We’ve already heard repeatedly, and will hear incessantly during and after tomorrow’s health care summit, that use of the budget reconciliation process to enact changes to the Senate-passed bill represents an effort to “ram through” controversial legislation through some sort of obscure, draconian procedure. Conservatives have taken to calling it the “nuclear option” (appropriating a term that actually referred to the Republican threat in 2005 to outlaw all filibusters of judicial nominees).
Aside from the fact that the House and Senate have both duly enacted health reform legislation, and are utilizing reconciliation simply to make changes in the Senate bill that Sen. Scott Brown has promised to block, the idea that reconciliation is not a legitimate way to deal with health care issues is wrong from any historical point of view, particularly for Republicans who have resorted to it regularly.
Long-time health care journalist Julie Rovner has an important article up on the NPR site documenting the long history of reconciliation bills with major health care components. To hit a couple of highlights, SCHIP was created via a reconciliation bill (the 1997 Balanced Budget Act touted by Republicans at the time as an epochal achievement), and so, too, was the legislation allowing people to continue health insurance policies terminated by their employers (the term for this procedure, COBRA, refers to the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986).
Sometimes Republicans claim that reconciliation is inappropriate for health care legislation because the procedure was designed for provisions strictly intended to reduce the federal budget deficit. According to CBO, of course, the House and Senate health care bills do in fact reduce budget deficits. Moreover, this particular Republican complaint rings rather hollow since GOPers used reconciliation to enact the mother of all budget busters, the Bush tax cuts of 2001.
The reality is that reconciliation, at least after its incredibly expansive use by the Reagan administration in 1981 to enact much of its agenda, has long been understood as the way Congress gets important business done on a broad array of issues that affect federal spending. Calling it the “nuclear option” or “draconian” doesn’t change that history, and progressives really need to push back on that distorted construction.
Month: February 2010
Need a good piece of evidence for the proposition that the latter-day Senate filibuster tactic is aimed at obstruction of action by the majority rather than opposition to questionable policies? Look at the final vote on the first “jobs bill” (a relatively small package of payroll tax credits for companies hiring new employees, and money for transportation construction). Six GOP senators who voted against cloture on the bill, and two others who were absent on the cloture vote (the functional equivalent of a “no” vote) flipped and voted for final passage.
As Josh Marshall points out:
It shows you a lot of the cowardice, buck-passing and general nonsense behind the current use of the filibuster. By any logic, the numbers should go the other way: the number of people who are willing to allow a vote should if anything be greater than the number who are willing to vote for the legislation on its merits.
You’d think so, but “logic” isn’t the ruling principle in the Senate right now.
Democrats who are anxious about the white house summit on health care tomorrow should find comfort and encouragement in Michael Gerson’s WaPo op-ed. “Obama’s Health Reform Gamble Raises Questions of Judgment.” Gerson, who served as President Bush’s chief speechwriter and a senior GOP policy advisor, provides perhaps the best bellwether in newspaper journalism for Democratic policy-making, in that, whatever he advocates is designed to support Republican political interests, and therefore will likely screw everyone but the rich. Here’s Gerson’s critique of the budget reconciliation process:
…Enacting health reform through the quick, dirty shove of the reconciliation process — would add coercion to arrogance…the imposition of a House-Senate health-reform hybrid would confirm the worst modern image of the Democratic Party, that of intellectual arrogance. Parties hurt themselves most when they confirm a destructive public judgment. In this case, Americans would see Democrats pushing a high-handed statism…Obama’s decision on the use of reconciliation will define his presidency. If he trusts in his charmed political fortunes and lets the dice fly, it will raise the deepest questions about his judgment.
In Gerson-think a simple majority is tantamount to a “dirty shove,” “coercion,” “arrogance,” and “high-handed statism.” He suggests it’s “intellectual arrogance” to believe that a true majority requires less than 60 percent. His readers are supposed to buy the argument that passing legislation with anything less than 60 Senate votes is outrageous.
Gerson warns that budget reconciliation “would almost certainly maintain conservative and Republican intensity through the November elections” — as if there was any chance of that not happening. He says budget reconciliation “would both insult House and Senate Republicans and motivate them for future fights.” What, not like now? We certainly don’t want to hurt their tender feelings, since they have been so kind when they were in majority.
