Recent news has it that the Democrats will introduce legislation to protect automobile manufacturers from liability actions. Soon after they plan to protect drug manufacturers from liability against their products. In each case, they have asked the manufacturers to write the bills that will be introduced.
If the above frightens you, don’t worry, it’s just kerfuffle.
But the Republicans have really been looking out for your interests, and you might want to thank them. For example, in 2005, President George W. Bush signed a Republican-sponsored bill, lobbied for by the National Rifle Association that shields gun manufacturers from being sued. Republicans also led the charge to prohibit the Center for Disease Control to research gun deaths. Imagine them doing the same for cancer or heart disease or vehicle deaths.
But the NRA as determinant of our country’s policies extends further; asked if Senate republicans would consider the nomination of President Barack Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court Merrick Garland, after the election if Hillary Clinton wins, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded that he “can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm in a lame duck session a nominee opposed by the NRA and the National Federation of Independent Businesses.”
He missed the point that, at that time, Clinton wouldn’t be a lame duck but rather the new president he and other Republicans are asserting should have the right to nominate the SCOTUS appointee. But his comment raises the question of who rules the Senate and the senators?
The bigger question relates to Republican proclamations of aiming to protect the vulnerable as, for example, in the recent past when they broke with many years of legislative agreement and decided to strip Food Stamps from the Farm Bill, voted to link defunding of health care for Americans to the budget bill and force a government shutdown, and continue to work at handicapping the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, formed only three years ago as a Democratic initiative.
To be fair, Obama signed the legislation giving Monsanto liability protection from suits against its products. Well, we’ll all go to the great roundup in the sky.
On the level of foreign policy, a group of Republican legislators sent what is often considered a treasonous letter to a foreign power and secretly invited a foreign head of state to address Congress in support of the Republican view. We have one Republican presidential nomination candidate who picks absolute war hawks as his foreign policy advisors and one who needs no advisors because he’s so smart.
All of this stands in the line the Republican party going from the “loyal opposition” to an anti-Obama corporate/religious handmaid, as witnessed by then-Republicant Ohio Sen. George Voinovich’s statement that “If he (Obama) was for it, we had to be against it.”
There is more than a touch of trickle-down economics, favored by Republicans, in Voinovich’s admission. Trickle-down economics in simple terms means treating the rich with deference and kid gloves and, as they prosper, good things will trickle down to the middle and lower class. It hasn’t worked, as we’ve seen the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
As a recent Princeton study concluded, we are no longer a democracy but are now a corporate oligarchy. Being against Obama appears in Republican thinking to mean such opposition will trickle down to middle and lower class Americans in some positive way. It hasn’t, but it does make us a laughing stock to the rest of the world, which goes on surpassing us in so many ways.
Hypocrisy is rampant in American politics, but in keeping with what is written above, one final note on an interesting Republican hypocrisy: Republicans undoubtedly favor policies that allow guns to be owned and carried by any and all in movies, schools college campuses, churches, grocery stores and whatever. The Cleveland Arena where the coming Republican National Convention will be held has a no-guns policy, and the Secret Service says that no guns should be allowed at the convention. Can you blame them when the convention looks to be angry and contentious?
GOP policy making seems to indicate they should favor handguns, automatic weapons and who knows what else should be in super-abundance at the convention for safety’s sake. The silence of the Republican nomination candidates, or their soft-shoe responses, is telling.
But don’t fret, they really want to help you.
Jim Coufal of Cazenovia is a part-time philosopher and full-time observer of global trends. He can be reached at madnews@m3pmedia.com.