The GOP Already Overplayed Its Hand... But How Consequential Will That Be In Upcoming Elections?

Will The Dems Learn That A Lesser Of 2 Evils Strategy Is A Losing Strategy?

Ugghhh... Hakeem is the lesser evil than MAGA Mike but not the leader the moment is calling for

When millions of people start losing their healthcare, as well as food stamps and opportunities to get college educations with Pell grants, who you gonna blame (aside from Trump and Musk, neither of whom you can get to)? Every Republican in the House (except Kentucky crackpot Thomas Massie) for starters. Yesterday, the House passed, 217-215, the framework for a draconian reverse Robin Hood budget resolution that steals hundreds of billions from the working class and gives it in tax cuts to the billionaire class. 

Two Republicans vowed to vote “no” all day, which nearly sunk the effort— MAGA Mike actually pulled the resolution and told the House to go home for the night— were whackadoodle Victoria Spartz (R-IN) and far right extremist Warren Davidson (R-OH). Both represent carefully gerrymandered red districts, R+11 for Spartz and R+14 for Davidson. 

Last year, Spartz, despite announcing she wouldn’t seek reelection and then changing her mind, beat Democrat Deborah Pickett 56.6% to 38.0% in the central Indiana district, winning all 6 counties in the district north of Indianapolis:

• Tipton- 70%

• Grant- 68%

• Howard- 62%

• Madison- 59%

• Delaware- 54%

• Hamilton- 53%

And Davidson vanquished Democrat Vanessa Enoch 62.8% to 37.2%, winning all 5 of the counties north of Cincinnati and west of Dayton:

• Darke- 84%

• Miami- 80%

• Preble- 80%

• Butler- 64%

• Hamilton- 54%

And how do people feel about this deal? New polling from Hart Research isn’t too good for the GOP… not even with 2024 Trump voters! Trump voters say they voted for him to reduce inflation and lower the cost of living, not to give tax breaks to the wealthy. The survey shows that 76% of respondents disapprove of Congress giving more tax breaks to the rich. More than two in three Trump voters (67%) disapprove of Congress passing additional tax cuts for wealthy individuals. Some of the top findings:

• More than two thirds of voters think that wealthy individuals (67%) and large corporations (70%) pay too little in federal taxes. Nearly half of Trump voters (49%) think wealthy individuals pay too little and 56% think large corporations pay too little. Fully seven in ten voters who identify as “working class” think that the wealthy pay too little in federal taxes.

• Substantial majorities of voters would like Congress to increase taxes on wealthy individuals (57%) and large corporations (64%). Among working-class voters, large majorities would like Congress to raise taxes on large corporations (67%) and wealthy individuals (62%). Only 27% of voters want Congress to cut taxes for wealthy individuals, and even fewer want Congress to cut taxes for large corporations (15%). Among Trump voters, just 38% would like Congress to cut taxes for the wealthy, and only 25% want to see tax cuts for large corporations.

• Fewer than one in five voters (18%) say that their own taxes went down as a result of the 2017 Trump tax law. Among those who know enough to have an opinion, however, more than two thirds think taxes went down for the wealthy and large corporations.

• Putting vital programs on the chopping block to pay for tax cuts for wealthy individuals and large corporations is UNacceptable to large majorities of voters. Voters express the greatest resistance to making large cuts to Social Security (85% unacceptable), Medicare (85%), and Medicaid (82%), while more than seven in ten voters say it is unacceptable to offset tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting K-12 education (77%), food and nutrition programs (76%), transportation and infrastructure (75%), Head Start and childcare programs (75%), and affordable housing programs (73%). Notably, when it comes to cuts to programs proposed in the House budget bill, large majorities of Trump voters say cutting Medicaid (71%) and food and nutrition programs (60%) would be unacceptable.

• A significant 70% majority of voters oppose the proposed elements of the House Republican budget bill that would: extend all tax cuts in the Trump tax law, including for the wealthy; add new tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy; add new tax cuts for tipped workers; and cut Medicaid, food stamps, and aid to the poor. Only 30% of voters favor it. Nearly half of Trump voters (47%) oppose the House Republican budget bill.

• Voters do not believe Republicans’ claim that new tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations will “pay for themselves” by stimulating stronger economic growth that leads to higher tax revenues: only 39% of voters think it is likely that these tax cuts will pay for themselves, while 61% think it is unlikely that they will do so. In fact, 81% of voters think it is believable that, “tax cuts for the rich aren’t free, and everyone else will end up paying the bill.”

So… any stirring from the anti-MAGA majority of the country? Naftali Bendavid and Maeve Reston reported that it’s starting in earnest. They wrote that “Rowdy crowds are showing up at lawmakers’ town hall meetings to protest President Donald Trump’s actions. Some people are launching into chants like “No king!” or shouting down Republican House members. Sen. Bernie Sanders is drawing overflow crowds of his own as he seeks to mobilize voters against Trump’s budget cuts. At the same time, a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general is methodically filing lawsuits against Trump’s orders, and in six out of seven cases, it has been successful in persuading judges to halt them. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Governors Association and liberal groups are seeing a surge in fundraising. And Democratic members of Congress are seizing on a budget clash as an opportunity to coalesce against the president’s plans. Little by little, after an initial phase of stunned confusion, the broader resistance to Trump is beginning to wake up.”

