With social program fights, some Republicans fear being seen as the party of the 1 percent

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

With social program fights, some Republicans fear being seen as the party of the 1 percent

By Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis March 29 at 5:37 PM

President Trump boasted this week that the Republican Party will soon be known as “the party of great health care.”

But a growing number of Republicans fear that it risks being tagged as the party of the 1 percent instead — handing Democrats a potent political message as the GOP pushes to gut former president Barack Obama’s health-care law and other popular federal programs, including those that help the poor and those with disabilities.

A spate of policy moves in recent weeks by Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials has driven the party’s agenda hard to the right, giving new fodder to Democratic presidential candidates eager to shift the national debate to such issues as health care and jobs ahead of the 2020 election.

The administration’s budget released earlier this month, for example, includes massive rollbacks of programs including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance, as well as cuts to the Special Olympics, Meals on Wheels, and programs related to autism and other developmental disabilities.

Trump signaled his own misgivings about some of those cuts in recent days — rescinding a proposal to zero out Special Olympics funding, which had sparked a bipartisan backlash, and promising to protect a cleanup program for the Great Lakes in states that could be crucial to his reelection.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/with-social-program-fights-some-republicans-fear-being-seen-as-the-party-of-the-1-percent/2019/03/29/9cfc3232-516b-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html

[Va Lefty]

1. That ship has sailed

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. Ya beat me to it! I was going to say: "Only some?"

[ck4829]

3. Yep

[elleng]

6. and we have to REMIND them, EVERY DAY, in EVERY WAY!

[SWBTATTReg]

7. Absolutely. They still haven't justified or explained their so called tax cut and jobs bill of ...

2017, where over 80% of the proceeds went to the uber wealthy in this country...not us.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. Maybe they should have thought of that before they ran for office as GOPers

and happily signed on to whatever bullshit emanated from Trump's White House.

[gratuitous]

5. The party of the 1 percent? The deuce you say!

I mean, gee whiz, we only have evidence piled up from the last 40 years or so; let's not be hasty about tagging the Republicans with any pejoratives; not like those tax-and-spend, soft-on-defense, bleeding-heart Democrats.

[JHB]

8. Some Republicans fear their smokescreen of fog rising off mountain of bullshit...

...is getting thin.

[Karadeniz]

9. They made that bed...

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

10. The Republican party has been the party of the 1% for the last 40 years

They're only now seeing that as a problem?

[ananda]

11. You mean they're worried about the blind?

It's always been obvious to anyone who can see.