The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down the expected ruling the other day and now the Republicans can get their panties in a bunch just like the Democrats did when Trump’s Muslim Ban was imposed. I mean, the decision was not a big surprise to anyone, regardless of the merits of the case. The Ninth is a liberal court, the proclamation they were ruling on was a badly lawyered, badly written piece of trash and the President had spent the previous week attacking every judge he could. What the hell did everyone expect?
The reality is, if the Ban had been written correctly it would have floated through with no comment and almost no notice. It was a blundering, incompetent piece of work, Nowit has to be fixed if the White House wants to get its way and there’s nothing Trump wants more than to get his way… in everything. That’s the problem. If we had a functional President, one who was more interested in moving the needs of the country ahead of his ego, this would be a piece of cake. But we don’t. We have a blustering bully who only cares only that he be perceived as right in all things.
If the administration really wants to fix this – and get their way, it’s really very easy. All they have to do is admit that the first draft was a piece of crap and pull it. They then can write a new ban with the correct legal phrasing and the important salient points and it will have no trouble passing into use.
But that’s too easy for the idiots that are currently running the country. If Trump was really interested in national security instead of always being right, that’s exactly what he would do. But to do that Trump would have to admit that his administration is not perfect. No way that’s going to happen.
In reality this country doesn’t need a ban to stop immigration from anywhere they don’t want it. This was all about Trump wanting to show all the fools that voted for him that he was fulfilling his campaign promises. The White House has made a big deal in telling the world that the seven countries they picked for the ban were already singled out by Obama. That’s one of the only true things this administration has said since it took office. These seven countries were singled out because none of them have the internal structure to provide the information needed for vetting their people by US Customs & Immigration. So all we have to do, and we are probably already doing it, is say to these people; “If you can’t give us the information we need from your country, you can’t come into ours.” That puts the onus on the countries in question and gives our C & I all the leeway they need to do anything they want. It’s very simple but the Trump administration being ignorant as well as non-functional, couldn’t get that one sentence on paper.
Instead, Trump, Bannon and Miller thought they could get all the dummies in their fan base all hot to trot if they threw them this moldy bone.
*****
Mitch McConnell, the blight that walks like a man was on the tube the other day whining about how slow the approval of Trump’s cabinet has been and how the Democrats are being obstructive in the process. Really Mitch, after what the GOP did during Obama’s 8 years?
Okay, let’s look at it. Of the eight cabinet members so far approved by the Senate, at least two of whom can’t walk and chew gum, Republicans have voted 461 yes, 3 no and 4 abstain. Among those candidates that were approved were Jeff Sessions, a confirmed bigot and racist as Attorney General, Betsy DeVos, a know nothing political contributor as Secretary of Education and Tom Price a billionaire Congressman who recently bought stock in a company after introducing legislation that would help it.
The Democrats on the other hand voted 237 no, 191 yes and 4 abstain. McConnell considers this as being obstructive. Remember only three GOP no votes were recorded through the voting on some of the worst candidates in the history of the cabinet nominations. Neither Sessions, nor DeVos nor Price could normally be elected dogcatcher, yet the GOP Senators almost unanimously and certainly mindlessly, voted them into the Cabinet. The Democrats, on the other hand, seemed, because of the numbers, to have voted more on the merits of the candidates as they saw them. I haven’t even mentioned that one of the candidates is Elaine Chao as Secretary of Transportation. Ms Chao is the wife of the big mouth in this conversation, Mitch McConnell. Just because no one has mentioned nepotism in this appointment doesn’t mean that she is qualified for this job. After all, anyone with the bad taste to stay married to the likes of McConnell for 24 years can’t really be qualified for anything.
To be fair, it used to be common for even the opposition party to vote in just about anyone the President nominated but that went by the board with the Republican’s treatment of Merrick Garland and it looks like it’s going to be the way things are from now on. To be even fairer, there has never been a President who has had so many bad nominations for the cabinet. Having already pointed out three losers out of the eight nominations approved we should go on to point out that of those remaining, Steve Mnuchin, for Secretary of the Treasury owned a bank that was responsible for thousands of foreclosures during the crash, putting helpless people out of their homes just so he could stuff a couple of bucks more into the trunk of his Mercedes. Wilber Ross known as the King of bankruptcy, has off-shored over 2700 jobs since 2004 even though he is worth almost three billion. Then there’s sleazebag Andrew Puzder, a billionaire fast food franchise owner, who is against minimum wage, against paid overtime and wants to replace workers with robots is up for Secretary of Labor. Of course the best known is Ben Carson who has already admitted that he knows nothing about either housing or urban development for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a brilliant choice by Trump standards and finally Rick Perry who had no idea when he was nominated for Secretary of Energy that the main part of the job had to do with ruling over our nuclear weapons. This is the clown who wanted to get rid of this department but wasn’t bright enough to remember what it was.
