Many Of Them Are Starting To Realize DeSantis Is Too Extreme
Let’s start with 2 important, loosely related questions— Why is the GOP working to weaken child labor laws and why are they trying to raise the retirement age, two unpopular propositions? The Republicans and their media allies respond to the latter by noting that “The combination of longer life expectancy and fewer workers paying in to the Social Security fund is exacerbating problems for a program that has long warned the money might run out. Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and now Nancy Mace (R-SC) have been pushing the idea of raising the age of retirement for Social Security and Medicare. For Republicans the idea of scrapping the cap on payroll taxes so that wealthy people pay their fair share, is never on the table— and it’s the most obvious solution to the problem.
Meanwhile, yesterday, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire brought up how rolling back restrictions on child labor and dismantling public education will make the country far more unequal. For today’s GOP, that’s a feature, not a bug. “In Arkansas,” they wrote, “children as young as 14 will soon be able to work up to 48 hours a week— without the permission of their parents. Iowa legislators are considering a bill that would allow teens to work in mining and meatpacking. And in Ohio, a bill currently sailing through the legislature would let 14- or 15-year-olds work until 9 PM year-round.” Weakening child labor restrictions “is in perfect keeping with the GOP’s larger project of rolling back equality. Moreover, the effort to get more children working longer [for lower pay] goes hand in hand with the assault on public education that is underway across the country.”
Laws keeping children out of the workplace— and in school— decreased inequality. “After all,” wrote Schneider and Berkshire, “compulsory attendance laws didn’t change the amount of education received by young people at the high end of the schooling spectrum, as there was no encouragement to attend school beyond the minimum age for leaving. They did, however, set a new floor for young people at the bottom end of that spectrum. As a result, compulsory schooling created greater parity across lines of race, class, and gender— and it did so at taxpayer expense. Today, we take this for granted. Obviously children shouldn’t work in factories. Of course they receive a free education through the end of 12th grade. Yet arriving at this consensus took a radical intervention in the nature of American society, establishing a collective responsibility for one another’s children. Even as late as the mid-20th century, observers were making the case that ending child labor would require ‘improv[ing] school opportunities, strengthen[ing] compulsory school attendance laws, and improv[ing] instruction to meet the abilities and special needs of all pupils.’ Today, many of us have forgotten how long it took to achieve that. As Republican legislatures across the United States work to undermine public education— through private school voucher schemes, efforts to roll back minimum requirements for teachers, and the imposition of limits on what teachers can teach and children can learn— they are also opening the door to an alternative: employment. Getting students out of school and into the workforce will save taxpayers money, and may even help some families meet their bottom lines. But it will come at a significant cost, at least if we are concerned with inequality… Peeling back child labor laws and undermining public education is, at its core, about restoring a vision of society that is profoundly unequal, one in which schooling is the privilege of those families who can afford it, and work for those can’t. It’s about washing our hands of one another. And while the economically well-off may gain in the short term, we will all pay the cost in the long run for a society that no longer views itself as such— a nation in which we throw other people’s children to the wolves.”
In Congress, we have the Freedom Caucus— it wouldn’t work for them to call themselves the Fascist Caucus, even though that’s what it is— working towards the same revisiting of societal organization. Turning back the progressive made in America is what they have in mind. Yesterday, Theodoric Meyer, Leigh Ann Caldwell and Tobi Raji, tried decoding what they have in mind in the fight over the debt ceiling and what they want in return for not crashing the economy. Last week, the caucus put out a list of priorities that would lead them to “consider voting to raise the debt ceiling.” Since they have managed to steer the House Republicans, this list will, more or less, wind up being the basis of the GOP’s list, as much as many of the mainstream conservatives disagree with some of the more extreme parts of it.
“Some of the demands,” wrote the trio of Washington Post reporters, “are easy to understand: canceling the climate investments and IRS funding in Democrats' new climate law and scrapping President Biden’s plan to forgive more than $400 million in student loan debt. Those ideas are nonstarters with the White House (although the Supreme Court could strike down the student loan forgiveness plan). But other demands are hard to make sense of for anyone who’s not a budget wonk. Here’s our guide to what they’d mean:
Cut spending to 2022 levels
Republicans have been talking for months about paring discretionary spending back to the levels the federal government spent in the 2022 fiscal year. (Discretionary spending doesn’t include programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.)
“You’ve got to start somewhere,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), the Freedom Caucus’s chairman, said in an interview on Monday.
But many House Republicans don’t want to cut defense spending— which accounts for close to half of discretionary spending— at all. Perry didn’t rule out Pentagon budget cuts but suggested any reductions would be minimal.
“We’re willing to take a very light touch on defense,” he said.
