The GOP has offered their contract for America. It isn’t a contract that celebrates America—it is a contract for cruelty, period. It instills the far right agenda, the stripping of basic rights from the people, and instilling the overwhelming weight of those rights into those who hold the most wealth and are willing to sacrifice the basic needs and rights of everyone else to maintain power. This is cruelty. And it is the Republican vision of the future.
This is the contract. Built on stripping your freedoms. This election is not about what you can gain, it is about one party completely committed to taking from you what you already have—rights and privileges we should never have to assume are at risk.
Abortion? They want a national ban. Forget your Fourteenth Amendment right to privacy, your inherent bodily autonomy, your plans for the future. Birth control? It’s also on the table. Plan B? Forget it. Might as well be Plan-X from Space for many of these Republicans. The right to vote? Most of us have had to fight for that right, and now the Republican plan is … let’s throw up as many roadblocks as we can, and before we even get there, let’s go out of our way to see if the courts can decide if your vote even counts, let’s submit fake documents to the Supreme Court that we stacked with Federalist Society lackeys. No word yet on if the Supreme Court’s conservatives will even care that the documents are fakes.
We look at every paycheck we receive and realize the Republicans are content with taking away the Social Security benefits we all pay for, and without thinking about it. They’ll remove a safety net that protects all of us, that we all pay into.
Why? Because the GOP is angry. They don’t like America. They want to define it as a country for their billionaire buddies. The idea of eliminating IRS agents sounds great to them, as none of them remember that it was the IRS that took down people like Al Capone. They strike fear into their own voters by lying about 87,000 gun-toting field agents. And yet, they fail to address what is really happening. The IRS needs people who go through paper returns, manage information technology, and try to modernize a government agency over the next few years, an agency that has been underfunded to the point it is outgunned by the biggest cheats.
But the IRS is struggling: According to Vox, Americans owe a cumulative $131 billion in unpaid taxes, enough to completely fund the Department of Education for two years. The bulk of that money is owed by the wealthiest people in the country, yet the IRS isn't attempting to collect it from them. Instead, as IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig confirmed in a letter to Congress recently, the agency literally can't afford to audit the rich, so it's pursuing the poor instead.
That’s right. Give IRS the resources, and it has a way to go after those who owe the most money. The people with the most money can put up too much of a legal fight for the IRS to handle right now; they don’t have the budget or means to keep up. Give IRS the budget, and who suddenly becomes the target? The big cheaters. Who can’t tolerate that? Republicans. They are more than willing to say out loud that they must overturn IRS agents immediately.
What are the Republicans offering?
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A plan to strip away your freedoms. A plan that says having the ultra-rich bully others is fine, as they will never be subject to the laws around abortion or most social issues; they will have easier access to travel than anyone else. No, skew our country against the overwhelming majority and get Fox “News” to promote it non-stop, as though it will somehow benefit the average American.
Whether they like to believe it or not, fans of Fox News and other right-wing propaganda organizations are the same voters who risk losing it all. Health care. Retirement. Reproductive rights. The right to marriage. And—I just can’t believe I’m saying this in 2022—the right to read.
That’s where we are right now, though. Gun owners talk about their fear of “gun grabbers.” Well, along with the basic human rights of every American, you can pry my copies of Animorphs from my cold, dead hands, you bunch of book-burning, hate-bound fucks. See you at the ballot box.