Depraved Republicans may actually be plotting to destroy themselves
Let’s just come right out and say it: the Republicans couldn’t do a better job of tanking the midterms if they were doing it on purpose.
Is it possible they are? Or have they just inherited their president’s gift for doing the worst imaginable thing at the worst imaginable time?
I’m talking about the decision of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley – a literal fossil at age 93 – to put Jack Smith on the stand Tuesday to testify under oath, along with the move last week to cancel roughly 760,000 Affordable Care Act enrollees off their health insurance coverage.
I’d like to take a moment here to remind everyone that we are little more than a month away from those aforementioned midterm elections. This is supposed to be the moment when a party puts on its best face and shows the country just how accommodating and benevolent it is, demonstrating the ways it feels everyone’s pain stemming from the ongoing war in Iran and the soaring price of everything from gasoline to ground beef.
But no. It seems the Republicans are just as skilled as their king at unfathomable stupidity. They instead made the incomprehensible decision to remind voters about January 6, 2021, and the fact they’re making sure hundreds of thousands, and soon millions, of people will have no access to health care outside of an emergency room.
Let’s start with Smith. He appeared voluntarily this week before a group of hostile witnesses playing a game of gotcha to catch him perjuring himself about a supposed vendetta against a certain Donald Trump. Let me just say, if Smith wasn’t targeting him for crimes against America and humanity, he’d be the only sane individual left who wasn’t/isn’t.
Seriously. Who the hell is going to blame a guy if he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the most corrupt individual who has ever stained American public life and who is doing everything he can to enrich himself and screw everyone else?
But no. Jack Smith has greater powers of remaining somehow impartial and objective than the rest of us, and his seeming lack of partisanship reflects it. On Tuesday, he sounded exactly like what he is: a poised, dedicated public servant and nobody’s fool.
Try as they might to goad him, the senators couldn’t prod Smith into any errors – though they did manage to commit many of their own. I’m pretty sure Eric Schmitt won’t ever mistake the Hawks for the Hawkeyes again. Schmuck.
What the Republicans did manage to accomplish rather successfully was shine a big flashing light on the Jan. 6 insurrection, offering a timely reminder of just what a big, fat, horrible black eye on Trump and his enablers that whole wretched episode was. Just in case any midterm voters may have forgotten that a vote for a Republican is a vote for someone who supported the pardon of criminal thugs who attacked dozens of cops — and democracy itself.
On that other topic, the Trump administration announced last week that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be canceling roughly 315,000 ACA Marketplace enrollments covering more than three-quarters of a million people. The claim is that the beneficiaries were unauthorized, fraudulent, or the claims involved nonexistent individuals (whatever that means).
CMS maintains that the action will save about $2.2 billion in subsidies, or approximately the same amount as Trump took in during the first year of his second term – ironic, I know. But after the DOGE fiasco last year, I don’t think a lot of voters are thinking about government waste, fraud and abuse. Instead, they’re looking at this as, “Hmm. Sure, let’s screw people out of their health coverage at a time when they’re already having to cut back on groceries and driving. That’ll show ‘em!”
No matter how you slice it, this is an issue of timing. They don’t seem to care that the headlines are piling up more evidence about this party’s lack of empathy and understanding for the plight of everyday Americans struggling to get by. I dare say that might even include a few of their MAGA morons.
This is not to even mention the massive cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare that are about to drop next year after the midterms are safely in the rearview mirror. Thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, the number of uninsured Americans is projected to increase by some 10 million (including 7.5 million on Medicaid alone), according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Now, of course, the cowardly Republicans buried their biggest hit to the nation’s most vulnerable citizens to make sure that last tidbit didn’t surface until post-election.
There’s a reason for this: they knew it wasn’t going to be terribly popular to leave people without recourse should they become ill just so billionaires could land some tasty tax breaks. And yet, they’ve made the political calculation that it’s okay to dump 760,000 from the health insurance rolls. It’s a numbers game, don't you know?
Both the Smith testimony decision and ACA cancellation represent, to my mind, a bizarre piece of self-sabotage. I know, there’s plenty of that going around right now in GOP circles, but this feels particularly obvious and egregious. Why this? Why now? Are these people just that tone deaf?
Sure, that could be it. It might also just be that they’re looking to satisfy their cruel and craven master. But I think it goes deeper than that. I believe the Republicans have performed an actual mind meld with Trump so they operate on precisely the same level of nastiness.
I don’t think it’s even just about satisfying him anymore. Their collective outlook is now indistinguishable from his. That means embracing the zillionaires without the slightest concern for those they’re elected to serve.
Chock full of mock rage and blinded by their own hubris, they’ve forgotten how to even pretend to be human. On that score, they’re walking in lockstep with the man who literally wrote the book on depravity.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)