He also ruled out cutting spending on veterans. That accounts for more than 7 percent of discretionary spending, according to Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Exempting those categories from cuts means Republicans would need to slash all other discretionary spending by more than 20 percent to return to fiscal 2022 levels, according to Brian Riedl, a former chief economist to former senator Rob Portman (R-OH) who is now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
And that could be tough.
“When you’re talking cuts of 15 to 20 percent to the [National Institutes of Health], K-12 education spending, housing subsidies, international assistance, highways, the border— that becomes more challenging both politically and on policy,” Riedl said. “Those are popular programs that have very strong constituencies.”
Perry argues that deep cuts are necessary after such spending ballooned during the pandemic. But Democrats warn it could trigger an economic downturn.
“I think there’s absolutely no doubt that it would cause a recession,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (PA), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, citing a recent Moody’s Analytics report. (Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, was more cautious, telling The Early such cuts would “probably” be enough to tip a fragile economy into recession.)
It’s not clear exactly which programs Republicans want to target because they haven’t put forward a detailed plan yet. Democrats’ challenge, Boyle said, is to make the consequences real for voters and avoid “very abstract terms like ‘nondefense discretionary,’ which make your eyes gloss over unless you are a budgetary wonk.”
Restore “Clinton-era work requirements”
The Freedom Caucus called for reviving “Clinton-era work requirements for welfare programs” without specifying which programs they’re eyeing. As our colleague Jeff Stein pointed out last month, there are already work requirements for receiving welfare and food stamps.
Perry said he wants nationwide work requirements for Medicaid. (The Trump administration allowed 13 states to impose Medicaid work requirements, but after courts blocked some of them, only Arkansas ultimately put them into effect. The Biden administration rolled back those rules.)
But James Capretta, an Office of Management and Budget official in George W. Bush’s administration who’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said Congress would be “highly unlikely” to impose Medicaid work requirements even under a Republican president.
“Once you start digging into it— ‘Well, who does this apply to? What’s the expectation of them?’— you quickly end up with large numbers of exemptions,” Capretta said. The number of people such rules would affect “would be very, very small.”
Another idea: slashing the amount the federal government contributes to cover people in higher income brackets who are now eligible for Medicaid in the 39 states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. “It seems to me that states need to have skin in the game here,” Perry said.
Take back unspent covid funds
Republicans have long called for recovering unobligated covid relief funds. Perry went further, calling for “clawing back obligated but not spent pandemic money.”
About $90 billion in covid aid was still unobligated on Jan. 31, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. That’s a small percentage of the $1.4 trillion deficit the federal government is expected to run this year— but it’s not nothing.
About 60 percent of what’s left is money meant to shore up the pensions of employees such as ironworkers and machinists, according to an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Other remaining funds are meant for veterans' health care and vaccine distribution and development, as well as transit funding that’s been promised to specific states and cities but is still technically unobligated.
Boyle was skeptical of Republicans’ push to claw back unobligated covid relief funds— but he didn’t rule it out entirely.
“If they can show me where there’s this big pot of money that could be used, I would be happy to take a look at it,” Boyle said.
Though Simon Rosenberg is generally an anti-progressive activist and polemicist, his perspective on the GOP is often spot on. Yesterday, writing for his blog, he noted that in 2022 by adopting MAGA as its politics, the Republican Party “made a huge strategic blunder.” Running against MAGAts, Democrats made significant gains in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the MAGA politics at the heart of the Freedom Caucus failing the GOP in 3 consecutive elections. Former Freedom Caucus douche “Ron DeSantis looked at all this and decided to become even more MAGA, super MAGA. He’s moved from a 15 week abortion ban to 6 weeks. He’s sold his Presidential campaign as a war against woke. He’s banning books, removing elected officials from office, mounting unprecedented assaults against undocumented immigrants and punishing businesses which don’t agree with his agenda. His response to the Silicon Valley Bank implosion was buffoonish and embarrassing. He choose Putin over America and the West. Republican Senators have been dumping on him all week. What in the world he is doing? As someone who has been in this business a long time it’s not easy to understand.”
He concluded that “For all those Rs hoping DeSantis would be a reasonable and capable alternative to Trump this has been a very bad week. It appears the Rs might be on the verge of another cycle of ‘candidate quality’ problems. It is another reason why as we head into 2024 I would much rather be us than them.” He told the Lincoln Project that Republicans thought they were getting someone “normal” compared to Trump. “He made a decision to become just as MAGA as Trump and the stuff he’s doing in Florida, in many ways, in my view, could even arguably scarier than some of the things that Trump has done… They hoped that somehow DeSantis is somehow going to be a country club Republican.They want him to be Reagan. They want him to be a normal center-right politician. And he isn’t.” He’s grand for their crackpot base; but not for normal American voters.