The Republican domestic agenda is a reform agenda. The want to reform Social Security, the tax code, tort law, the budget - to reduce spending, federal regulatory law, the design of the House and the design of the government itself.
Plenty has been said and much more will be said about Social Security reform. The Pubs want partial privatization, likely funded through huge new debt and possible increases in payroll taxes and reductions in benefits. The Dems see partial privatization as the first step towards total dissolution of Social Security and argue that increasing the deficit is risky at best. Bush has said that he wants legislation passed by the end of2005.
Tax reform is attractive on its face. Who hasn't struggled to understand their tax obligations or what deductions apply? But tax reform is a nice, bland label for making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, for ending estate taxes and taxes on dividends, for ending personal deductions for state taxes and adding taxes for the value of medical benefits provided by employers. The tax code is often used as a tool for implementing social policy and we should expect that to continue, knowing that the Pubs' social policy is far from progressive. For example, the use of a VAT to reduce or eliminate federal income tax (an option raised by the Pubs) is regressive, disproportionately affecting lower income citizens.
The Pubs have long desired tort reform. Their corporate sponsors want out from under the threat of significant damage awards for negligent acts on their part. The insurance companies particularly want to limit those awards. Bush likes to imply that the health insurance crisis is largely a result of frivolous law suits and unreasonable damage awards, but the government number crunchers have shown that the impact is negligible. The reference to health insurance is a classic redirection of our attention from an issue we won't support - limiting our legal options - to one we would support - making health care more accessible. We can't let him frame this issue and we should look to John Edwards to speak out loudly on it. He has credibility. We should also find cases where large damage awards resulted in better consumer protection and put forth the average John Doe who used the courts to address severe wrongs.
Reforming the budget to restrain spending? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Sorry, really. But not even conservatives believe this one. We should look for the issue of deficit reduction to be used as a PR tool, hauled out to support other initiatives but ignored when not convenient. The best proof of this that the numbers Bush is using to craft his new budget exclude the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the cost of privatizing social security. On top of that, he's using past projections of the total deficit instead of actual numbers, which let Bush claim that he reduced the debt when the debt he says he made go away was never incurred. (If I think that my total personal debt at the end of the year will be $500 and it ends up being $400, is it accurate for me to run around bragging that I cut my debt by $100? I didn't think so.) To add insult to injury, Bush's budget also assumes the largest one year jump in tax revenues ever to occur - a great example of faith-based reasoning. The bottom line is that Bush's budget and deficit reduction plans are simply fuzzy math, at best.
Regulatory reform is an area of high risk for citizens. It includes environmental protection, worker safety laws, media consolidation, government oversight of businesses, and a wide range of other areas. Look for reform that favors corporate America, packaged in language of economic growth and national security.
Reforming the design of the House is a nice way of saying that they want to rewrite the rules to ensure House Democrats have no voice, no sway, no opportunity to affect the legislation being proposed, considered, or passed. The most critical area here is Sen. Frist's threats to eliminate the Democrats' ability to use the filibuster to block the most extreme Republican proposals, specifically the approval of extreme conservative judges. On top of that, they also want to change the rules so that they can confer favor upon those colleagues who toe the line, punish those who don't, and keep the ethics committee off the back of DeLay and any other ethically sketchy members. The one upside here is that they may actually address the 9/11 Commission recommendations to form one committee to oversee Homeland Security instead of the fifty or so we have now.
Finally, the idea of reforming the government is interesting and vague. There's no discussion of they historical Republican efforts to reduce the size of government or reform it in favor of states' rights. Instead, there is talk of constitutional amendments, limiting the judiciary's ability to rule on the constitutionality of specific legislation, impeaching judges who make unpopular legal decisions (the activist judges spiel), repealing the 28th amendment (to allow foreign born citizens to run for president), and discussions on how to legally neuter the party that isn't in power.
All in all, the Pubs are raring to go and want to flex their majority muscle. The Dems need to coalesce as the opposition party and fight tooth and nail, choosing their battles wisely, framing the issues clearly, challenging the PR machine that presents unpopular legislation as a moral issue, and standing firm in the face of a majority party that seems drunk with power. We'll lose again and again. But we'll win some. And we need to have a long term vision, using every win and every loss to inform and educate the public - red and blue - on the real agenda and consequences of ceding the government to the extreme right.
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