Why Is The Republican Party So Greedy and So Heartless?

For the record, it's not just Republicans - remember it was the heartlessness of former President Clinton that shoved through the heartless and self-serving welfare reform act.

Why Is The Republican Party So Greedy and So Heartless?

It started with the first politician. Not just the U.S.A. politicians, but, worldwide.

Greed is the prime driving factor for the majority of politicians and various levels of heartlessness come along over time.

For the record, it's not just Republicans - remember it was the heartlessness of former President Clinton that shoved through the heartless and self-serving welfare reform act.

Why Is The Republican Party So Greedy and So Heartless?

Republicans hate Social Security because it has been an extraordinary success and has done exactly what it was designed to do. It is the most successful government program in our nation's history and is enormously popular.

When Social Security was developed, 50 percent of seniors lived in poverty. Today, that number is 10 percent - still too high, but a testament to the success of Social Security.

Republicans have spent years demonizing Social Security and spreading lies about its sustainability. They want to scare Americans and build support for making drastic cuts to the program or privatizing it entirely. Their long-term goal is to end Social Security as we know it, and convert it into a private account system which will enable Wall Street to make hundreds of billions in profits.

The truth is that, today, according to the Social Security Administration, Social Security has a $2.7 trillion surplus and can pay out every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 25 years.

Further, because it is funded by the payroll tax and not the US Treasury, Social Security has not contributed one nickel to our deficit.

Now - in a prolonged recession that has decimated the poor and middle class and pushed more Americans into poverty than at any point in modern history - we need to strengthen Social Security. That's why I, along with nine co-sponsors, have introduced the "Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act." This legislation would lift the Social Security Payroll tax cap on all income over $250,000 a year, would require millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share into the Social Security Trust Fund, and would extend the program for the next 75 years.

For 76 years, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American. The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the next 76 years is to scrap the payroll tax cap for those earning $250,000 a year or more.

Right now, someone who earns $106,800 pays the same amount of money into Social Security as billionaires like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. That is because today, all income above $106,800 is exempt from the Social Security tax. As a result, 94% of Americans pay Social Security tax on all of their income, but the wealthiest 6% do not.

That makes no sense.

The "Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act" will ensure the long-term solvency of Social Security without cutting benefits, raising the retirement age or raising taxes on the middle class.

Social Security is keeping tens of millions of seniors out of poverty today. I can think of no more important issue facing our country today than making sure that Social Security remains strong for generations to come.

Donald Trump is a man of many notable qualities. He is ignorant and a brute. He has bragged about sexually assaulting women by grabbing them by their genitals. He is a serial womanizer and has been divorced several times. He has also admitted to finding his own daughter sexually attractive. He is a serial liar who adores autocrats and dictators. He may even have gone so far as to collude with Russia and Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 presidential election. Trump is also violent, moody, vain and impulsive. He does not read and is proudly ignorant.

Why would anyone support such a leader? More specifically, why would any supposed “Christian” support Donald Trump, who appears to represent the antithesis of Christian virtues in so many ways?

But Trump is able to take people of some apparent substance and attainment and destroy them as well. The key though is that he doesn’t destroy them. In his orbit, under some kind of spell, he makes them destroy themselves. It is always a self-destruction. He’s like a black hole. But for this there’s no ready explanation. Because what is the power? The force?

I puzzled over this for some time. Eventually I sensed that Trump wasn’t inducing people’s self-destruction so much as he was acting like a divining rod, revealing rot that existed already but was not apparent. … The rot was there but hidden. Trump is the moonlight. Perhaps better to say, to invert our metaphor, Trump is the darkness. …

This seems most palpably the case with the political evangelical community with which Trump has maintained, since early in his campaign, a profound and profoundly cynical mutual embrace. Here I use the term advisedly: I don’t mean evangelical Christians or even conservative evangelical Christians but the evangelical right political faction, which is distinct and different. Nothing I have seen before has more clearly revealed this group’s moral rot than the adoration of Trump, an unchurched hedonist with the moral compass of a predator who is lauded and almost worshipped purely and entirely because he produces political deliverables.

Despite his strong words, Marshall does not go far enough. Christian evangelicals (“Dominionists” and Christian nationalists especially) support Trump because he shares their most important values.

Trump and the Republican Party are waging a crusade to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedoms.

Trump and the Republican Party want to remove constitutional and other legal barriers that limit the ability of churches and other religious organizations to engage in overt political lobbying while retaining their tax-exempt status.

Trump and the Republican Party want to destroy the social safety net and believe that wealth and money are indicators of human worth and value. A belief in the “prosperity gospel” and a crude form of Calvinism where money and wealth are signs of being among “the elect” and of God’s blessing has been endorsed by many Christian evangelical leaders.

