Over the past couple of months Republicans have passed or proposed three big budget initiatives. First, they enacted a springtime-for-plutocrats tax cut that will shower huge benefits on the wealthy while offering a few crumbs for ordinary families. Then they signed on to a what-me-worry budget deal that will blow up the budget deficit to levels never before seen except during wars or severe recessions. Finally, the Trump administration released a surpassingly vicious budget proposal that would punish not just the vulnerable but also most working families.
Looking at all of this should make you very angry; it certainly infuriates me. But my anger isn’t mostly directed at Republicans; it’s directed at their enablers, the professional centrists, both-sides pundits, and news organizations that spent years refusing to acknowledge that the modern GOP is what it so clearly is. Which is not to say that Republicans should be let off the hook.
To be sure, American history is full of politicians and parties that pursued what we would now call nefarious ends, but I can’t think of a previous example of a party that so consistently acted in bad faith – pretending to care about things it didn’t, pretending to serve goals that were the opposite of its actual intentions.
You may recall, for example, the grim warnings from leading Republicans about the dangers of budget deficits. Then came the opportunity to pass a $1.5 trillion tax cut targeted on the rich, and suddenly all worries about the deficit temporarily disappeared.
Now that the tax cut is law, of course, deficit-hawk rhetoric is back – not as a reason to reconsider those tax breaks, but as a reason to cut food stamps and Medicaid. You knew this was going to happen.