E. J. Dunne has a column up at the WashPost with the unfortunately accurate head “Our political foundation is rotting away” . Noting how Republicans are pushing through a tax bill that is both utterly abysmal and far ranging for no other reason than to garner Big Donnie a “win”, regardless of the number of lies needed to get it through Congress and regardless of its likely massively deleterious impact on the, you know, United States of America, Dunne all but throws his hands up in despair and then turns to “a widely noted series of tweets” issued by Benjamin Wittes, calling for a “temporary truce” between liberals and conservatives to “unite around a political program based on the protection of American democracy and democratic institutions.”
Unfortunately, as Dunne notes, the fault lies not in our stars but in our Republicans. The Tea Party—basically, the “Tear Down the Government So It Can’t Give Money to Black People and Foreigners Party”—has swallowed the Republican Party and digested the whole. Even the few “Conscience Republicans” in the Senate who are “solving” their Trump problem by quitting politics are quite likely to vote for the wretched tax bill, basically because they are afraid to be alone and afraid of the vituperation that will descend on them if they dare to hurt Big Donnie’s feelings. Trump is simply the apotheosis1 of the Tea Party movement. The only Republicans who are “standing up to Trump” are the ones who have the simplest and most basic political reason for doing so: to support the bill might cost them their district.
Afterwords
What is “shocking”, or maybe totally unsurprising, is that most of the “Respectable Right"—e.g., the National Review and the Weekly Standard—have lined up in favor of Lyin’ Paulie Ryan’s atrocious tax bill, largely in obeisance to the sacred cause of cutting the corporate tax rate2, combined with instinctive forelock tugging in deference to the "donor class” (“Conscience Republican” talk for what we screamin’ libs call “the 1%”.)
- Since I’ve used this word three times in one week, a word I basically stole from Herman Melville, I’m going to try to lay off until at least 2020. ↩︎
- It’s “arguable” that the current rate of 35% is too high and could be advantageously lowered, but since many corporations find ways to pay no tax at all, including circa 2016 27 on the S&P 500, the rate could surely be “usefully” lowered without signficantly reducing the total amount of taxes paid, making the whole thing “more fair”. Guess what? Ryan’s bill wouldn’t do that. ↩︎