Gerson’s readers are supposed to believe that, if only the selfish Democrats would cave on the principles that elected them, Republicans would become more cooperative. He warns, “The minority would not only be defeated on health reform but its rights would be permanently diminished — a development that would certainly be turned against Democrats when they lose their majority” — which sounds an awful lot like majority rule.
Few Dems will be hustled by Gerson’s polemic. No one believes the Republicans would not use budget reconciliation to enact any part of their agenda, as they did to ram through Bush’s deficit-expanding tax cuts and in their failed attempt to open the Arctic National Wildlife refuge to oil drilling.
More importantly, majority rule — 50 percent plus one — is more than defensible. It’s a fundamental principle of great democracies. Arguing otherwise, that the party in minority should have a permanent stranglehold on the fate of all reform legislation– is the real elitist arrogance.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s health care “summit,” Ben Smith of Politico has a pretty good summary of the five distinct audiences the President must think about in handling this event: House Democrats, Senate Democrats, the Public, the Fans of Bipartisanship, and Republicans. But there are obviously priorities in his messaging:
He’ll be making the sale, for the umpteenth time, to an American public that supports aspects of health care legislation but opposes the bill. He’ll be pitching Beltway graybeards obsessed, as always, with bipartisanship. He’ll be appealing to moderate Senate Democrats to back reconciliation.
But most important will be his pitch to a handful of conservative Democrats in the House who will have to switch their votes and vote for the Senate health care bill for it to pass into law.
Smith’s right that the most important immediate audience is House Democrats. In the longer run, however, this summit is a very important landmark in his overall positioning of himself and his party for the midterm elections in November. The reality in Washington is that a Republican Party that is becoming more ideologically extreme each day is using every procedural tool and political trick you can imagine to avoid any real action on any significant issue. If that reality becomes more generally known because of the summit, then it will be a success for Obama and Democrats, regardless of how it plays with the Republicans, the pundit class, or Democrats who are wavering on health reform.
It’s already died a thousand deaths, but the idea of a public option as a component of health care reform seems to have finally expired with the cold water dashed by Sen. Jay Rockefeller on the scenario under which the Senate would add a public option in a reconciliation bill. This is momentous because Rockefeller was well known as the most passionate defenders of the public option in the Senate. It’s generally being interpreted as an act of honesty by someone who knows the votes aren’t there, and doesn’t want to perpetuate false hopes aroused by the recent movement back towards the public option among Senate Democrats.
Some progressives are angry at Rockefeller. Others blame the White House, particularly given Robert Gibbs’ statement today that the votes aren’t there. One observer, TPM’s Brian Beutler, even suggests the possibility that this is all a bluff to avoid complicating Thursday’s heath care summit, and that Democrats might revive the public option yet again in the wake of what is sure to be a contemptuous rejection of the President’s proposal at the summit.
That’s probably wishful thinking, or at least a real reach. But it’s certainly maddening to many progressives to see their hopes raised and dashed again. I’m not a public option hardliner myself, but do understand that for many single-payer advocates the public option has always represented a big compromise with the idea of a system dominated by private health insurers, who will benefit significantly from the new customers they will obtain via an individual mandate. Moreover, it’s been deeply frustrating to watch senators in both parties who claim to be mainly worried about the cost to taxpayers of health reform draw a line in the sand against the public option, which would almost certainly ;reduce those costs significantly.
Still, the only two things that have really changed since the Senate passed a bill without a public option on Christmas Eve is that Democrats lost their 60th Senate seat, and nonetheless worked out a process for compromising between House and Senate bills and getting a final product enacted. Until a couple of weeks ago, virtually no one thought that final product might include a public option. Now it looks most unlikely that it will-yet again. The long goodbye to this iconic detail of health reform continues just a bit longer.
This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it appeared on February 21, 2010.
Because Congress failed to adopt a bipartisan deficit commission on its own, President Obama created one through executive order on Thursday. This comes as a disappointment to members of both parties who had endorsed the Conrad-Gregg bill: that proposal would have forced the Congress to vote on the commission’s recommendations, while the administration’s initiative does not.
