Who Were Those Rednecks Embarrassing Their Constituents?

Were Voters In Chattooga County Proud Of Their Little Margie Tuesday Night? Probably

For many people, the picture that remains in their minds after the State of the Union address wasn’t of Biden— nor even of Kyrsten Sinema dressed as… whatever she thought she was dressed as (above). The visual that people took away from Tuesday night was the heckling and performative outrage by clowns like Marjorie Traitor Greene. I wonder what her constituents think, although I suspect I know.

James Carville knows something about rednecks— beyond just drinking Yuengling— and he described Republican members of Congress who heckled Biden— particularly Traitor Greene— as white trash. “I tell people I have the equivalent of a PhD in white trashology, and we saw real white trash on display. The level of white trashdom in the Republican Party is staggering. I mean, for somebody that has observed it for a long time like I have, I’ve never seen it manifest itself on a level that it’s manifesting itself.” OK, fair enough. But not all Republicans were comfortable with the trashy display for the goobers back home in hellholes like Murray, Walker, Gordon and Chattooga counties, where over 80% of the voters went for Trump and where the average COVID vaccination rate is under 40%.

On the one hand, on Wednesday we saw McCarthy and his team defending the monkey-like outbursts from his members, Scalise telling the media that Biden is a liar and deserves to be called a liar and McCarthy blaming the GOP rudeness on Biden: “Well, the president was trying to goad the members, and the members are passionate about it— but the one thing that the president was saying was something that he knew was not true. I've said it many times before: Social Security and Medicare are off the table. He tries to use that for a political ploy. We need to be smart. He's trying to play politics with the debt ceiling, by not negotiating, by lying about our position... We need to be smart. Don't take the bait.” Except… Dozens of Republicans have called and continue to call for not just privatizing and shrinking Social Security and Medicare but for abolishing them both. Utah Senator Mike Lee was captured on the video explaining to conservative voters back home that the reason he was running for office was to “get rid of Social Security.”

Yesterday, Susan Glasser, writing for the New Yorker, noted that the far right extremists in the House acted up and that “even McCarthy’s audible shushing could not get a few House Republican hecklers to shut up. And if their goal was to rattle the eighty-year-old President, embattled and down in the polls and facing questions even from within his own party about whether he should run again, it’s safe to say that it didn’t work. Biden, it seemed, had carefully prepared for their antics. Had he scripted their reaction, he could not have asked for a better foil than Marjorie Taylor Greene… dressed for the TV cameras in an all-white fur-trimmed outfit that made her seem like a villain in a Disney movie.”

“It’s your fault!” a Republican shouted at Biden later in his speech, right after the President had paid emotional tribute to a dad who had lost his daughter to a fentanyl overdose. Every boo from then on might as well have been a campaign contribution to Biden’s reëlection. The dystopian Republican response later in the evening from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Arkansas governor and former Trump White House press secretary, peddling Fox News talking points about the culture wars and portraying Biden’s America as an American-carnage-style hellscape conjured from her former boss’s Twitter feed, only reinforced the point. Joe Biden has been lucky in his enemies these last few years.

Not all Republicans were thrilled at the red neck behavior from Traitor Greene and some of her cronies. Emily Brooks and Mike Lillis reported that Louisiana right-winger Garrett Graves “said while he thought the president deserves respect, he understands why some members found it difficult to ‘uphold decorum. The office of the president deserves respect, period, agree or disagree. I got a little uneasy in my seat and pretty frustrated listening to some of the allegations that are just patently false’ Graves added. Once the vocal pushback started, though, it didn’t stop. Later in the speech, some Republicans chanted ‘secure the border’ and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) yelled ‘It’s your fault’ when Biden mentioned fentanyl deaths. Some thought the uproar went too far. ‘I think it’s important that proper decorum be addressed not only in the chamber, but everywhere we go. And we should hold ourselves to a higher ground,’ said Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH), chair of the more centrist Republican Governance Group. ‘That’s something we shouldn’t engage in, and we should at least show the respect that’s due and owed [to] the office of president when he comes to our chamber to speak.’… A CNN flash poll found 72 percent of adult viewers, including 67 percent of independents, had a very or somewhat positive reaction to Biden’s speech.”

