Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet:
GOP Wants To Cut Social Security and Medicare (Again)
In the late 1950s, the American Medical Association created Operation Coffee Cup to oppose Democratic plans to expand Social Security with a medical insurance program known today as Medicare.
The AMA asked doctors’ wives to organize coffee meetings with their friends to get them to write letters to Congress opposing the Medicare program. In 1961, the AMA hired actor Ronald Reagan to record a speech outlining what could happen if those letters didn’t get in the mail.
Reagan said, “If you don’t, this program, I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow; and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until, one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.
And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
Republican attacks against Social Security and Medicare are not new. The rhetoric they use in those attacks isn’t new. And the ongoing reaction to President Biden telling the nation that there are Republicans who want to cut these programs leads me to believe, as Queen Gertrude said to Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
So I am glad to see writers compiling what Republican leaders have said and proposed about Social Security and Medicare. We don’t have to look too far into the past, as Popular Information’s Judd Legum outlines:
“The largest caucus of House Republicans is the Republican Study Committee (RSC). There are 156 members of the RSC, which is more than 70% of the entire Republican delegation. The 2023 budget proposed by the RSC, called “The Blueprint to Save America,” calls for cuts to Social Security and Medicare.”
Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall is also compiling quotes and policy proposals to demonstrate where Republicans stand on these issues.
“Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI): Johnson denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But after saying this he then called Social Security a “legalized Ponzi scheme” and says that Congress should no longer automatically pay Social Security benefits each year but rather decide each year whether to pay them and how much the benefit should be. “That doesn’t mean putting on the chopping block,” Johnson told local radio. “That doesn’t mean cutting Social Security. But it does mean prioritizing lower priority spending.”
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT): Mike Lee also denies President Biden’s claim that Republicans want to cut Social Security. But running for Senate in 2010 he told supporters: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.”
Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA): Steve Scalise also denies President Biden’s claims that Republicans want to cut Social Security: But just late last year Scalise support the proposed budget of the Republican Study Committee which, according to Politico, “rais[es] the eligibility ages for each program, along with withholding payments for individuals who retire early or had a certain income, and privatized funding for Social Security to lower income taxes.” After the State of the Union, Scalise said Biden’s claims have been “inaccurate for a long time,” by which he presumably means ten weeks. But even while insisting the President was lying he endorsed yet more cuts. “We want to strengthen Social Security by ending a lot of those government checks to people staying at home rather than going to work.”
Senator Rick Scott (R-FL): In his official agenda for 2022 Republican Senate candidate Scott proposed sunsetting (i.e., ending) every federal program, including Social Security and Medicare, after five years.“
As The New York Times’ Paul Krugman explains, we have seen this dynamic play out since Reagan became president in 1981.
“And then there’s that historical record. Two things have been true ever since 1980. First, Republicans have tried to make deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare every time they thought there might be a political window of opportunity. Second, on each occasion they’ve done exactly what they’re doing now: claiming that Democrats are engaged in smear tactics when they describe G.O.P. plans using exactly the same words Republicans themselves used.
So, about that history. It has been widely forgotten, but soon after taking office Ronald Reagan proposed major cuts to Social Security. But he backed down in the face of a political backlash, leading analysts at the Cato Institute to call for a “Leninist” strategy — their word — creating a coalition ready to exploit a future crisis if and when one arrived.”
We also should be warned that Republicans are no longer relying solely on the legislative branch to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare. Given their success in overturning Roe v. Wade, they are now turning to the courts.
That is why Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern asks us—again—to look at what is happening in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He warns this time about the ramifications of an ongoing legal battle over the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism:
“You might wonder: What does this skirmish over a small financial agency have to do with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual entitlement spending? The answer: everything. In her concurrence, Jones took pains to clarify that her reasoning was not limited to the CFPB. Jones announced that all “appropriations to the executive must be temporally bound.” If Congress does not put a “time limit” on funding, it gives the executive branch too much discretion over spending. Under the Constitution, she claimed, the executive must “come ‘cap in hand’ to the legislature at regular intervals” to ensure that it remains “dependent” and “accountable.” Judge Wilson approvingly cited this idea in his own opinion formally invalidating the CFPB, highlighting the “egregious” nature of the agency’s “perpetual funding feature.”
All told, seven judges on the 5th Circuit have now endorsed the notion that courts must strike down appropriations that allow “perpetual funding” of government agencies or programs. If their view becomes the law of the land, it will empower courts to abolish trillions of dollars in entitlement spending. Why? Because today two-thirds of annual federal spending is “mandatory”—including some of our nation’s most beloved social safety net programs. All of this spending amounted to $5.2 trillion in fiscal year 2021 that would suddenly be at risk of elimination by judicial fiat.
Does this principle derive from the Constitution? Of course not. The appropriations clause at question simply states that all money drawn from the treasury must be “in consequence of appropriations made by law.” There is no textual requirement that Congress reauthorize appropriations periodically. In fact, Article 1 of the Constitution suggests the exact opposite: It bars Congress from appropriating money to the Army “for a longer term than two years,” implying that other kinds of long-term appropriations are permissible. If they weren’t, then why would Army appropriations need an explicit time limit?“
Because, as we’ve learned, original intent doesn’t actually mean what the Framers intended. Conservative judges and justices have demonstrated that originalism is a philosophical scam used only when it can justify the result conservatives want today.