The failure of Conrad-Gregg was surprising as well as troubling. By last December, the bill had garnered almost three dozen cosponsors across party lines and seemed to be gaining momentum. Although Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell had not formally signed on, he had made a number of favorable public statements. (Last May, for example, he proclaimed on the Senate floor that the Conrad-Gregg proposal was “the best way to address the crisis” and that it “would provide an expedited pathway for fixing these profound long-term challenges.”) And just days before the vote, President Obama endorsed the bill.
But it wasn’t enough. On January 26, the bill went down to defeat: 53 senators voted in favor, but it needed 60 to pass. Democrats assembled a solid majority of 37 votes, while Republicans could muster only 16. As has been widely reported, seven of the bill’s Republican cosponsors ended up voting against it; had they remained resolute, it would have passed. Reversing his earlier position, the minority leader also voted against the bill.
So what happened between December and January? Put simply, the forces within the conservative movement who oppose any and all tax increases mobilized against legislation that might have produced the long-sought grand bargain—significant entitlement reform coupled with additional revenues.
On December 9, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform sent a letter to Conrad and Gregg expressing his opposition to their proposal. “Despite the appearance of protection for taxpayers,” he wrote, “this commission would guarantee a net tax increase. … In order to make this commission acceptable from a taxpayer perspective, language must be included that explicitly removes tax increases and/or new taxes from commission consideration.” The substantial anti-tax coalition Norquist leads then swung into action with a steady drumbeat of op-eds and open letters to elected officials.
Even more significant was a lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal on December 29. After issuing a thinly veiled warning to Republicans who might go along with the plan and denouncing past bipartisan efforts–including the 1983 Greenspan Social Security commission and the 1990 Andrews Air Force Base summit–the Journal launched a preemptive strike against the kind of deal it feared a Conrad-Gregg commission would reach: “Democrats would agree to means-test entitlements, which means that middle and upper-middle class (i.e., GOP) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes. … In return, Republicans would agree to an increase in the top income tax rate to as high as 49% and in addition to a new energy tax, a stock transaction tax, or value added tax. The Indians got a better deal for selling Manhattan.”
In short, the Journal opposed not only new taxes, but also progressivity in spending cuts. The only remaining alternatives to national bankruptcy (although the editorial writer wasn’t candid enough to say so) are draconian cuts imposed on those Americans who can least endure them.
In the few weeks following the editorial, the intensifying pressure proved too much for many Republicans. The seven Conrad-Gregg deserters included Robert Bennett, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and John McCain, all of whom are embroiled in tough primary campaigns, along with Sam Brownback, who’s running for governor of Kansas, and John Ensign, who’s already in more than enough trouble.
Also of interest is the roster of 16 Republicans who stood up to the pressure and held their ground. In addition to four senators who are retiring and have little to lose, the honor roll includes a dozen who will have to answer to the forces that Norquist and the Journal represent: Lamar Alexander, Saxby Chambliss, Susan Collins, Bob Corker, John Cornyn, Mike Enzi, Lindsey Graham, Johnny Isakson, Mike Johanns, Dick Lugar, David Vitter, and Roger Wicker. (Olympia Snowe is conspicuous by her absence, yet another in a lengthening list of disappointing performances.) Whatever their substantive views on fiscal policy, these are public servants who at least take the responsibility of governance seriously and understand that no single party—whether today’s Democratic majority or a possible future Republican majority—can discharge this responsibility on its own.
And that’s the issue: Will the Republican party remain beholden to the forces that Grover Norquist and The Wall Street Journal represent? Does the party just want to mobilize popular grievances in the effort to regain power, or is it willing to help govern our country and address its mounting problems? Beyond undermining campaign finance legislation, Mitch McConnell is interested in only one thing—winning elections—an outlook apparently shared by two-thirds of his colleagues. The question is whether the minority of the minority party can ever get together with the majority of the majority to find real solutions—and then level with the people about what these solutions will mean. The alternative to a new governing coalition is the intensification both of our problems and of public contempt for its elected representatives.
At TNR today, Jonathan Chait examines the dynamics involving Democratic efforts to get 218 House votes for the Senate health plan (presumably in conjunction with Senate action to “fix” its bill along the lines set out in the “President’s Proposal”). In noting that a few “no” votes on the earlier House bill would have to flip to “yea,” he cites the honorable 1993 precedent of Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinksky, who supplied the 218th vote for the first Clinton budget bill knowing full well she was probably dooming her own re-election.