Trump and the Republican Party embrace racism and white supremacy. Southern Baptists and other white Christian evangelical faith communities have a long and deep history of racism against people of color — especially African-Americans.

There is also a biblical-mythological dimension for why Christian evangelicals support Trump. Many right-wing Christians have convinced themselves that he is a leader in the tradition of Cyrus the Great or King David who, while being deeply flawed, can be used as an instrument of God’s will.

There is another factor, rooted in emotion and irrationality, that also helps explain evangelical Christians’ support for Donald Trump.

New research published in the Journal of Religion and Health explains it this way:

The studies, based on surveys of more than 900 people, also found some similarities between religious and non-religious people. In both groups the most dogmatic are less adept at analytical thinking, and also less likely to look at issues from other’s perspectives. … The results showed religious participants as a whole had a higher level of dogmatism, empathetic concern and prosocial intentions, while the nonreligious performed better on the measure of analytic reasoning. Decreasing empathy among the nonreligious corresponded to increasing dogmatism.

Professor Anthony Jack highlights the implications of this research for American politics: “With all this talk about fake news, the Trump administration, by emotionally resonating with people, appeals to members of its base while ignoring facts.”

Jared Friedman, a co-author of this new research, concludes, “It suggests that religious individuals may cling to certain beliefs, especially those which seem at odds with analytic reasoning, because those beliefs resonate with their moral sentiments.”

Christian evangelicals’ rejection of empirical reality and their habituation into believing the absurd and the fantastical mates perfectly with the zealotry of the broader American right, which views politics as a form of religious fundamentalism.

Faith, after all, is a matter of believing in that which cannot be proven by normal or empirical means. This definition is a perfect description of both movement conservatism and the Christian right.

Ultimately, Christian evangelicals and Donald Trump are united in an imperfect marriage because they share mutual goals. This is an unholy alliance and, as such, a perfect emblem of today’s Republican Party.

The Republican Party today is basically a coalition of grievances united by one thing: hatred. Hatred of immigrants, hatred of minorities, hatred of intellectuals, hatred of gays, feminists and many other groups too numerous to mention. What binds them together is hatred of Democrats because they are welcoming to every group that Republicans reject.

I do not know exactly when hatred became the binding force in the Republican Party, but its takeover of the once “Solid South” of the Democratic Party was the key turning point. When the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts broke the Democratic Party’s hold on that region, the G.O.P. moved in to replace it. But in the process, Republicans absorbed the traditions of racism, bigotry, populism and rule by plutocrats called “Bourbons” that defined the politics of the South after the Civil War. They also inherited an obsession with self-defense, allegiance to evangelical Christianity, chauvinism, xenophobia and other cultural characteristics long cultivated in the South.

The Bourbons maintained their power by dividing the poor and working classes along racial lines so that they would not unify for their mutual betterment by raising taxes on the wealthy, improving schools and making government responsive to the needs of the masses rather than protecting the wealth and position of the Bourbons.

The Southern states have long followed what are now doctrinaire Republican policies: minuscule taxes, no unions, aggressive pro-business policies, privatized public services and strong police forces that kept minorities in their place. Yet the South is and always has been our poorest region and shows no sign of converging with the Northeast, which has long followed progressive policies opposite those in the South and been the wealthiest region as well.

The addition of conservative former Democrats to the traditional Republican coalition increased the party’s strength in the short run and allowed it to take over Congress. But as Southern attitudes have now completely taken over the G.O.P., its strength outside the South has begun to wane. It simply cannot win nationally as a whites-only party in a nation where the white share of the vote is inexorably shrinking.

I expect that I may not live to see another Republican president and it’s only a matter of time before the G.O.P. loses control of Congress. A new Republican coalition must be assembled, purged of the haters and know-nothings, but I expect that process to take decades.

President Donald Trump has calculated that he will gain political leverage in congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate — separating immigrant parents from their young children at the southern border, according to White House officials.

On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.

Trump's public acknowledgment that he was willing to let the policy continue as he pursued his political goals came as the president once again blamed Democrats for a policy enacted and touted by his own administration.

"The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda," he tweeted. After listing his demands in any immigration bill, he added "Go for it! WIN!"

The attempt to gain advantage from a practice the American Academy of Pediatrics describes as causing children "irreparable harm" sets up a high-stakes gambit for Trump, whose political career has long benefited from harsh rhetoric on immigration.

Democrats have latched onto the issue and vowed to fight in the court of public opinion, with leaders planning trips to the border to highlight the stories of separated families, already the focus of news media attention. Democratic candidates running for vulnerable Republican seats also have begun to make the harsh treatment of children a centerpiece of their campaigns.

The policy has cracked Trump's usually united conservative base, with a wide array of religious leaders and groups denouncing it. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention issued statements critical of the practice.

