been driven out. There may be some with moderate beliefs left, but they are all too scared to stand up for their beliefs. They are too interested in their own short term survival over their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution and, while they’re at it, represent their constituents beyond those who bellow the loudest.
Hey Moe, you’re trying to “both sides” what you perceive as a leadership problem. The problem, though, is it ain’t both sides.
Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein pointed out the problem more than a decade ago, and this was PRE-Trump.
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
Please define a radical Liberal.
The party leadership is so split on the national level that it’s difficult to imagine on what policy one would want to aisles being crossed. Immigration reform is the only issue I can think of.
The only thing that party leadership can agree to is to disagree. Agreement on anything of substance that would help the citizens of the country. They have not never been able to agree on what do to about immigration and probably never will.
The GOP has chosen the path of gerrymandering and voter suppression — they figure they can do that well enough to stay in power with 33% minority rule.
Unfortunately true.
Any Republican who doesn’t drool all over him/herself or can string more than four words together to form a cohesive sentence is dubbed a “moderate” by our grand and mighty major media.
Even if he or she is a knuckle-dragging, pyschopathic, provincial moron. Consider, for example, at our new speaker, embraced by the entire spectrum of Repugnicans from X to Z.
Consider, for example, our new speaker,
Everything I’ve read and seen points to the fact that Johnson is a much lesser known (and Christian oriented) version of Jim Jordan. This improved the optics enough for the “moderates” to cave.
Disagree with the first post. Politics has its extremes but there’s no equating what’s happening on the left with the right in this present day scenario. Start with Jan 6 and move on from there.
It’s strangely similar to what we saw on the left in the ‘60s. Except they didn’t have highly placed officials in office at the time.
Holding on to power by any means possible is the antithesis of what out democratically run republic stands for. Hopefully the future House actions get major press and enough of the working class decides to vote in their best interests this next time around.
The sad thing is, that this “idea” of raising the retirement age “as life expectancy increases” ignores the fact that life expectancy in the US has DROPPED over the past 5 years
Let Republicans stop trying to brand themselves as compassionate, and let Democrats stop being Republicans Lite. Republicans are unable to resist boxing themselves into the MAGA-mad corner. With that, the party of FDR wins the match with one house of Congress tied behind its back.