Ironically, Trump is using the same line of attack against his Republican primary rivals as Biden is using against GOP House extremists— the general conservative animus towards Social Security and Medicare. “Trump,” reported Isaac Arnsdorf, “moved to wield the issue as a wedge in the primary, particularly against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with a video message last month urging Republicans to use negotiations over raising the debt ceiling to cut spending but not ‘a single penny’ from Social Security or Medicare. He also posted a short video clip of a younger DeSantis praising Paul Ryan, the former House budget chairman from Wisconsin who famously proposed replacing Medicare with giving seniors money for private health insurance. The emphasis reflects potential vulnerability for Republican rivals who were elected to powerful posts in the pre-Trump tea party era, embracing austerity in the last showdown over raising the federal debt limit. As Trump’s campaign has signaled an interest in stoking debate over entitlements, Biden used his State of the Union address on Tuesday to similarly bait Republicans, producing a rowdy spectacle in which they booed his accusation that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare. ‘President Trump has been clear where he stands on the issue,’ Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. ‘Others will have to decide which side they’re on. And others will have to answer to past positions they’ve taken.’”

Protecting Social Security, in contrast with other Republicans who were more hawkish on deficits and spending, was also a major theme of Trump’s 2016 campaign. His avowed stance, however, is at odds with Trump’s own record as president: Each of his White House budget proposals included cuts to Social Security and Medicare programs.

Several other prominent Republicans making moves toward running for president have a history of embracing cuts.

“I support what Ryan is trying to do in terms of reforming entitlements,” DeSantis said in a 2012 newspaper questionnaire. “It’s not a voucher, it’s premium support.”

As a member of Congress, DeSantis voted for three nonbinding budget resolutions calling for raising the retirement age and slowing future spending growth for Social Security. He received a 0 percent rating from the Alliance for Retired Americans, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. During a previous showdown over the debt limit in 2013, DeSantis said he supported including Social Security and Medicare in the negotiations.

“I think we need to restructure some of these entitlements,” he said in a 2013 CNN interview. “I think we should try to look at entitlements, look at restructuring Medicare so it’s delivering services at a lower cost to the taxpayer.” Spokespeople for DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.

Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador who is planning to announce her own presidential bid this month, also praised Ryan’s Medicare proposal at the time and said lawmakers should examine Medicare and Social Security spending to address federal debt.

“What they need to be doing is looking at entitlements,” Haley said in a 2010 interview on Fox News. “Look at Social Security. Look at Medicaid. Look at Medicare. Look at these things, and let’s actually go to the heart of what is causing government to grow, and tackle that.”

Fiscal conservatives have fought Social Security and Medicare since their inception as crowning achievements of Democratic presidents, and rising national debt has intensified calls for overhauling the programs in recent decades. But charting a new course for entitlements has also long proved a graveyard for Republican ambitions.

In 2004, President George W. Bush seized on his reelection victory by making his top domestic priority diverting Social Security savings into private accounts, declaring, “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” The initiative smashed into congressional resistance and contributed to tanking Bush’s public approval.

Bush’s proposal resurfaced this month in a speech by Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president who is now taking steps toward his own White House run. In the Feb. 2 speech to the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, Pence called it “an idea whose time has come.”

“I think the day could come when we could replace the New Deal with a better deal and literally give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account that the government would oversee,” Pence said in the speech, first reported by Yahoo News.

Pence’s campaign-in-waiting has signaled staking out a sharp contrast with Trump on this issue. Top Pence adviser Marc Short elaborated in a recent op-ed in the National Review, arguing that Republicans demanding spending cuts without touching Social Security or Medicare were being disingenuous or unrealistic.

“I understand that some Republicans are reluctant to address entitlement reform because Democrats’ demagoguery on the issue in the next election cycle would hurt them,” Short said, “but that does not justify misleading the American people by claiming that we can solve the fiscal crisis by taking a scalpel to ‘wokeism’ or the military-industrial complex.”

…Other potential entrants in the Republican primary, such as former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Sen. Tim Scott (SC) and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, also voted for Ryan’s budget when they were in Congress.