But there’s another dynamic in the saga of getting the final votes that was illustrated in 1993: because the budget passed by exactly one vote, Republicans were able to attack vulnerable Democrats all over the country for casting “the deciding vote” for the bill. The same could happen on health reform with Democrats running in hostile territory.
So word to Speaker Pelosi: go for 219!
This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on February 18, 2010.
When political observers start comparing Republican prospects in 2010 to those of 1994, they really ought to spend more time consulting people who were, you know, sort of there in 1994. TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg certainly was, and in a new piece for The New Republic, he provides some important advice on how Democrats can avoid a repeat performance later this year.
Greenberg sees a lot of the same warning signs: a president struggling to get his agenda enacted; Democratic divisions and discouragement; Republican intransigence and excitement. But he also notes there was a lot more going on in 1994 than Clinton’s struggles on the health reform front, the subject of so many 1994-2010 comparisons:
At about this stage in the electoral cycle, in midwinter, we were feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves. The State of the Union address on January 25 hailed the previous year’s passage of the Clinton economic plan, nafta, and the Brady Bill. Health care reform was still supported by half the country. Clinton’s approval rating stood at 58 percent.
Then, it all went tragically and almost comically downhill. The State of the Union glow was blotted out by a media frenzy when a special prosecutor subpoenaed White House officials to testify before a grand jury on the Whitewater land deal–and the president was forced to defend his wife’s honor at a prime time press conference. The president’s job approval plummeted eight points–and support for health care dropped ten. Paula Jones kicked off May with her sexual harassment suit. And, by the June publication of Bob Woodward’s The Agenda–and his characterization of the Clinton White House in a word, “chaos”–the president’s approval had fallen to 45 percent.
Moreover, the health reform debacle was not the abiding reminder of Democratic disarray going into the 1994 elections: it was the omnibus crime bill.
With the Congressional Black Caucus rebelling against the bill’s death-penalty provisions and the conservative Democrats standing against its assault-weapons ban, the popular measure was defeated just before the August recess–only three months before the election. Reporters battled to capture their own astonishment. USA Today called it a “shocking” loss that “plunged” the White House to what could be “its worst political defeat.” In a hoarse voice, the president gathered reporters and upbraided his congressional opponents and vowed to “fight and fight and fight until we win.” After a frantic ten days of campaigning against Congress, followed by high-wire negotiations, he finally won the vote on a Sunday night.
Clinton’s approval fell to 39 percent after this fiasco–which voters interpreted as further evidence of Democratic incompetence and fractiousness. Congress’s approval plunged, and voters warmed to the Republicans, who had moved to about a four-point advantage in party sentiment.
That points up the single largest difference between 1994 and present circumstances, says Greenberg, is that Democratic weakness in the former year led directly to Republican strength. It’s not so clear that’s happening today:
Unlike the party of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, which gained standing with each battle with Bill Clinton, today’s Republican Party looks like a cult. During the 2008 campaign, the Republican Party fell to its lowest level in the history of our thermometers measuring the party’s popularity, and it has not improved its standing since Election Day. The Republicans’ widely held conviction that Obama has a hidden “socialist” agenda, and the ascendancy of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck as ideological spokespeople, indelibly defines the party. At the same time, Tea Party candidates are contesting mainstream Republicans in primaries–dividing their base.
This provides a potential opening for Democrats if they get their act together and congressional Democrats behave responsibly. Even in 1994, says Greenberg, he urged the White House to attack the GOP’s Contract With America as promising a return to unpopular Reagan policies. But Clinton, who was by then listening closely to Dick Morris, refused to do so. It doesn’t have to be that way in 2010:
Put aside the rancor and gridlock and show a very different face. Take Paul Krugman’s advice and quickly pass a version of the Senate health care bill. That will raise presidential and congressional approval ratings, just as Clinton bucked up Democrats by passing nafta and tax increases for deficit reduction–neither of which were popular at the time.
They must put the Republicans on the defensive. Make them an offer they can’t refuse on bipartisan legislation they dare not oppose–jobs measures that help small businesses and energy-independence legislation. Then, force Republicans to cast tough and defining votes–on Wall Street bonuses and bailouts and limiting corporate spending on elections….
