After shock comes anger. I don’t think I’ll move on to negotiating – anger seems about right, particularly with the news emanating from President-Elect Trump’s transition team. His closest adviser will be the spiritual leader of one of the alt-right’s most popular web sites, Breitbart, so you know this is going to be a volatile time from the standpoint of those issues Breitbart tends to report on. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, perhaps? That would certainly put black people’s minds at ease. I think Trump may be considering Cap’n Crunch for secretary of the Navy. Sounds like a good pick, though he’s rumored to have a crunchberry problem.
Okay, so what will Trump’s victory mean from a policy standpoint? Well, if he’s anything remotely true to his word, we are likely to see the most reactionary policies ever advance in our lifetimes passed through congress and signed into law. This is not just about Trump – this is about a extremist Republican party that becomes even more virulent every time it returns to power. We had the Reagan-Bush cycle, which was far to the right of anyplace we had gone politically since the Great Depression. Then there was the George W. Bush presidency, shot through with neocons and a decidedly more autocratic approach to governance, powered by the disaster of 9/11. Now: a Republican electoral trifecta – president, senate, and house, all in the hands of an even more reactionary strain of this very destructive party.
What will that look like? Well, we have a pretty good idea. Look at Wisconsin when Blind Scotty Walker took the reins. Look at North Carolina when Pat McCrory was elected (though he may have lost this year, we’ll see). Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Trump will do something very similar – put together a pre-baked raft of reactionary programs into a series of bills, pass them over any objections, and sign them into law in the first few weeks of the ass-clown in chief’s administration. They will also do everything they can to lock in their gains, passing voter i.d. restrictions, confirming ultraconservative justices at various levels, and attacking the remaining institutions of the liberal-left: public sector unions, Planned Parenthood, and so on. That’s what we’re looking at, and judging by Ryan’s various activities over the past year, they are likely to use budget reconciliation on a lot of this legislation. My guess, too, is that the filibuster will be disabled or destroyed quite early on, as well.
So hold tight, people. We are going to have to fight like hell to preserve what ground we can. Elections have consequences, as we will soon see.
On top of that, the “Better Way” will use reconciliation votes to repeal sections of the Affordable Care Act, including Medicaid expansion. Ryan tested his caucus’s ability to use this tactic on non-fiscal legislation this past term when he brought an ACA repeal vote via reconciliation. This will be repeated next year, but with a Republican president, their vile legislation will get a signature. Ryan will be able to move forward with converting Medicare to a voucher. You can already hear right-wing pundits floating the concept of expanded Health Savings Accounts as part of their “repeal and replace” strategy – that and the seemingly evergreen notion of allowing insurance to be sold across state lines. This should be great comfort to the hundreds of thousands thrown off of Medicaid by their so called “better way.”
claiming that this can be balanced by closing loopholes on upper income earners. Horseshit. Where’s the proof? They don’t have any numbers. They can’t name deductions that they would suggest in any negotiations with Congress. They’re talking about an enormous gap that their plan would greatly expand, they claim they can close it, but they offer no details. They’ve got a secret plan to cut taxes and balance the budget while raising military spending: it’s called “Just trust us.”