Remembering what’s at stake in 2016

Lost in the arguments about who is sane, and who has the right temperament for the presidency, is the practical impact of the election. People have wondered aloud: how can men of conscience like Paul Ryan endorse and support someone like Donald Trump? They ascribe a level of moral consciousness that is not deserved according to Ryan’s actions and plans. And they furthermore ignore the entire premise and goal of most of the elected GOP members: to slash taxes on the rich and gut the safety net.

It has been apparent for a long time now that this is what Paul Ryan intends to do: it was clear in 2012 when he was picked as Romney’s vice president. The GOP will in all likelihood control the house regardless of the presidential outcome due to the extreme gerrymandering done at the state level since the 2010 census and district redrawing, and there is a desperate fight for control of the Senate right now, where the tie-breaking vote could be the vice president’s (a role which Cheney played several times). If Trump wins the presidency, it’s likely that Republicans will also control the Senate, and at least have the tie-breaking vote.

What is Paul Ryan’s plan in the event of a Trump presidency and Republican control of the Congress? Here is the lede of a Politico story:

If Donald Trump is elected president and Republicans hold onto Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan is bluntly promising to ram a partisan agenda through Capitol Hill next year, with Obamacare repeal and trillion-dollar tax cuts likely at the top of the list. And Democrats would be utterly defenseless to stop them.

He would do this through the use of budget reconciliation: this is what was used to pass the Bush tax cuts in the early 2000s, and it was used to finally get Obamacare passed (to reconcile the differences between the House and Senate bills, the latter which required a super-majority to pass). There would be no president to veto: in fact, Paul Ryan is counting on Donald Trump’s support to pass the plan, which explains Ryan’s quiet endorsement despite personal objections to Trump’s style, instability and blatant racism.

Apparently, Americans want Congress to “get things done” as opposed to gridlock, while awarding the party causing the gridlock with a massive and radical legislative victory. They will award this to Republicans through a series of protest votes for third-party candidates and a core failure to understand the actual stakes of the election. They are content with either saying “single-payer or nothing” while ignoring the 20 million + who have receive health insurance under Obamacare, and ready to punish a center-left agenda they see as corrupt by giving massive tax cuts for the wealthy (ignoring that the center-left Obama successfully drove up taxes for the wealthy).

Here is a line in the article that summarizes what is at stake:

By the end of the decade, the richest 1 percent would have accumulated 99.6 percent of the benefits of the House GOP plan, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore also covered Ryan’s agenda, in an article titled “Paul Ryan Is Planning a Revolution, and It Starts in January”

[T]he illusion that the filibuster would give Senate Democrats a veto over anything egregious, the Republicans-in-disarray meme has lulled a lot of Democrats, and the media, into a drowsy inability to understand how close we are to a right-wing legislative revolution if Donald Trump becomes president and Republicans hang on to Congress.

This was the plan in 2012 as well if Romney were to win. People claimed nothing much would change back then, or that it wouldn’t be much of a disaster. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. They ascribe a fundamentally undeserved level of moderateness in policy substance to politicians based on speaking style and handsome looks alone.

I am unsure of the Clinton strategy: they want to win over independents and moderate Republicans by appealing to their sense of patriotism and the fact that Trump is clearly unstable and bigoted. But the campaign has done precious little to demonstrate the radical nature of the GOP plan that would go into effect with high likelihood in the event of a Trump presidency.

And I am unsure of the voters “unhappy” with the two candidates and what they will ultimately due in roughly a month’s time. There are real stakes to the results of the election; voting for someone you don’t personally respect or like seems to be a small price to pay for saving the hard fought gains of the last 8 years and salvaging any hope of withstanding a radical set back to the progressive agenda for years to come.

Ed Kilgore concludes:

[I]t should be a warning to Democrats as well, and something that with imagination and persistence they can convey to those critical progressives who are meh about voting for Hillary Clinton and don’t think the identity of the president much matters. Even if you think Clinton is a centrist sellout or a Wall Street puppet, she’s not going to sign legislation throwing tens of millions of people out of their health coverage, abolishing inheritance taxes and giving top earners still more tax benefits, shredding the safety net, killing Planned Parenthood funding, and so on through Ryan’s whole abominable list of reactionary delights. If Democrats think a scenario so complicated that it’s lulled the press to sleep cannot be explained to regular voters, maybe they should break out the hand puppets. There is no more urgent and galvanizing message available to them.”

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