Most importantly, Democrats must explain this election’s stakes and frame the choice that voters face. This is something we failed to get right in 1994. In the summer before the election, we began to see some power in a populist narrative–“[A] president trying to make a better life for ordinary people against Republicans who favor the wealthy and hurt the middle class.” But we could not define this choice in a way that similarly helped congressional Democrats.
There’s a lot more time in 2010 for Democrats to recover from their troubles, with the important exception that they need at least a little help from economic indicators. Democrats really didn’t know what hit them in 1994. This time around, says Greenberg:
Democrats have already lived through their legislative nightmare. We have already had the benefit of Massachusetts to concentrate the mind. And, just as valuable, we have the lessons of history to guide our course.
There are a couple of interesting articles out today offering meditations on the theatrics of the contemporary American Right. At TAP, Paul Waldman mocks the American Revolutionary trappings of the conservative movement in its efforts to get down with the Tea Party folk–most notably the staging of the Mount Vernon Statement, featuring a rogue’s gallery of old-school conservative power brokers:
What [former Attorney General Ed] Meese and his aging colleagues no doubt realized was that if you want to be relevant in the quickly changing conservative movement of 2010, you’d better pretend it’s 1776. Donning revolutionary regalia — sartorially or rhetorically — is becoming to today’s right what slipping on a tie-dye was to Grateful Dead shows back in the day. It tells other participants that you’re all part of the same tribe. It may seem silly to pretend to be a radical agent of change fighting against “tyranny” — the word you hear over and over again from conservatives these days — from a corner office in a corporate-funded D.C. think tank, but they’ll do their best.
Meanwhile, at Salon, Michael Lind characteristically sees something more profound going on, as the Right adopts a self-conscious counter-cultural stance similar to the one that got the Left off course in the 1970s. Lind notes how far conservatives have been backsliding in recent years towards the zaniness that kept them in the political wilderness before the rise of the organized conservative movement:
When [William F.]Buckley came on the scene in the mid-1950s, the American right was dominated by kooks: right-wing isolationists, Pearl Harbor and Yalta conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and members of the John Birch Society like the palindromical y-named Professor Revilo P. Oliver. Buckley and his movement conservatives, and later the early neoconservatives, struggled to purge the right of crackpots and create an intellectually serious movement capable of governing the country.
And yet the right of 2010 looks like the fever-swamp right of 1950 instead of the triumphant right of 1980. The John Birch Society, which Buckley and Goldwater expelled from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, was a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC). Folks who claimed that Eisenhower was a communist now insist that Obama is a socialist.
Calling tea partiers the “hippies of our time,” Lind goes on to compare today’s conservative counter-culture with its leftist forebears, noting a common anti-system radicalism, a Luddite tendency to disparage science and technology, a flair for street theater, and an underlying desire to secede from the broader society. This last observation is interesting; I suppose “going Galt” really is the contemporary equivalent to “getting back to the land,” and could portend a retreat from political activism by tea partiers if they become frustrated by the failure of Americans to embrace their cause.
In any event, Lind concludes, the counter-cultural tendencies of the Right may represent good news for progressives:
The rise of the conservative counterculture may provide the beleaguered Democrats with a stay of execution. A serious Republican counter-establishment, putting forth credible plans for addressing the nation’s problems and determined to collaborate with the other party to govern the country in this crisis, would be a greater threat to the new, shaky Democratic establishment than the theatrics of the right’s Summer of Love.
Or should it be called the Winter of Hate?
I tend to agree with Lind on this point, and also think Waldman may not be taking the implications of the conservative movement’s flirtation with revolutionary rhetoric quite seriously enough. The tea partiers have seized on 1776 rhetoric and imagery not just because of the anti-tax nature of the original Tea Party, but because they argue with considerable consistency that the cure for America’s ills is a rollback of much of the country’s political and constitutional developments over not just years or decades, but centuries. It’s no accident that there’s been a remarkable revival of talk on the Right, even among elected officials, of such discredited nineteenth century theories as the “right” of states to nullify federal laws or even express their “sovereignty” by secession. And the prevailing school of constitutional “thinking” among conservatives is a sort of crude fundamentalist originalism that dismisses health care reform as unconstitutional on grounds that the Constitution itself does not mention health care (an argument Glenn Beck, among others, often makes).
