#GOP deathwish

[liberalsarecool]

Trump is bonkers. The GOP has a deathwish. Their faustian gamble with Trump came up a goose egg, now they will go down with the ship, guzzling the kool-aid.

Elect Democrats and restore American sanity.

[nurfe-blog]

The GOP Donor Class Is a Pack of Ungrateful Brats by Eric Levitz, New York Magazine (5 October 2017)

Levitz argues that the ire of the GOP’s ‘donor class’, which he defines as Koch-type funders, the finance industry, and agribusiness, towards the Republican Party and its leadership is wholly misplaced, for three reasons. First reason: Trump alone has achieved many of their deregulatory goals: mining waste regulations, insulation for financial advisors, fewer workplace injury protections, etc., ad nauseam. Moreover, he has appointed a judiciary conservative enough to solidify many of those gains. Indeed, (Levitz doesn’t mention this but) the crown jewel of the judiciary appointments, Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, succeeded only by way of McConnell’s wholly cynical and despicable strategy of blocking Obama from appointing Scalia’s replacement.

Second reason: The GOP and its leadership are beholden to more players than their donors. Their voters, after all, need to return them to office for those donations to have made any difference. So, the donors should complain only if they made donations that would work to insulate the GOP politicians from voters ire if the politicians enacted unpopular policies. And the first reason suggests this is false.

Third reason: The GOP has acted against the will of the voters and in favor of the donors in the nine-month march to repeal Obamacare, and this has been the single most glaring policy failure of the Trump administration. It ignited intense opposition, entrenched that opposition against future overtures by the President or by Congress, increasingly jeopardizes the GOP’s House majority, and most importantly, wasted time from ventures that would’ve been more likely to succeed had the well not been poisoned (e.g., infrastructure or a tax cut for this very donor class).

The donors, Levitz concludes, are getting almost everything they want and remain dissatisfied, at minimum, closing their wallets, and worse, looking to back Bannon-ish challengers to sitting GOP members of Congress. Where Levtiz’s analysis slips is in not attempting to account for the dissatisfaction: why would people who got most of what they asked for, way more than they would’ve gotten under Clinton, the judicial conditions to get more in the future, demand that their chosen candidates pursue a strategy that risks all of their gains? Plausible hypotheses: obliterating Obama’s legacy and name means more to them than we’ve credited; they’re calculating the costs of Obamacare’s taxes as greater than the gains of a significant tax cut; in their hearts (i.e., subconsciously) they don’t want any of this monstrous stuff, and are trying to realize the conditions necessary for a liberal majority to undo the horrors they cannot deny they’ve done to society; or, worse, they don’t care about any of the gains to themselves and really want a President Bannon-type, which is just to say that they have a deathwish and the money and power to make it so.