Let’s start out today’s drunken cannonball into the GOP kiddie pool with a little mental exercise. Hands up everyone who spends their days and nights fretting over the possibility that we won’t fund the military sufficiently to protect our country. Okay, I see one, two, maybe four hands. You only have to raise one, Mr. Cheney, Halliburton can speak for themselves. Okay, now let’s do people who genuinely worry about losing their full Social Security or Medicare benefits, or their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Oh my, that’s Just about everybody.
So you see the difference, right? Well, Republicans don’t. And let’s hope they never do, because the following argument isn’t going to win them many votes.
South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds appeared with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday to totally not rebuke Republicans’ no-longer-very-secret plan to turn the lifesaving programs millions of Americans rely on into a political football we have to white-knuckle our way through once every five years ... or one year ... or whenever an angry Adderall djinn decides endangering millions of people’s health insurance coverage is the only possible salve for the nasty boo-boo on his ego.
Watch:
Transcript!
JAKE TAPPER: “President Biden out there, obviously, on the campaign trail, as it were—not officially—hitting Republicans all week on Medicare, Social Security. And he’s pointing specifically to the plan that your colleague Sen. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, released when he was leading the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, which says, just to quote, ‘All federal legislation sunsets in five years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,’ unquote. Do you support that plan?”
SEN. MIKE ROUNDS: “I kind of look at Social Security the way I would the Department of Defense and our defense spending. We’re never going to not fund defense, but at the same time, every single year we look at how we can make it better, and I think it’s about time that we start talking about Social Security and making it better. We’ve got 11 years before we actually see cuts start to happen to people that are on Social Security. It could be very responsible for us to do everything we can to make those funding programs now and the plans right now so that we don't run out of money in Social Security and that it continues to provide all the benefits that it does today. Simply looking away from it and pretending like there’s no problems with Social Security is not an appropriate or responsible thing to do. So I guess my preference would be, let’s start managing it.”
And we all know what Republicans mean when they talk about “managing” Social Security.
In other words, despite all the performative writhing and near-speaking-in-tongues we saw during Biden’s SOTU after the president pointed out that some Republicans have suggested regularly sunsetting Social Security? It turns out that, yeah, that’s exactly what they want to do. Why else would Rounds bring up annual defense appropriations?
Though he doesn’t want to tinker with Social Security every five years. That would be bonkers, yo. Let’s shoot for every year instead.
This really is the gift that can keep on giving for Joe Biden and the Democrats. In fact, now that the Biden administration has reclaimed WhiteHouse.gov and changed the admin password from something Trump couldn’t spell so he wouldn’t fill up the site with messages to his chief of staff asking where his golf socks and hydraulic steam girdle are, Democrats have used the opportunity to point out the numerous instances when Republicans have threatened Americans’ hard-earned benefits.
This video, for example, starts out by mentioning this fun rant from GOP Sen. Mike Lee …
… while the White House fact sheet adds a couple examples you may or may not have heard about:
- The Republican Study Committee – which includes a majority of House Republicans – released a formal budget that, according to Politico, included “raising the eligibility ages for each program, along with withholding payments for individuals who retire early or had a certain income, and privatized funding for Social Security to lower income taxes.”
- And in 2015, most House Republicans, including Speaker McCarthy, Rep. Scalise, and a host of others in current leadership, voted to raise the retirement age to 70, which would cut Social Security benefits for tens of millions of seniors who paid into the system for years.
Sounds like Republicans kind of want to cut Social Security, huh?
Of course, there are plenty of ways to preserve entitlement programs going forward without turning them into an annual tug-of-war. Like, say, lifting the cap on income that’s subject to Social Security tax. But the only thing Republicans hate more than being called out as the party of the grotesquely wealthy is not actually being the party of the grotesquely wealthy. So raising taxes on wealthy individuals is permanently off the table, no matter how much inequality we see. Because the 500 or so richest people in the world are playing a game with each other to determine who can hoard most of the planet’s wealth, and we all need to see who wins. It’s the only entertainment we plebs will have left after canceling cable to cover our ramen and slightly expired Spaghettios budgets.
Of course, Republicans’ heartfelt assurances that they won’t cut such programs would be far more reassuring if they hadn’t spent the past decade-plus discussing changes to Social Security, voting dozens of times to repeal Obamacare, and threatening the U.S. and global economies with their reckless debt ceiling brinkmanship.
But hey, they think they can get away with it because they assume not enough of us are paying attention.
So let’s prove them wrong. What do you say?
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.