The Pledge to America

The latest GOP manifesto reads like a comedy but is really more of a tragedy. It does absolutely nothing to address this country’s pressing problems, and it does nothing for the common good. It represents a deterioration into cynical unseriousness. No adults were welcome on the drafting committee. It basically calls for a repeal of recent Democratic accomplishments, and a return to Bush-era politics, all dressed up in meaningless mantras. On the specifics, let me outsource to others:

Jonathan Bernstein on foreign policy:

“What’s the current Republican foreign policy?  Stripping out the immigration stuff from that section of the document, what remains is (1) Gitmo; (2) Missile defense; and (3) threatening Iran.  That’s it.”

Jonathan Chait on fiscal policy:

“The Pledge To America fulminates against debt, but it should be read as a plan to explode debt through the ceiling. It would make permanent all the Bush tax cuts, at a cost of trillions. It would add new business tax cuts on top of those. It would repeal the Affordable Care Act, at massive long-term fiscal cost. (Republicans are already planning to undermine many of the cost-saving features of the bill.)”

Jonathan Cohn on healthcare:

“It will force a lot of people to pay higher premiums. It will lavish subsidies on the private insurance industry. It will put life-and-death decisions in the hands of bureaucrats. And it will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal debt.

Michael Sean Winters on social issues:

“Social issues merit one line in the programmatic section of the document. The Republicans plan to codify the Hyde Amendment. That is fine with me, although it also seems unnecessary since Hyde has been approved every year, by Congresses under the control of both parties, since 1977. A lot of things have changed since the first year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but not Hyde. Still, if they can pass it, I am all for that. The only other mention of social issues is a throwaway line about traditional marriage in the preamble to the document. These two sentences, one in the intro and one in the body of the document, were evidently added at the last minute to appease social conservatives. What to say? If social conservatives are satisfied with lip service, that is no surprise. Making a phone call to the Right-to-Life March was enough for Reagan, Bush pere and Bush fils to be considered “pro-life” so lip-service is nothing new to the GOP.”

I’ll end with Peggy Steinfels:

“Unless Obama and his fellow Democrats rally their base to step up and stop a Republican sweep in the midterm election, we will become the nation that the Republicans have worked so hard to create, a nation with a fourth-rate government, a third-rate economy, and a first-rate military (imagine what they will do with that).”