John McCain held a townhall meeting near Phoenix today and was berated by his own constituents, many of whom completely disagree with ever letting undocumented workers become citizens, and some of whom would prefer to shoot them. All in all, it’s just one more brick in the wall that is being erected to isolate the Republican Party from anything resembling majority rule. They cannot tame the beast they created in their effort to beat Obama.
The party is becoming incoherent. On health care, the Supreme Court ruling that upheld ObamaCare also allowed the states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion. It shouldn’t matter. Opting out of the Medicaid expansion is a fiscally irresponsible thing to do. It doesn’t make economic sense for any governor to turn down massive amounts of federal money that will cover their citizens and drive down costs at hospitals and everywhere else. The vast majority of Republican governors are opting out anyway.
Then there is the issue of the health insurance exchanges. Governors can build their own exchanges, they can partner with the federal government, or they can let the federal government create their exchanges for them. Almost all Republican governors have opted to let the federal government build their exchanges, essentially abdicating their responsibility and giving up on having any influence.
The Obama administration says they are on track to have all the exchanges built by the new year. What’s ironic is that you can look at the 2012 Electoral College map and reverse the blue and red states. Blue states are exercising their sovereign right to regulate the health insurance industry (within some federal guidelines) while Red states are being taken over completely by a Democratic administration. Why?
Basically, the GOP has been driven mad and is hewing to its ideology when it makes the least sense (rejecting Medicaid funding), while rejecting it’s ideology when it makes the least sense (retaining state control over federal policy).
Christ, at this point Ramesh Ponnuru is making sense. He points out that the GOP orthodoxy on income taxes is totally out of date.
When Reagan cut rates for everyone, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the income tax was the biggest tax most people paid. Now neither of those things is true: For most of the last decade the top rate has been 35 percent, and the payroll tax is larger than the income tax for most people. Yet Republicans have treated the income tax as the same impediment to economic growth and middle-class millstone that it was in Reagan’s day. House Republicans have repeatedly voted to bring the top rate down still further, to 25 percent.
A Republican Party attentive to today’s problems rather than yesterday’s would work to lighten the burden of the payroll tax, not just the income tax.
Part of that whole disastrous 47% rhetoric was based on the phenomenon Ponnuru points out. The Republicans have forced income taxes to such a low level that most people don’t see them as a big deal. But the GOP still acts like it is 1980. This same situation is spread throughout our political landscape. Bashing gays was popular, until it wasn’t. The pro-life position was viable for a major party to take until the loons started passing actual restrictions. You could win by wrapping patriotism in a flag and having it carry a cross, until you couldn’t. You could make Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson your whipping boys until a black man became president and a black man took over the Justice Department. (Fucking check mate).
The conservative act is old. It’s crazy.
And it is still powerful enough to screw everything up.
