Did you hear? President Trump is going to be running for a third term in office. And he’s not joking. Who knows how serious he is, but as we’re going to see, the constitutionality of third presidential term may not be as set in stone as many suspect. Along with the rest of the US Constitution. A constitutional convention could be just around the corner. Just a lawsuit away. And we can thank the DC austerity lobby and their fellow travelers at the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC) for this looming threat. The same austerity lobby that has spent years trying to roll back Obamacare, eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid through block-grants, and generally erode what’s left of the US’s social safety-nets as more and more Americans are forced to take any work available just to qualify for increasingly meager government assistance. That austerity lobby. It’s back with a big sneaky plan: a lawsuit purporting to prove that the 34 state threshold for an Article V constitutional convention has already been met. David M. Walker — the former US Comptroller for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — is leading the legal effort, with legal support from NRA lawyer (and CNP member) Charles “Chuck” Cooper. If the lawsuit succeeds, get ready for a new constitution written by and for the oligarchy.
But this story isn’t just about this new lawsuit. It’s also about how the DC austerity lobby has been working with CNP to push these constitutional convention ambitions since at least 2013, which is right around the same time it become clear that the last major round of DC austerity lobbying had failed in achieving a “grand bargain” of slashed entitlements. A round of lobbying that began in earnest as the 2008 financial crisis was still playing out with David Walker — then President and CEO of the newly formed austerity-centric Pete Peterson Foundation — taking on a lead role as public austerity advocate. The Great Recession was a great opportunity for a “grand bargain”. And it almost worked. But didn’t work, at least not entirely, and it wasn’t long after that failure became clear that we saw the austerity lobby and the CNP begin hatching far more ambitious plans. Plans that just might be about come to fruition. Because as we’re also going to see, if a constitutional convention does happen, the forces behind this plan are the ones who will be running it. The DC austerity lobby really is just a lawsuit away from winning everything.
Is kicking senior citizens out of nursing homes good politics? That’s a question GOP asking itself these days. One of many questions related to the politics of health care. Although not many are asking it since the public largely has no idea the question is being asked at all as recent polls show. With the Senate’s version of ‘Trumpcare’ finally released to the public, we’re now learning that, yes, the GOP appears to think kicking seniors out their nursing homes is good politics. Because transferring Medicaid costs to states and individuals has been a key GOP goal of Trumpcare’s congressional authors the entire time and nursing homes are paid for by Medicaid for the vast majority of people. So in addition to the many profound moral questions raised by the GOP’s health care ‘reform’ plans, a growing number of profound political questions are being raised the more we learn about Trumpcare as it takes form. Including whether or not putting nursing home coverage on a fiscal death spiral makes for good politics. Granny would probably say ‘no’, but she’s got competition.
Did Trump suddenly drop his oft-repeated criticism of tradition unemployment reporting and assertions that in reality its 42 percent and 94 million American adults are out of work? Well, as we’re going to see, probably not because his administration is still planning on redefining the “official” unemployment rate to be much “looser” and his claims that 42 percent if American adults are out of work are necessary to achieve a long-held GOP goal championed by House Speaker Paul Ryan: converting the US safety-net — including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — into a “work for a pittance to get a pittance of government support”-net that traps the poor in system where if you have to find full time work to get any help at all. Maybe even for the elderly. And the help you get in return for that work-requirement will keep shrinking year after year. It’s a plan that can’t happen unless almost all non-working adults are defined as “unemployed”. So, no, Trump didn’t change his mind. He just still thinks we’re all stupid (maybe).
Change is coming to Washington DC. Mostly horrible changes. But as we’ll see in this post, there is one very significant and positive change coming as a consequence of the unified GOP control of the White House and Congress: GOP is actually going to start getting the blame it deserves for all the damage its pro-oligarch/anti-everyone-else agenda routinely inflicts upon the American people. Politics can be frustrating for a myriad of reasons, but one of the biggest sources of frustration is the cloud of perpetual obfuscation and confusion that tends to permeate the political discourse and collective understanding of what’s actually happening, why it’s happening, and who should be rewarded or blamed for it. But for the next couple of years, at a minimum, it’s going to be very clear who to blame for the damage DC is about to unleash, and it’s not just going to be Donald Trump. And when it comes to health care “reform” (privatization) that the GOP is about to impose upon the populace, that blame is about to get dangerously diffusive for state legislatures and governorships because the Health Care Austerity Hot Potato is about to get tossed in their laps over and over. Indefinitely. And since the GOP controls almost all state legislatures and governorships at the moment they won’t be able to prevent themselves from slashing these programs. So with the coming block granting of first Medicaid and then Medicare (or maybe both together), the politics of health care is about to get weird. And tragic because the GOP won’t be able to help itself with all the austerity
When “God’s Senator”, Sam Brownback, became “God’s Governor” of Kansas back in 2010 it was clear some pretty big changes were on the way for Kansas. After all, when a GOP member of Opus Dei is your new governor, some form of austerity for the masses is probably in the cards. And following the 2012 intra-GOP “moderate” purge, austerity for Kansas has arrived in full force. As once might expect, this includes the austerity that comes with refusing to accept the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. Utterly pointless, yet still painful, self-flagellation. And that’s just the beginning...
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