Trump adversaries, they wrote, “are aiming their fire more selectively [than in 2017], directing political and legal attacks against specific Trump policies they believe are both damaging and unpopular. The targeted strategy is in part a response to Trump’s own shift. In his first term, he embraced populist anger, but he often struggled to implement specific policies. This time, he has been far more efficient in deploying his plans and dismantling individual government programs… Democrats are also trying to make inroads in districts held by Republicans. Close to a million federal workers live in red states, party strategists say. [DNC chair Ken] Martin recently visited states including Missouri and Texas, meeting with farmers and labor leaders.”

Democrats hope this spending battle gives them a platform to make a case that has been largely drowned out so far— that the president is destroying programs that help ordinary Americans while embracing tax cuts for his billionaire friends.

Many Democrats say Trump’s cuts will hurt Republican-leaning states as well. They hope that some GOP leaders begin speaking out against the president’s moves, even if they must be more circumspect than their Democratic counterparts.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who chairs the National Governors Association, said severe cuts to Medicaid, for example, would jeopardize rural hospitals and other health-care providers.

“If the House’s [proposed] level of cuts went through, 400,000 Coloradans would lose coverage— and we’re a wealthier state,” Polis said. “This affects a lot of the red states and poorer states even more, where high percentages of people are on Medicaid.”

Many activists complain that the Democratic Party establishment and their pathetic congressional leaders “are being too cautious as they pick and choose when to stand up to Trump.” On Tuesday, Natasha Lennard reported that it might help Democrats to grow a spine if they study how the Germany left campaigned in the election that ended this past weekend. All the fuss was about the gains made by the Nazis— primarily in the backward states that made up the old East Germany— but you don’t see many media outlets noting that the German leftists, Die Linke, picked up 25 seats, the second biggest number of any of the German parties.

The slightly left of center parties— the Social Democrats and Greens— which are kind of like our own pusillanimous Democrats— were devastated by the voters. “Democrats in the U.S.,” wrote Lennard, “would do well to learn from their mistakes, and instead take notes from Germany’s left-wing party, Die Linke, or The Left— the only party to dramatically exceed expectations on Sunday… The party outperformed, especially with young women voters; it won 27 percent of all first-time voters and gained 30,000 new members in the last month of the election campaign. Their surprise comeback offers a lesson in what is required to build— or at least begin to build— party political resistance to the far-right.”

Die Linke’s relative successes, and the accumulating failures of the Greens and the Social Democrats, are further grounds to reject the centrist liberal insistence on bending to the right to keep the far-right at bay. The centrist strategy, aside from being morally turpitudinous, has been a losing one; it only serves to legitimize far-right frameworks and bolster right-wing parties.

Die Linke, meanwhile, gained significant ground with an unambiguously leftist economic platform, which also— and this is crucial— refused to throw minorities under the bus. They focused on so-called “bread and butter” issues like rent and the rising cost of living, transport, and pensions, and defended trans and immigrant rights. They ran as the only party to robustly oppose far-right politics with strong words and policies.

The election results undermine claims that the left must embrace “anti-woke” positions if we are to challenge the racist far-right. One German party specifically deployed this strategy and failed to win enough votes to enter parliament.

The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, named after its famous leader, formed as a split from Die Linke early last year and pushed a program of economic redistribution and worker protections, alongside anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ stances— a nationalist social democracy, willing to treat many thousands of people as disposable, while pushing to segment the international working class with protectionist nation-state borders. Wagenknecht was not rewarded. Meanwhile, her former party’s clarity on class struggle as a clear priority, but intractable from race and gender struggles, appealed far more.

Hundreds of thousands of German voters disturbed by the rise of the far-right sought an anti-fascist alternative. This was particularly true after the Christian Democrats’ Merz caused public outcry in January when he pushed through a harsh anti-immigrant proposal in parliament by relying on votes from the AfD. The move was seen as a breach of the “firewall” prohibiting collaboration with far-right parties, upheld since 1945. The Christian Democrats may have won the most votes on Sunday, but it was nonetheless the party’s second lowest result in its history.

… There are, of course, limits to mapping Germany’s multiparty liberal capitalist democracy onto the U.S.’s two-party leviathan. Certain similarities and patterns are, however, too strong to ignore. As is true with establishment Democrats, the German parties that span the liberal-to-conservative center have all lurched rightward on anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy in the last decade, while attempting the impossible balancing act of serving capitalist interests and claiming to stand for the working class. Redistributive economic reforms and state investment in social welfare have been insufficient. Ideological commitments to austerity pervade, bolstering the right-wing, anti-immigrant myth that there is too little to go around.

Concerns about fascism from the lips of figures like Merz can ring hollow when AfD leaders have accused— with good reason— the Christian Democrats of copying their far-right anti-immigration program. Likewise, Biden and Kamala Harris warned of the fascistic threat of Trump, but were complicit in genocide, the criminalization of left-wing and pro-Palestine protest, and racist fearmongering over immigration and crime. These liberal capitalists have failed to offer a bulwark to the right, let alone an alternative.

Die Linke’s example is not a clear road map to anti-fascist victory; the AfD earned twice as many votes and further cemented gains in its strongholds in Germany’s east. The mistake, though, would be to treat the German election as a story of political polarization, in need of centrist correction. There has been a repudiation of the liberal center: The Green Party, a green capitalist liberal party that has drifted far from its leftist roots, lost 700,000 voters to Die Linke compared to the 2021 elections; the Social Democrats, who will likely form the governing coalition with Merz’s party, lost 560,000 votes to Die Linke.

The neoliberal austerity paradigms that helped foster 21st century fascist movements will not be the answer. Die Linke’s proposal is a simple one: We don’t need to moderate fascism, we need to oppose it.