The elephant in the room

At a time when evidence is mounting that the sitting president colluded with a hostile foreign power to try to swing the election in his favor (and also that the sitting president is a delusional narcissist whose very presence in the Oval Office could endanger the whole world), one would think that it would be a time for our congressional representatives to take a step back from efforts to pass said president's favored legislation and instead focus on the crisis of governance in the executive branch.

Instead, our GOP Congress is rushing forward with efforts to pass one of the worst pieces of legislation in the history of this country.

Last night, in a total mockery of legislative diligence that would make our Founding Fathers weep, the Senate passed a tax reform bill that was being written and rewritten by corporate lobbyists in the hours leading up to its passing so that it's literally impossible for the senators voting for the bill to have known all of what is in it. But we know enough to know that what's in it is very bad. Corporations and the ultra-wealthy will get massive tax breaks, and millions of middle class families will ultimately end up paying more in taxes to partially offset those massive tax breaks. That's unprecedented in the history of our country - cutting taxes on the very fortunate while simultaneously raising them on the less fortunate. The bill also threatens to destroy the country's health insurance marketplace. It's also projected to add more than a trillion dollars to the federal deficit, proving once and for all that the idea of the GOP as a "fiscally conservative" party is a total sham and concerns over our debt expressed by GOP lawmakers past, present, and future should never be acknowledged as serious.

One of the most telling aspects of just how terrible this bill is is the provision to tax graduate students' tuition waivers as income, which would result in grad students' taxes increasing by several hundred percent. I was a grad student for many years. The stipend a grad student receives for doing research and/or TAing is basically just enough to get by without having to go into debt. It's not a lavish lifestyle. Creating a huge financial disincentive for people to go into research is the exact opposite of what you'd want to do if you want to encourage innovation in this country, which the GOP falsely claims will result from huge corporate tax cuts.

The public isn't being fooled by this scam. Recent polling shows only about one third of the country supports the bill. People are generally opposed to it because they've correctly concluded that it benefits the wealthy and doesn't benefit anyone else. So what does it say about our country and its political system that one political party is so hellbent on passing a plan that is not only terrible (no credible nonpartisan analysis suggests the benefits of the plan will outweigh the harm it causes) but that is also hated by voters?

Sadly, Republicans have realized that they no longer have any reason to try to win over a majority of the public. Donald Trump was elected president despite losing the popular vote. That's because the Electoral College gives disproportionate weight to voters in states with small populations, and voters in states with small populations are disproportionately white and disproportionately Republican-leaning compared to the country as a whole. The same logic applies to the makeup of the Senate, where a voter in Wyoming has about 67 times as much influence on the legislative process of that body as a voter in California. The House of Representatives is massively gerrymandered toward the GOP such that Democrats could win the aggregate national popular vote for House seats by several percentage points and still fail to gain a majority in number of representatives. Plus, in many states Republicans have engaged in massive voter supression efforts targeting demographic groups that tend to vote Democratic, further stacking the deck in the GOP's favor. (To be clear, in-person voter fraud that voter ID laws are supposedly intended to prevent is a virtually nonexistent problem; such laws would be solutions in search of a problem unless one recognized that the actual "problem" from the GOP's point of view is "minorities voting.")

What it all comes down to is that we have a two-party system, and one of those two parties no longer has any inclination toward trying to do things that will benefit most of their constituents. Sure, the influence of corporate money on both political parties is a huge problem, but the Democrats have to try to strike a balance between helping their donors and helping their voters. The Republicans can now focus almost entirely on trying to help their donors, and then count on the heavily tilted electoral landscape plus the powerful influence of right-wing media sources on the minority of voters who make up their base to help keep them in power.

Political moderates, influenced both by news media coverage and by a natural human desire to see the truth as being in the middle, like to blame problems in Washington on "both sides." And I'm by no means saying all or even most of our Democratic elected officials are doing a great job. But the elephant in the room today is the fact that, in our two-party system, one of those two parties has become completely bankrupt both morally and intellectually, and we cannot move forward as a country until that party loses power and is purged of this intellectual and moral bankruptcy. The GOP Congress's continued enabling of Trump and its passing of this horrific tax bill have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the modern GOP is a toxic force in our country. The problem is not just Trump. The problem is the Republican Party itself.

I continue to speak up about these things because I care too much to stay silent, but I also feel like I'm largely preaching to the choir. I have little interaction with people of significantly different political views. All my friends who I see regularly already hate Trump and the GOP. It's interesting, because I never made any effort at filtering who I befriended by their political views; it just kind of worked out that way. My job finds me working in a biology research lab, so you aren't going to find a lot of conservatives in a place like that either.

I guess the only people I'm really close with whose political views don't largely align with my own are my parents. I'm so relieved, though, that despite voting Republican more often than not during my lifetime, my parents fully recognize the awfulness of Trump. But as I said, this goes way beyond the awfulness of one man. I hope that people like my parents are waking up to the fact that the GOP itself, not just Trump, is a threat to our country. And that people like my parents, whose circle of friends and acquaintances is not nearly as one-sided politically as my own, are trying to influence the people around them whose views may be less rigid. And to all my friends, I hope that you'll continue to speak out on these issues with people you know both of similar and different political stripes, and make sure you and everyone you know get out to vote next fall. Our country is in bad shape at this moment, and if we can't muster up a mass movement against the party of Trump in the 2018 elections, things are only going to get worse.