If you are feeling a sense of deja vu about where the current budget debate in Congress is headed, you aren’t alone, and I offered an explanation at New York:
In the partisan messaging battle over the federal budget, Joe Biden seems to have Republicans right where he wants them. Beginning with his State of the Union Address in early February, the president has hammered away at GOP lawmakers for plotting to gut wildly popular Social Security and Medicare benefits. This has driven Republicans into a defensive crouch; they can either pretend their proposed cuts aren’t really cuts or forswear them altogether. It’s a message that Democrats would love to highlight every day until the next election, or at least until Republicans figure out a better response than lies, evasions, and blustery denials.
But as Ron Brownstein points out in The Atlantic, there is a logical path Republicans could take to counter Democrats’ claims that GOP policies threaten popular retirement programs. It’s based on pitting every other form of federal domestic spending against Social Security and Medicare, and on making Democratic support for Big Government and its beneficiaries a political problem among seniors:
“Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare [from cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit] will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs … potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.
“Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. ‘We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,’ Blendon said. ‘The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.’”
And so Republicans will very likely return to the messaging they embraced during the Obama administration. Back then, self-identified Tea Party conservatives constantly tried to convince elderly voters that the real threat to their retirement programs stemmed not from GOP budget cutting, but from Democratic-backed Big Government spending on younger people and minorities, with whom many conservative voters did not identify. Then as now, a partisan budget fight — and the threat of a debt default of government shutdown — let Republicans frame funding decisions as a competition between groups of beneficiaries, rather than a debate over abstract levels of taxing or spending.
The big opening shot in the anti-Obama campaign was Sarah Palin’s wildly mendacious but highly effective September 2009 Facebook post claiming that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels” that would eliminate Medicare coverage for seniors or disabled children deemed socially superfluous (the barely legitimate basis for the attack was an Affordable Care Act provision to allow Medicare payments to physicians discussing end-of-life treatments with patients).
Soon Republicans would come up with slightly more substantive claims that Obamacare threatened Medicare. In 2011, House GOP budget maven Paul Ryan, whom Democrats hammered for his proposals to partially privatize both Social Security and Medicare, claimed that Obama administration projections of health cost savings in Medicare represented a shift of resources from Medicare to Obamacare. By 2012, when Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, Ryan was campaigning with his mother in tow, claiming that Republicans wanted to protect her from raids on her retirement benefits by the redistributionist Democrats.
Romney and Ryan didn’t win, of course, but they did win the over-65 vote by a robust 56-44 margin, a better performance in that demographic than Trump registered in 2016 or 2020. As Thomas Edsall explained in The New Republic in 2010, the Tea Party–era Republicans understood they had to mobilize their federal spending constituents against alleged competitors:
“Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obama’s health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age war—creating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.”
In a 2024 campaign in which Democrats are going for the jugular with seniors, a reprise of the GOP’s 2012 Medicare counterattack, dishonest as it was, might make sense.
During this year’s budget skirmish in Congress, House Republicans are expected to take a claw hammer to domestic spending outside Social Security and Medicare, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports:
“This spring, House Republicans are expected to release an annual budget resolution that calls for large health care cuts, and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) marketplace coverage are likely to be prime targets. House Republican leaders are calling for cutting the deficit and making the Trump tax cuts permanent, while saying they will shield certain areas of the budget (Medicare, Social Security, and military spending) from cuts. To do all these things at once, it is highly likely they will propose cuts in health programs that provide coverage to millions of people.”
The House GOP has also already called for deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending, including food stamp and nutrition programs. It’s likely the GOP’s state-based crusade against “woke” public education will lead to a renewal of ancient conservative demands to deeply cut or kill the U.S. Department of Education. Maybe those representing energy-producing areas will go hard after EPA or the Department of the Interior’s programs. Almost certainly, the GOP as a whole will embrace across-the-board cuts in federal employment or federal employee benefits under the guise of “draining the swamp.” Any and all such cuts can also be rationalized as necessary to avoid reductions in spending for Social Security, Medicare, and national defense, not to mention tax increases.
Whatever formula they adopt, there’s little doubt Republicans will find ways to present themselves the true defenders of Social Security and Medicare, just as many of them will always keep scheming for ways to damage or destroy these vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society. Biden seems committed to his effort to make seniors fear the GOP, and this is the only way Republicans can counter-punch.
I agree with Steve’s comments. I know from experience that, while I am not especially a liberal, I am not what they could loosely call a conservative, and therefore not one of them. They seem to be able to make that judgment about me in about 5 minutes. I can feel the sharp eyes watching me. I do not make the correct coded responses that they all seem to know. I don’t know the correct responses even though I grew up in a very fundamentalist church. Now there are politically oriented coded responses that must be passed. I don’t make it. They will be polite and easy-going to your face for a short while, but once you’ve shown your colors, then the shading starts: how far out are you, how far out am I willing to go. When they find out that I am not willing to play their authority game, then, I’m out.
The Christian Right are deadly serious about their agenda. I’m not that sure about how they stand with the GOP any more, though I think they still have their eyes on the levers of power. I think W & Cheney has taken them into uncharted waters, but the authoritarianism is not the brand they wanted.
Make no mistake about it, the game is one of authority. Power might be a side element, but if they have the authority to make you respond, you can be saved again, and you will submit to a particular personal power as directed by their representative of God.
Thank you. It was a good entry with some excellent points.
“….also offered a reminder that most conservative white evangelical Protestant Americans are kind, decent, well-adjusted people who (whatever their voting habits) don’t really reflect the angry views of some of their self-appointed political leaders.”
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You’re being far too generous as to “everyday, commonfolk” religious conservatives in the U.S. Yes, at a funeral or picnic or wedding interacting with them may seem a pleasant if not innocuous event. Smiles, handshakes, “Howya doing?” get traded. Even more in-depth discussions about life might not see you getting consigned to hell for being the degenerate “you don’t belong to the right religion (or no religion)” person you are. However, these same people fervently want leaders ensconced in office pledging to enact laws enforcing a moral code in line with their conservative beliefs. Homosexual marriage is to be banned. Even homosexual relations are to be banned or criminalized. Abortion is to be outlawed. Prayer (Christian prayer) is to be allowed if not outright encouraged in public schools. The federal and state governments are to pay for or subsidize private, religiously leaning schools. Many believe God says the enviroment, plants and animals are there to be plundered for the pleasure and needs of humans and therefore laws restricting or preserving them are contrary to God’s will. Jews and other non-Christians are going to hell. This tenet is sacrosanct. No Jesus, no afterlife. No, amend that, you get some sort of afterlife. It’s just one wherein you twist and writhe in the fires of Hell or linger about in some sort of nothingness forever regretting rejecting Billy Graham. No, I wouldn’t mistake a few hours of interplay with a crowd of cordial, devout Christians as indicative of their willingness to allow everyone to just be left alone. Over Cokes and chips you are silently being judged. And given absolute control of the levers of power you will bend to their vision of morality and execution of public policy controlling it.