We’re all angry about this tax monstrosity. It is practically an encyclopedia of things to get mad about, if encyclopedias were storehouses of venality instead of knowledge.
Don’t get mad, get even.
And getting even doesn’t just involve taking back the House and Senate and the WH, it involves understanding how the Rs came to this point of passing a tax bill so deeply and justly unpopular that, no matter what we do, we probably will take all three at the next opportunity the voters have to wreak vengeance. We can rely on the voters to supply the anger. A political party is supposed to supply the understanding of politics and public policy needed to channel that anger to good ends.
The Rs voted in near lock step for this atrocity, despite its suicidal unpopularity, because they calculate that the Trump factor has already lost them the next election. As a group, they view their majority status as a wasting asset. Those of them in marginal seats view their particular occupancy of those seats as wasting assets. You’re a failure in business — and that’s what govt service is to them, a business — unless you know how to ruthlessly exploit all of your assets, even the ones that have a sell-by date. It’s especially important to wring what value you can from those wasting assets whose sell-by date is especially close.
So the Rs passed a tax bill that rewards the people who are going to reward them. As a party the reward will be donations. The ones who lose their seats fighting the bad fight will get high paying make-work jobs as their eternal enough reward for their holy martyrdom to their god Mammon.
Campaign finance reform that would hamper their ability to reward the party as a whole is already on our to-do list, so I wont say more about it.
As for punishing the individual malefactors who lose their seats, that pesky ex post facto provision in the Constitution might limit the ability of our legislative majority to give them all they deserve, but we certainly can pass laws that remove the incentive of future employment for defeated legislators by the malefactors of great wealth.
We have some laws already to limit such cashing-in, but the issue doesn’t get nearly as much attention as campaign finance, so let me give some idea of what I mean here. Right now we mostly just put a time limit, on mostly just lobbying Congress, as the only limits on what former legislators can do. You can’t lobby Congress until x number of years have passed since you left Congress. But you can accept just about any other remuneration, as long as you are not so incautious to explicitly call it a quid pro quo for your past legislative service to your new paymasters.
My maximum plan, which can be modified down if the ideal is thought to be constitutionally problematic, would be to make it illegal for ex-legislators to ever again get any money, for doing anything, from anybody, except the govt. Make them give up their wealth to the Treasury as a condition for accepting election, or re-election if they already serve in Congress. Make their pensions and health care and provisions for their children’s education more generous if you have to so that legislators don’t have to accept actual hardship for themselves and their families to serve in govt. The idea is to require a renunciation of wealth, not a vow of poverty.
The ideal would involve capping their retirement and health care and support for their children’s education at the maximum safety net that the least of us get from the govt. If this were in effect, maybe future legislatures might take a more generous view of what the least of us deserve, as the actual Golden Rule gets a concrete incentive, instead of the Golden Rule of US Politics, “those that have the gold make the rules.”. Medicare for All, and Social Security, and student loan programs would overnight become the healthiest programs the govt funds. These programs would be restructured and refinanced to stop exploiting the public for the profit of private enterprise, because the people in charge of the govt would finally have some skin in the game. Get them out of those wingnut welfare hammocks they lie in now!
Lord knows what wider effects we will see from law-making being put in the hands of people who are willing to renounce wealth in order to gain political power. Nothing govt and the law touch upon, and that is everything in our society, will remain the same once the public good, which can seem remote and abstract and unclear, no longer has to compete with private gain, which is much more tangible and sure.
We will not create a utopia, because the love of power is at least as problematic as the love of money. You can’t take the love of power out of the game, because power is the game. But the unavoidable flaws in any system of govt only make it that much more important to avoid the avoidable flaws. We can’t get power out of politics, but we can get money out of politics, and focusing on the personal wealth of public servants gives us much more powerful tools in that regard than anything that limiting campaign contributions could do.
Get even. Get our society even.
The next election is 11 months from now. The next time the WH is up for grabs is 35 months from now. Keeping that electoral anger alive that is going to ensure our legislative majority requires having a program to present to the voters that channels their anger. Let that program be getting even, getting our society even instead of skewed, in everything that govt does, to favor the 1%.
If we are to build something of value, something that will last, from the opportunity the Rs are handing us by this suicidal culmination of all that they have aimed for since 1876 when they gave up on Reconstruction, we have to start thinking about how this happened, how an electoral majority came to the point of putting these malefactors of great wealth in power. Then we have to make whatever changes, however fundamental, that are needed to keep that from happening again.