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who delivered a prayer at Trump's inauguration, signed a letter calling the practice "horrible." Pastor Franklin Graham of Samaritan's Purse, a vocal supporter of the president's who has brushed aside past Trump controversies, called it "terrible" and "disgraceful."

Besides increasing the odds of a broader immigration bill, senior Trump strategists believe that the child separation policy will deter the flow of migrant families across the border. Nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from parents during six weeks in April and May, according to the Justice Department. The figure is the only one released by the goverment.

"The president has told folks that in lieu of the laws being fixed, he wants to use the enforcement mechanisms that we have," a White House official said. "The thinking in the building is to force people to the table."

Trump reinforced that notion Friday morning at the White House, when he suggested Democrats alone had the power to alter the policy.

"I hate the children being taken away," Trump said.

The president used a similar strategy last year as he sought to gain approval for his immigration demands by using the lure of protection for young immigrants brought to the United States as children. That effort, which ran counter to Trump's earlier promise to sign a bipartisan bill protecting the young immigrants, foundered in Congress.

Democratic and Republican strategists believe the odds of passing a broad new immigration law — this one ending the family separation policy — remains slim.

House Republican leaders nonetheless have been trying to broker the compromise between moderate and conservative GOP lawmakers that would encourage families to be kept together, while also provide funding for a new border wall, a path to citizenship for the young immigrants brought to the country as minors and new limits on legal immigration.

The White House told lawmakers Friday that Trump would sign the bill if it passes.

Some Republican immigration hard-liners, however, continue to hold out, saying they will not support any path to citizenship and do not support any accommodations to keep families together. "I don't see a reason to spend the money doing that," Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said in an interview Friday. "And I don't see how you do that without having a suite for every self-described family unit."

If Republicans come together, the bill would need to attract Democratic support to pass the Senate. "They're claiming it addressed separations, but clearly, when you put that in a bill that funds a wall and won't get Democratic votes, they don't have a serious plan," said Rep. Marc Pocan, D-Wis. "They never expected the bill to pass."

Democratic House aides said there were no negotiations Friday on a possible bipartisan compromise. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has introduced a bill in the Senate focused narrowly on ending the child separations, but it has not yet attracted any Republican support.

"On the legislative side, they are not trying to talk to any Democrats," said Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "They are holding the kids hostage."

The current policy resulted from a decision made in April by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute all migrants who cross the border, including those with young children. Those migrants had avoided detention during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Because of a 1997 court settlement that bars children from being imprisoned with parents, Justice Department officials now say they have no choice but to isolate the children.

Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have defended the policy as a sound, and biblical, decision to enforce the law.

"The previous administration wouldn't prosecute illegal aliens who entered the country with children," Sessions said Thursday in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in which he cited biblical advice to follow laws. "It was de facto open borders."

The biblical underpinnings have been challenged by religious leaders.

"There's definitely a groundswell of opposition from virtually every corner of the Christian community," said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. "People are able to understand immediately the drive of parents to protect their child and to understand the horror of splitting up vulnerable children from their parents."

Yet several key Trump administration officials support the family separation policy, including Chief of Staff John Kelly, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and senior adviser Stephen Miller, a vocal supporter of stricter immigration laws.

Some senior officials think Democrats will be pressured by the policy to cut an immigration deal.

"If they aren't going to cooperate, we are going to look to utilize the laws as hard as we can," said a second White House official.

Others have argued that the main benefit of the policy is deterrence. Miller has said internally that the child separations will bring the numbers down at the border, a goal that Trump wants to achieve. Miller and Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, have argued that immigration legislation is unlikely to pass this summer, officials said.

"The side effect of zero tolerance is that fewer people will come up illegally, and fewer minors would be put in danger," said a third senior administration official. "What is more dangerous to a minor, the 4,000 mile journey to America, or the short-term detention of their parents?"

Democrats have been incorporating the plight of the separated children in their midterm election campaigns.

Pelosi will join members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in a Monday visit to the Southern California border, where she plans to talk to parents who have been separated from their children. Several other legislators, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., chairman of the Senate Democratic midterm effort, plan to visit the border city of Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday to highlight the concerns.

Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, who is challenging Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, visited a detention center Tuesday, later describing in a Facebook video the concerns of a mother he met who was about to be separated from her 7-year-old daughter. The video had been viewed 40,000 times by Friday.

Democratic candidate Josh Harder held a protest Thursday over the separation policy at the Modesto, California, offices of Republican Rep. Jeff Denham, one of the leaders of the House effort to craft a Republican compromise bill. "These stories are horrifying," Harder said. "It's deeply impactful in a district like ours, where we are 40 percent Latino."

In response to the rally, Denham released a statement to The Washington Post expressing optimism that the Republican House bill would end the practice.

"We are fixing family separation within this bill and have made changes to keep children with at least one of their parents," he said.