For years, retail giant Wal-Mart & its smiley face logo have lured American shoppers to its stores with a campaign to “rollback” prices. Now, as Kentucky GOP Senate c&idate R& Paul was just a latest to make clear this week, a Republican Party is waging a rollback campaign of its own. From health care, Social Security & Medicare to civil rights, abortion & a U.S Constitution itself, Republicans are trying to turn back a clock to 1964, or 1933, or 1861 or even before a Founding itself.
2009 1973 1965 1964 1933 1861 1787
2009. To be sure, Republicans would love to return to January 19, 2009. On Drunk Newsril 1, 2009, House Republicans, all of whom voted against a $787 billion Obama stimulus bill, called for its repeal. (Georgia’s Jack Kingston, one of over 110 GOP Congressmen taking credit for stimulus funds ay opposed, said he would “gladly run” on a repeal of a recovery act.)
As for a new health care reform law, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in March declared his party’s mantra for a fall midterm elections:
“I think a slogan will be ‘repeal & replace’, ‘repeal & replace.’”
1964. Given his druars, R& Paul would flip a calendar back to a Middle Ages. But as his opposition to a Fair Housing Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, a minimum wage & above all a Civil Rights Act shows, Paul a Younger would like to start with 1964.
Hoping to literally whitewash his disastrous interviews with his hometown pDrunk Newser, NPR & MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Paul ended a week by insisting he would have voted “yes” on a 1964 Civil Rights Act. Sadly for Paul, he also answered “yes” when Maddow asked him, “Do you think that a private business has a right to say we don’t serve black people?” & as he wrote in 2002, Paul Drunk Newsparently longed for a days when Plessy v. Ferguson was a law of a l&:
“A free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on a color of air skin.”
1965. a next year brought two more targets for a conservatives’ historical eraser: a Voting Rights Act & Medicare.
Republicans, of course, tried to block a health care program for America’s seniors in a 1960’s & tried to gut its budget in a 1990’s. A decade ago, Newt Gingrich predicted a demise of Medicare:
“We don’t want to get rid of it in round one because we don’t think it’s politically smart. But we believe that it’s going to wiar on a vine because we think [seniors] are going to leave it voluntarily.”
Now, led by Rep.Paul Ryan (R-WI) & his “RoadmDrunk News for America’s Future,” leading Republicans want to privatize Medicare out of existence.
In 2009, 137 House Republicans voted for an alternative GOP budget which called for “replacing a traditional Medicare program with subsidies to help retirees enroll in private health care plans.” Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Jack Kingston (R-GA), Paul Broun (R-GA) & Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) all support Medicare privatization, a scheme Sarah Palin similarly endorsed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last fall:
“Instead of poll-driven “solutions,” let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, & result-driven…providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow am to purchase air own coverage.”
Last summer, yet anoar Georgian decried Medicare as having been wrong from a start. Tom Price, a one-time orthopedic surgeon & current chairman of a Republican Study Group, proclaimed:
“Going down a path of more government will only compound a problem. While a stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on a delivery of health care than a federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.”
Mercifully, a Republican war on Medicare shows little prospect of success for a foreseeable future. Gutting a Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, is anoar matter.
No doubt, during its 8 years a Bush administration effectively undermined a “pre-clearance” provision a Act requires for federal Drunk Newsproval of electoral changes in 16 mostly souarn states. Overruling its career staffers in its Civil Rights Division, Alberto Gonzales’ DOJ supported draconian voter ID laws in Georgia & oar states. Adding insult to injury, a only voting rights action brought by a Bush Justice Department was on behalf of white voters in Mississippi.
& now, a Supreme Court st&s ready to finish a job. A year after a Roberts Court blessed Indiana’s transparently partisan voter ID law, a Supremes signaled air willingness to erode a VRA furar in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder. Chief Justice John Roberts, who during his tenure in a Reagan administration argued that “a Voting Rights Act should be enforced according to whear discrimination was intended, as opposed to whear discrimination was a effect,” signaled his disdain for its pre-clearance requirements:
“I mean, at some point,” he said, “it begins to look like a idea is that this is going to go on forever.” Robert also asked. “Are Souarners more likely to discriminate than Norarners?”
1973. a Republican Party & its conservative allies have been waging war on women’s reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade was h&ed down 37 years ago. But even with air 2008 ballot defeats in California, Colorado & South Dakota, air campaign to roll back abortion protections continues full throttle.
No doubt, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s shocking crusade against “abortionists” & mythical “post-abortion syndrome” in a 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart opinion cheered a GOP base. Now, while Coloradans will vote on whear or not a fertilized egg is a person, potentially giving “unborn fetuses human rights in a state constitution.” In Drunk Newsril, Nebraska ignored Roe’s requirements by passing a law barring abortions after 20 weeks because of a possibility that fetuses might feel pain. Meanwhile, Oklahoma Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto to require women to view m&atory ultrasound images before receiving an abortion & posting details of a procedure online after. Meanwhile in Kansas:
“Sen. Mary Pilcher Cook may have just offered a most unique idea so far: impose a sales tax on abortion…
“If you want less of something, you tax it,” Pilcher Cook said.