This is powerfully radical stuff, and it will not be easy for Republican pols to whip up crowds by embracing it and then going back to the twenty-first century where the machinery of modern government depends on hundreds of Supreme Court decisions (not to mention a Civil War) that have modified the strict letter of the Constitution.
It’s not clear how long and far today’s counter-cultural trends on the Right will last; maybe Mark Schmitt is correct in predicting this is just another populist wave that will soon recede.
But in the mean time, these are some fine days for conservative-watching, whether it’s Ed Meese posing as a revolutionary or conservatives raptly listening to the deep jurisprudence of Glenn Beck.
To continue some thoughts about the growing contradiction between conservative policy predilections and the GOP’s violent anti-spending rhetoric, there’s a specific political factor that’s intensifying the dilemma: the heavy, heavy reliance of Republicans on support from whiteseniors.
Several smart commentators (Chait, Douthat, and Larison) have drawn attention to a new Pew survey on generational political attitudes which shows the exceptionally geriatric nature of the Republican Party’s current base of support. That’s a good thing for Republicans in the very short term, since seniors tend to vote at disproportionately high levels in midterm elections. But it’s not easy to be the Party That Hates Government Spending when your most important constituency is receiving Medicare and Social Security benefits. Here’s how Ross Douthat puts it:
[Y]ou can win an awful lot of elections just by mobilizing the over-65 constituency — they’re well-informed, they turn out to vote, and there are more of them every day. But the easiest way to do it, as the Democrats proved for years and years and years, is to defend Medicare and Social Security like McAuliffe at Bastogne. This means that while the energy of activists may be pushing the Republicans to the right on size-of-government issues, the concerns of their central constituency could end up pulling them inexorably leftward on entitlements….
This wouldn’t be a terrible thing if Social Security and (especially) Medicare accounted for, say, ten percent of the federal budget. But where the size of government — and if we ever want to cut the deficit, the burden of taxation — is concerned, they’ll be the whole ballgame soon enough. And if the Republican Party depends too heavily on over-65 voters for its political viability, we could easily end up with a straightforwardly big-government party in the Democrats, and a G.O.P. that wins election by being “small government” on the small stuff (earmarks, etc.) while refusing to even consider entitlement reform.
Now that’s how it looks if you are simply considering the fiscal numbers. But from a psychological point of view, there’s another problem for conservatives: how to rationalize a posture of maximum defense of Social Security and Medicare with a general hostility to transfer payments. The only obvious way to do that is to treat senior entitlements as benefits earned by virtuous old folks, as opposed to unvirtuous younger folks whose demands for “welfare” are to be resisted and demonized at all costs. You don’t have to hold a negative view of conservative motives to see how this can lead to highly invidious, and perhaps semi-racist, political appeals. Indeed, the current position of Republicans all but demands that they encourage seniors to view public life as a struggle to keep their own public benefits and their own private wealth against rapacious efforts by “elitists” and welfare “looters” to reduce their share of federal spending while increasing their taxes. And that’s a temptation Republican politicians don’t seem inclined to resist, illogical and immoral as it might be.
It’s not clear how long GOPers will continue to maintain this odd mixture of pro-government policies and anti-government rhetoric (a contradiction that extends, of course, to conservatives’ lust for ever-higher defense spending and foreign policy adventurism). But at present, they might as well emblazon on their Tea Party banners the legend: “Don’t Tread On My Medicare!”
UPDATE: One obvious way around the GOP’s dilemma on entitlements is simply to “grandfather” current beneficiaries and introduce radical changes for younger generations. That’s how Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare Voucher proposal–central to the congressional Republican “plans” for both health care and the budget–operates. And that’s explicitly what Tim Pawlenty is talking about doing with both Medicare and Social Security.
It remains to be seen if this approach, which for all the talk about “keeping promises to seniors” sure looks like a cynical effort to buy off a demographic group that favors Republicans at the expense of groups less inclined–will fly with seniors or with anyone else. It does nicely comport with the “I’ve got mine! To hell with the rest of you!” spirit that Republicans are carefully cultivating among older white voters.