Republicans are hoping the Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court conservative supermajority can accomplish harming Social Security and Medicare in ways that voters repeatedly have rejected. Their chances of success are much higher than I wish they were.
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Teddy Roosevelt’s Valentine’s Day Tragedies
Historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us how the tragedies suffered by Theodore Roosevelt on February 14, 1884, would have a significant impact not just on him but our nation. Roosevelt would change his life’s trajectory and political philosophy in reaction to the deaths of his wife, Alice, and mother “Mittie” on that day.
“On February 14, 1884, Roosevelt slashed a heavy black X in his diary and wrote “The light has gone out of my life.” He refused ever to mention Alice again.
Roosevelt’s profound personal tragedy turned out to have national significance. The diseases that killed his wife and mother were diseases of filth and crowding—the hallmarks of the growing Gilded Age American cities. Mittie contracted typhoid from either food or water that had been contaminated by sewage, since New York City did not yet treat or manage either sewage or drinking water. Alice’s disease was probably caused by a strep infection, which incubated in the teeming city’s tenements, where immigrants, whose wages barely kept food on the table, crowded together.”
Seriously, it is hard to think of a more heartbreaking journal entry than this one.
Fox News Hosts Don’t Believe Fox News
Dominion Filing Systems submitted a filing in its defamation case against Fox News that exposes what the channel’s hosts and executives actually think despite the lies they transmit during their shows.
As The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe explains, “Hosts at Fox News privately ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen while simultaneously peddling the same lies on air, according to court filings in a defamation lawsuit against the network.
Rightwing personalities Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are among those named in the $1.6bn action brought by Dominion Voting Systems, the seller of electronic voting hardware and software that is suing Fox News and parent company Fox Corporation for maligning its reputation.”
The filing makes for interesting reading. So I thought I’d share some of my favorite parts of the filing, where the Fox News people speak for themselves.
Here we learn about the time Tucker Carlson wanted a producer fired for telling the truth.
I want to emphasize this section, which provides evidence of what Sidney Powell told Maria Bartiromo about the sketchy proof backing up a crucial part of the Trumpian lies about the 2020 election.
I will need to remember to try using that time-travel line the next time I want to contribute to a coup against the government of the United States. A serious news channel would not allow that kind of sourcing to be the basis of so much coverage. But we’ve known what Fox News is for some time.
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The New York Times’ Horrific Bias Against Trans People
A group of over 1,000 people who have contributed to the New York Times have signed an open letter to the paper’s managing editor for standards to question the paper’s bias in its coverage of issues related to trans people.
The Present Age’s Parker Malloy highlights a recent example of this bias in an article explaining why she signed the letter.
“After the paper published a very rare pro-trans column from Jamelle Bouie titled, “The Relentless Attack on Trans People Is an Attack on All of Us,” the paper swapped out the headline with a much more generic, “There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America.” God forbid that the paper makes it clear in its headlines that trans people are being targeted by unjust and unprovoked attacks.
There’s no dignity in the kind of newspaper that can’t even say the word “trans” in a headline without immediately backtracking and changing it to something so vague that it tells you next to nothing about the subject being discussed.
After trying to work with the Times privately to improve its coverage of trans issues (the fact that medical associations have to keep telling the Times that they’re misrepresenting this topic should say a lot), GLAAD has also weighed in, working with more than 100 organizations to call out the Times and its skewed coverage.”
Malloy was the first person to note this headline change. She has deactivated her Twitter account in the wake of the awful abuse she’s received after pointing it out.
The open letter contains many examples of the Times’ biased coverage and explains how people pushing anti-trans laws are weaponizing those misleading articles.
“The natural destination of poor editorial judgment is the court of law. Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender-affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” As recently as February 8th, 2023, attorney David Begley’s invited testimony to the Nebraska state legislature in support of a similar bill approvingly cited the Times’ reporting and relied on its reputation as the “paper of record” to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.”
I signed the letter as a New York Times reader, and I encourage everyone to sign on as a supporter.
Quick Pitches
Margaret Atwood responds to the Madison County, Virginia, school board’s decision to ban her book, The Handmaid’s Tale. “The truth is that the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale is in part biblical: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15). The novel sets an inward faith and core Christian values—which I take to be embodied in the love of neighbor and the forgiveness of sins—against totalitarian control and power-hoarding cloaked in a supposed religiousness that is mostly based on the earlier scriptures in the Bible. The stealing of women for reproductive purposes and the appropriation of their babies appears in Genesis 30, when Rachel and Leah turn their “handmaids” over to Jacob and then claim the children as their own. My novel is also an exploration of the theoretical question “What kind of a totalitarianism might the United States become?” I suggest we’re beginning to see the real-life answer to that query.” (Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic)
The Chelyabinsk meteor explosion ten years ago demonstrated why we need to improve our planetary defense abilities with better methods of detecting and tracking near-Earth asteroids. (Brett Tingley, Space.com)
“Under the shadow of the Cold War, many in the world feared the impending prospect of a nuclear winter. According to a new report, our focus has since drifted from its horrors, leaving us with a general lack of awareness that could be dangerous for the future of humankind.” (David Nield, Science Alert)
All I can do is sigh at this one.
three suited men in my coffeeshop. one of them just said, “my personal idea of progress is moving things forward,” which is actually just the definition. everyone’s nodding. guys like this are in charge of every industry and it’s clearly why trains explode
— stillorangecrushed (@stilloranged) 2:37 PM ∙ Feb 15, 2023
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