What a proud day for Republicans.
Oh, we’re not referring to that impeachment thing.
Impeachment is a political process with political consequences and it should not be confused with an attempt to hold someone accountable for potentially criminal actions. The fact that dozens of senators – people who have clawed their way to the top of the political pyramid – voted to protect their personal political futures as opposed to, say, protecting American democracy, should not surprise anyone.
It will be up to the rest of us in the coming years to convince them that their political calculations were wrong. If they were wrong.
So, what else happened this week to warm the hearts of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and other thoughtful, truth-seeking Republicans?
How about an international commission of public health and medical experts releasing a report that concludes that Donald Trump’s presidency “jeopardized the health of the world and its people.”
This week, the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era published a chilling report that describes the devastating impacts of four years of Trump – and forty years of Republican policies – on the health and well-being of Americans and American democracy.
The Lancet Commission is an international group of American, British, and Canadian commissioners from a variety of disciplines, including public health, law, economics, politics, epidemiology, and medicine. The commission has been studying the impact of the Trump administration’s policies on public health and American society since 2017.
The report notes that Republican-favored policies enacted since the 1970’s have resulted in:
- Greater inequality
- An actual decline in US life expectancy
- Mass incarceration characterized by stark racial inequities
- An epidemic of drug overdose deaths among working-class people driven by efforts of drug firms to maximize profits through promotion of unconstrained use of opioids
- Implementation of market-oriented health policies that shifted medical resources towards higher-income people while burdening middle class Americans with unaffordable out-of-pocket costs
- The use of public money to stimulate the corporate takeover of vital health resources
- Funding cuts that have led to a 20 percent reduction in the front-line public health workforce
But while Republican policies have been degrading American health in measurable ways for decades, the commission found that Trump’s presidency was especially destructive.
Trump, they wrote, “exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilize racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health.”
“His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care. His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection.”
In the conclusion of their report, they wrote:
“During the Trump era the USA was led by a president whose disdain for science and manipulation of hatred jeopardize the health of the world and its people. President Trump’s denunciations of the status quo ante and promises to return the USA to greatness, camouflaged policies that enriched people who were already very wealthy and gave corporations license to degrade the environment for financial gain.“
“He halted progress in almost every domain (table 4), undermined care for low-income people and the middle class, weakened pandemic preparedness; withheld food and shelter from those in need, and persecuted those who were vulnerable and oppressed.”
Well, they’re just doctors and lawyers and public health experts from multiple countries, so what do they know? We should find out what Sean Hannity thinks.
And to top off the week, yesterday evening – after the Senate declined to convict Trump of insurrection – the Washington Post published a searing commentary by columnist Greg Sargent, in which he called out the Republican Party’s “ongoing and intensifying radicalization.”
Sargent quoted a frighteningly-prescient 2012 essay co-authored by Norman J. Ornstein of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute and Thomas E. Mann of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institute which called the Republican Party an “insurgent outlier in American politics.”
Now that Republicans have openly embraced actual insurgency, this essay, though nine years old, seems tragically relevant.
Ornstein and Mann rejected the both-sides-do-it argument and concluded that the source of the most bitter partisanship in current American politics is the Republican Party. “We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years,” they wrote, “and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
The party, they wrote, is “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Ornstein and Mann quoted Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican staffer who wrote, “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”
The party of Lincoln, I am sure.
The Lancet Commission’s report is 49 pages of data, charts, analysis, and footnotes, so you probably won’t see it mentioned on Fox News. But every American should read it. There is a link below.
The Washington Post essays, sadly, are behind the newspaper’s pay wall (I think), so if you don’t have a subscription you might not be able to see them. Still, here are the links.
February 14, 2021
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32545-9/fulltext
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/lancet-commission-examines-trumps-covid-response/story?id=75826837
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem. – The Washington Post