October 14, 2017
The entire policy agenda of the Trump administration can be summed up as one of malevolent destruction. Every day, Trump reveals himself to be both vile and incompetent, animated primarily by a malignant zeal to reverse every decision that President Barack Obama made. His only other aim appears to be privatizing every government function previously devoted to the public good, in order to enable profiteering by his bumbling coterie of idiotic kleptocrats.
Yesterday, Trump signed an Executive Order eliminating the Cost Sharing Reduction payments to health insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act. These payments played a key role in keeping insurance available and affordable for Americans who purchase insurance on the individual marketplace. The effect of this Executive Order will be twofold: 1) it will dramatically increase premiums and decrease access to insurance for the 6.7 million middle income people who obtain their insurance on the individual marketplace; and 2) it will increase the cost to the United States government, because it must still provide legally mandated subsidies to Americans too poor to afford premiums on their own. As we’ve noted, vile AND incompetent.
The ongoing humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico is further evidence of Trump’s destructive malevolence. FEMA head, Brock Long, said that they had “filtered out” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz’s requests for assistance, treating her like an undeserving peasant who dared to cross the king, rather than a public servant legitimately seeking aid for her storm ravaged island, (Source: “FEMA Director: ‘We Filtered Out San Juan Mayor A Long Time Ago,'”By Connor O’Brien, Politico, 10/8/17). As a result of FEMA’s callous indifference, American citizens in Puerto Rico are beginning to die from completely preventable conditions in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (Source: The Rachel Maddow Show, 10/12/17). To add insult to injury, we learned that disaster relief workers in Puerto Rico used triage tents to set up taxpayer-funded spa days for themselves, corralling dispossessed Puerto Ricans to provide manicures and pedicures (Source: “Disaster Relief Workers in Puerto Rico Treat Themselves to a Taxpayer Funded Spa Day Given by Puerto Ricans,” by Anne Branigan, The Root, 10/13/17). This is just further proof that this view of government service as a vehicle for personal gain is endemic to this administration from top to bottom.
While we were rightly focused on Trump’s vicious sabotage of the Affordable Care Act and the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico, efforts by the Sessions Justice Department to undermine both judicial independence and the due process rights of immigrants may have escaped notice. Sessions seeks to reverse protections in the judges’ union contract that prohibit the imposition of numerical quotas as a performance metric. Such a change would treat them like assembly line workers, rather impartial arbiters of fairness and justice, (Source: “Immigration Judges say proposed quotas from Justice Department Threaten Independence,” by Maria Sacchetti, The Washington Post, 10/12/17). In addition, a leaked DOJ memo recommends stripping the protection for unaccompanied minors, enacted in a 2008 anti-trafficking law, from immigrants who reach the age of majority while awaiting immigration hearings. Taken together, these two policies would incentivize speed over due process and lower the number of immigrants entitled to asylum (Source: “Leaked Memos show Sessions DOJ aims to undermine due process for immigrants,” by Dara Lind, Vox, 10/13/17).
Whether by deliberate sabotage, as with Obamacare, malignant neglect, as with FEMA in Puerto Rico, or cruel transformation of immigration proceedings into Kafkaesque dead ends, as with Sessions at the DOJ, these policies all share a contempt for the idea that government actions should serve the public good. Instead, all of these decisions are designed to consign entire classes of human beings to entirely preventable misery and death. Genocide in slow motion is still genocide. We should call it what it is.
#SaveObamacare
#PuertoRico