The Democratic party suffers the lowest credibility in over 30 years. It’s been so bad their rants about Trump’s treacheries and how America has lost its Democracy have fallen on deaf ears.
But the shutdown is a crisis in which millions of workers will suffer financial hardship. Voters will want to know who created the crisis, why and when it will be over. So, they’ll listen and be enraged as Democrats explain that the Republicans’ obscene tax cuts are part of a sinister plan to increase deficits and create shortfalls that will force the government to cut funding of Medicare and Medicaid, which have been Republican targets for decades.
The Republicans will get to siphon billions from those safety nets to replace the estimated $4 trillion in lost tax revenues . Although 11.8 million people will lose access to Medicaid and Medicare, they won’t feel the pain until after the midterms because the bill deceitfully provides that the loss of the health benefits won’t take effect until after the midterms, while the tax cuts for the wealthy will start this year.
The shutdown also provides a platform for Democrats to explain that they don’t want to fund a government that’s already become a dictatorship. Voters need to understand that Trump has coopted the rolls that the Constitution gave to Congress and the Supreme Court, thus destroying the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. Trump’s obedient Republicans have already handed him control of Congress. And his Supreme Court majority have freed him to violate the Constitution by freezing multiple injunctions against his unconstitutional executive orders. Trump’s majority also gave him full control over the policies that Congress wanted the 400 federal agencies it created to decide by letting him fire their employees and replace them with whomever he wants to, in clear violation of the legislation creating those agencies.
American wealth and income equality is at its highest point since World War II, and higher than in any other developed country. Republican tax cuts and their attack on our safety nets will widen those spreads further, and the Crowning of King Trump by the Supreme Court will reduce America to a feudal system with its bottom 80% serving the top 20%.
It would be a shame for the Democrats to miss this opportunity to be heard.
