Congressional Republicans have given up their personal agency to let Trump do whatever he wants, but on this year’s “big, beautiful” spending bill, president deals is still giving them the impression that Congress is a deliberative body allowed to pass laws that aren’t dictated straight from their cult leader. Republicans are working on a big spending bill that Chuck Schumer already abandoned all his leverage on earlier this year, so the Democrats don’t matter and aren’t important and aren’t worth even paying attention to in this saga. This is a 100 percent GOP story now.
And the story so far is that they can’t get their story straight. Republicans are weighed down by their “high on their own supply” caucus in the House, as a rabid group of Marjorie Taylor Greene acolytes govern in accordance with the craziest shit you read on right-wing media that definitely isn’t being funded by the Kremlin.
In this unreality, there is no such thing as any kind of good government spending, and so all forms of government spending must be cut well past the bone. Given that healthcare coverage like Medicaid and Medicare comprise a significant amount of state and federal spending, going after people’s health care is the logical conclusion of these loony tunes right-wingers who all think they’re Trump and will always escape the consequences of their actions.
These maniacs have found allies in the Very Serious pro-business portion of the GOP, who has always viewed deficits as intolerable unless they are used to give away tax breaks to billionaires. Then blowing out the deficit is just Very Serious financial thinking to these lizard people, even if people’s health care gets taken away along with it, consequences be damned.
But assuming that elections do still exist in America, there are consequences to cutting people’s health care, and there are Republicans desperately taking their case to the public to try to drown out the uber pro-Medicaid cuts wing of the party. To be clear, all Republicans are on board with cutting Medicaid, the question is whether they want to leave enough of a program left that they can at least defend politically, or whether the lizard people and lunatics just want to take everyone’s health care away and see what happens.
Missouri Senator and January 6th crowd-fleer Josh Hawley wrote an op-ed in the New York Times today, proving that they are the newspaper of choice for Very Serious right-wingers who think the Wall Street Journal has gone too woke. In it, he pleads with his own party, highlighting unavoidable realities that will make the lizard people/whackadoo alliance responsible for staggering GOP electoral losses. Hawley points out that “Recent polling shows that 64 percent of Republicans hold a favorable view of Medicaid. About one in six have personally been on the program. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of Americans oppose significant cuts to Medicaid and over half — half — have a personal or family connection to the Medicaid program.”
Hawley writes that “it’s safe to say the Trump coalition was not pulling the lever for Medicaid cuts in November,” which isn’t quite true since much of the Trump coalition was clearly voting for what is unfolding to happen to everyone except for them. But point taken. This push to gut Medicaid isn’t popular, and as Hawley notes, “Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs.”
This plea by Hawley comes on the heels of Republican House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie writing yesterday in the woke Wall Street Journal who Trump won’t talk to anymore that the bill that Gurthrie and Hawley support “preserves and strengthens Medicaid for children, mothers, people with disabilities and the elderly—for whom the program was designed.”
This line comes after a significant amount of throat clearing alleging that Democrats made Medicaid too susceptible to fraud and therefore the cuts to Medicaid the pro-Medicaid wing of the GOP is proposing are actually designed to strengthen it. There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance required to be a Republican, as logic does not track to their positions and this Medicaid fight is another one of these arenas where it’s difficult to tell what’s going on because so many people are lying to themselves.
But what’s clear is that if Republicans in the House and Senate are taking to America’s elite op-ed pages to make their case, that makes it very likely it was falling on deaf ears behind closed doors. That these op-eds found their way to the conservative New York Times and Wall Street Journal opinion pages is telling as to who they are trying to reach, as Hawley and Guthrie seem to have abandoned reason in their bid to convince the screeching hyenas in the GOP House. This is a clear attempt to split the pro-business caucus from the “cut government at all costs” caucus in the House and isolate the latter, and it is yet another indication of how fragile the GOP coalition is and how dependent it is on one cult leader to tell them all what to do—and the shitshow that ensues when that doesn’t happen.
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