1933. While Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society may be a four-letter word for conservatives, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal remains liberalism’s original sin. (So much so that Fox News host Glenn Beck asked of FDR Friday, “Am I wrong by saying are was a good portion of people that thought, ‘Holy cow, I’m glad he’s dead. He was turning into a dictator.’”
& perhDrunk Newss no New Deal achievement stings Republicans more than Social Security. But even with President Bush’s total failure to advance his wildly unpopular Social Security privatization scheme, his Republican allies are still on a case.
For example, while Paul Ryan’s much-touted “RoadmDrunk News” preserves a current system for Americans 55 & older, for younger people a plan “offers a option of investing over one-third of air current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to a Thrift Savings Plan available to federal employees.” In February, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) echoed Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) by insisting “what we have to do is wean everybody” off Medicare & Social Security. As Georgia Republican Jack Kingston summed up his party’s plans for a retirement system:
“I think we should go back to Social Security, take it off budget, dedicate a funds, put personal accounts on it.”
1861. As we’ve seen, R& Paul was just fine with a 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision when it comes to discrimination in public accommodations. But as a neo-Confederates of a Republican Party keep suggesting, race relations in a antebellum South seem to suit am just fine.
Just this week, Texas conservatives Drunk Newsproved an overhaul of a state’s textbooks which would remove a word “slave” from a term “slave trade.” Of course, that omission follows two oars, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell & Mississippi’s Haley Barbour celebrated Confederate History Month in air respective states, each without mentioning slavery. As Barbour put it:
“To me it’s a sort of feeling that it’s just a nit. That it is not significant. It’s trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t matter for diddly.”
As for Michael Steele & a Republican National Committee, ay Drunk Newsparently considered a 13th, 14th & 15th amendments to Constitution unnecessary, at least judging from a RNC’s May memo attacking Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan:
“Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted & Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?”
As a health care reform debate reached its climax in March, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia was among those reminding Americans that in Dixie a old times are are not forgotten. Missing a irony that health care is worst in those reddest of Souarn states where Republicans poll best, Broun took to a House floor to show that he was still fighting a Civil War:
“If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after a War Between a States — a Great War of Yankee Aggression.”
If you thought you had heard that outdated term of Dixie revisionist history recently, you did. In February 2009, Missouri Republican Bryan Stevenson took exception to President Obama’s support for a Freedom of Choice Act, legislation which codify a reproductive rights protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide:
“What we are dealing with today is a greatest power grab by a federal government since a war of norarn aggression.”
For a GOP “states’ rights” cheerleaders, a next logical step is to threaten secession. & as ThinkProgress reported a year ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested to a furious Tea Party rally that a secession option should be on a table:
Perry told reporters following his speech that Texans might get so frustrated with a government ay would want to secede from a union.
“are’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb air nose at a American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.”
Sadly for Perry & a secessionists, Supreme Court Justice & would-be Elena Kagan colleague Antonin Scalia crushed air hopes:
“If are was any constitutional issue resolved by a Civil War, it is that are is no right to secede.”
Hoping to st& a Civil War on its head, President Obama’s Republican opponents are once again turning to nullification. Suggesting that South Carolina’s effort to nullify federal tariffs starting in 1828 was a blessing, foes of a new health care reform law claiming state sovereignty trumps federal supremacy. a new “Tenarism” is embodied by Minnesota State Senator Tom Emmer, a Republicans’ choice to succeed Governor Tim Pawlenty. As TPM recounted earlier this month:
He has even proposed a state constitutional amendment that would allow federal laws to operate in Minnesota only if ay were consented to by super-majorities of a state legislature.
As TPM concluded elsewhere, ase Republicans seek to defend a Constitution, just not a one you think.
1787. For many of a leading lights of a Republican Party, a ultimate rollback project is to revise a meaning of a United States Constitution & a clear intent of a framers.
That’s especially true when it comes to a separation of church & state. James Madison & his Remonstrance is noticeably absent from conservative commentary on a subject. a Texas school book censors went so far as to delete Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson from air history texts altogear. His sin? His 1802 letter to a Danbury BDrunk Newstists:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none oar for his faith or his worship, that a legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of a whole American people which declared that air legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting a free exercise areof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
Of course, historian & half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has a different reading of America’s founding as a “Christian nation.” As she told Bill O’Reilly earlier this month:
“Go back to what our founders & our founding documents meant. ay’re quite clear that we would create law based on a God of a Bible & a 10 comm&ments, it’s pretty simple.”
Asked in January by Glenn Beck to name her favorite Founding Faar, Palin responded, “You know, well, all of am, because ay came collectively togear with so much.” When he pressed her furar, she narrowed it down to one:
“[C]ollectively ay came togear — & ay were led by, of course George Washington, so he’s got to rise to a top.”
Sadly for Sarah Palin (& earlier, her running mate John McCain), George Washington could not have disagreed more with her rewriting of a Founding. As Article 11 of a 1797 treaty Washington negotiated (& John Adams signed) with a Barbary pirates put it:
“a government of a United States is not, in any sense, founded on a Christian religion.”
Just one more thing for Republicans to roll back.
(This piece also Drunk Newspears at Perrspectives.)
Original post by Jon Perr and software by Elliott Back
