June 27th, 2017
Republican cruelty continues unabated. The CBO score of the Senate “healthcare” bill released yesterday confirmed our worst suspicions. Although the topline number of people slated to lose health insurance by 2026 is marginally better under the Senate bill (22 vs. 23 million), in all important respects, it is equally draconian. The Senate bill will entail a devastating $772 billion cut to Medicaid over time, which will wrest coverage from children, the elderly and disabled Americans. It would shred mental health coverage, leaving states adrift to manage a crippling opioid crisis without funding. Despite the fact that thousands of their constituents will be grievously harmed by this bill, Senators Murkowski and Capito are still equivocating, rather than dooming this bill to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
The question we keep asking is, “Why?” Are Republicans willing to pass legislation that will cause Americans to die at a greater pace higher than the annual murder rate (Source: Center for American Progress), just for a tax cut for billionaires? That is only part of the answer. In truth, the Republican Party is engaged in a massive social engineering project to create an authoritarian, hierarchical society with wealthy, straight, white Christian men on top and everyone else reduced to a compliant, desperate, unquestioning mass. Once we understand that, we can see that rationale behind every legislative initiative, foreign policy alliance and judicial appointment made by Republicans.
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions offer a hint of how this effort might play out in the judicial branch. Although there is a great deal of focus on the Court’s decision to partially lift the stay on the travel ban, we would do well to focus on two other decisions that may have much more far-reaching consequences. Both the decision to grant the appeal in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and the 7-2 decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, point to a possible radical rethinking of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
While we don’t know how the court will decide Masterpiece, it has the potential to allow bigots to use religion as a club with which to deny people their civil rights. Trinity Lutheran, more ominously, has the potential to tear down the wall separating church and state, by providing that a government’s prohibition on funding nonreligious functions of religious institutions violates their right of free exercise of religion. Although Justice Roberts tried to limit the applicability of the case to the specific facts of playground safety equipment in a footnote, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas refused to sign on that part of the opinion, preferring an expansive reading. Justice Sotomayor wrote a blistering dissent, pointing out that the Court had never previously required a government to provide assistance to a religious institution (source: Scotusblog, Erwin Chemerinsky). There is no more foundational principle in our Constitution than the separation of church and state. Gorsuch and Thomas’s unwillingness to limit yesterday’s decision to its narrow facts is a harbinger of things to come. We had better pray for the continued health of Justices Kennedy and Ginsburg.