With the 2022 midterm election now less than a month away, this may be a good time to ponder what the Republican Party would do should they manage to win a majority in the House, the Senate, or both. And in some respects they have been helpfully candid as to their plans should their aspirations come to pass.
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It isn’t exactly a pretty picture. Among the more brazenly shameless admissions on the the part of leading Republicans have been Sen. Lindsey Graham’s promise to advance legislation to ban abortion nationwide, and Sen. Rick Scott’s agenda proposing to sunset Social Security and Medicare.
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However, the most harrowing scenario cooked up by the power mad GOP is their plan to take the nation’s economy hostage by demanding that Democrats submit to their policy demands or else they will refuse to negotiate the debt ceiling. Those GOP proposals include cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and slashing benefits for seniors and healthcare recipients.
To be clear, the debt ceiling defines the government’s limits on issuing credit in order to pay its bills. If it isn’t appropriately adjusted, the result would be the U.S. government falling into default. That would create an economic crisis in the U.S. and around the world. It is the equivalent of the “nuclear” option for the economy. And Republicans are threatening to drop that bomb if they don’t get their way.
This isn’t idle speculation. Leading Republicans in Congress have openly expressed their intentions to deploy this political weapon. Bloomberg News reports that “‘The debt limit is clearly one of those tools that Republicans — that a Republican-controlled Congress — will use… ‘ said Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.).” And that… “House Republicans are openly threatening to cause an economic catastrophe in order to realize their obsession with slashing Medicare and Social Security,” Henry Connelly, a Pelosi spokesman, said in a Tuesday statement to Bloomberg Government.”
It should come as no surprise that this economic terrorism is being ignited by the GOP cult messiah, Donald Trump. For months he has been chastising Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, for not issuing debt ceiling threats to allow a default. As recently as last month Trump whined on his floundering social media scam, Truth Social, that…
“Mitch McConnell is giving the Democrats everything they want. He is their lapdog! He didn’t stop trillions of dollars in spending by refusing to use the Debt Ceiling as a negotiating tool. He gave it up for nothing. […] in order to destroy America.”
Republicans have already been acting to tank the economy. They have voted against several bills that would have eased inflation, and lowered the costs of gas and healthcare. The threat of that betrayal, and the devastating default that Republicans are embracing, has not been getting the media attention that such catastrophes merit. Virtually the only recent television coverage has been on MSNBC by Chris Hayes, who warned that…
“If the economy is the number one issue to voters, then there is one party that will have an incentive to make it better. And that party is the one that has the presidency. The Democrats.
“The other side, the Republicans, have an explicit incentive to make the economy worse. And I will tell you, having covered the Tea Party Congress of 2011, amidst the recovery from the financial crisis, i feel confident in predicting that if Republicans win control of one or both houses of Congress, they will do everything in their power to sabotage the economy to best set them up to retake the White House in 2024.”
.@chrislhayes: "I feel confident in predicting that if Republicans win control of one or both houses of Congress, they will do everything in their power to sabotage the economy to best set them up to retake the White House in 2024." pic.twitter.com/2UFp9xFKQB
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) October 13, 2022
And Hayes’ guest during this segment, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, concurred, saying that…
“The Republicans are loud and clear about this. They’ve already said, for example, that they will use the debt ceiling negotiations. […] There are already Republicans saying that if they can get control of the House or the Senate then they’re going to hold hostage things like Social Security and Medicare.”
Republicans are aiming a weapon of mass economic destruction at the United States and all of its citizens. And there is little being done about it by the media, whose job it is to keep people informed of threats such as this. What the GOP is plotting would produce more harm than the recent hurricane in Florida. But there aren’t any hourly updates about the path of this disaster. That needs to change – and fast!
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