Yes, it’s definitely a rogue’s gallery of stupidity and incompetence but it’s also a list of billionaires and millionaires to lead programs that are supposed to benefit the average guy. This is Trump’s way of fulfilling his promises to elevate the average guy, to help with jobs, paychecks and everything else that the poor fools who voted for him thought he would get them. This is a candidate that was supposed to change things. He’s going to change them all right, but not in any way that will help the suckers that voted for him. Trump knew, before he promised the jobs that they no longer existed. They had already gone to robots. He also knew that the only way he could help the poor conned suckers that voted for him in the vain hope of maybe getting some work, would be through proper education and then he nominated a useless rich bitch as Secretary of Education, a woman who hasn’t a clue as to what’s wrong or how to fix it. None of those fools that voted for Trump cared that they were electing a convicted con man. They sat there and let him run one more con on them and now they are going to pay for it, the hard way.
*******
The noise out of the Trump White House has been deafening. Trump and his minions have found a way to fight with everyone and his brother but much of it really doesn’t have much importance. Most of it is just political rhetoric. This may be mostly true of the Muslim Ban where the only problem with the ban is really about the way it was written, announced and implemented and not what it actually does, which has been going on for years with no problem.
But there is one huge issue that is destined to stick awfully hard in the Republican’s craw. It may not affect the White House very much because of what seems to be Trump’s vacillation on it. I’m speaking about the ACA, Obamacare. This is an issue that threatens to sink the Republican Party even more than it does Trump.
Let’s start by making a couple of observations. The ACA, which is basically a good program, has a lot of problems. Those problems are for the most part solvable. But the Republicans because of their philosophical basis cannot begin to solve them. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s pretty simple. The Republicans, because of their leanings toward big business and their necessity of listening to the top one percent that pays their bills are locked into a health care system that incorporates and practically depends on the insurance industry. A long as that situation exists the ACA cannot be economically viable.
Why? Well, let’s look at what we have now. Our current system is based on getting the insurance we all need from private companies, not the government. That causes a huge loss of medical function to corporate profits. Compare the cost of the government to maintain Medicare and Medicaid, which is about 4% to that of private insurance companies to maintain Obamacare, which is between 20% and 40%. Right there we have the difference between a viable system and a system that will bankrupt the country.
To see how this works we have to go back and look a how the ACA came into being. Obama, in order to move the legislation forward had to play nice with the insurance companies that had huge lobby positions in the GOP. This led to the insurance companies actually writing part of the bill. So now buyers cannot buy insurance across state lines resulting in the insurance companies having huge monopolies, which create enormous profits for them, profits that come out of peoples pockets and the US Treasury. This has also led to insurance companies dropping coverage in areas that didn’t give them a high enough profit margins. The mandatory coverage part of the law has resulted in insurance companies being able to sell enormously overpriced policies to young healthy buyers just so they don’t have to pay the government a penalty. None of this should exist in a new law but all of it exists now because the Republicans want it to, in their service to the insurance lobbies. That is precisely the disease that will poison the entire effort of the GOP to come up with some kind of functional plan to replace the ACA. Everything they now speak about has some kind of built in profit margin for business. This is the antithesis of functional health care. In the search for functional health care one must ignore the concept of profit. The only consideration must be good health care at an affordable price.
And there is another big consideration that adds to the GOP reticence in coming out with a new plan for the ACA, one that may be why they have come up with nothing in the seven years since it passed and they first voted to abolish it. Voters! All the GOP plans look to help the younger buyers, the ones who are being killed by the current plan. But those young voters are mostly Democrats. The older voters who voted for Trump in this election and usually vote Republican will be hurt by the GOP shrinking of services in all the new GOP plans.
It’s an interesting conundrum if you are a Republican. The things you want to change will hurt your voters and cost you congressional seats, but you have to do them in order to appease your financial backers whose money allows you to win those seats. Be interesting to see which way they go and how much damage either decision causes.