Rip Gop

by Stanley B Greenberg

  Walker would have to survive a recall election in 2012, but not surprisingly, got $11 million in help from Koch brother groups.

  After voters threw out Governor Walker and took away the legislature’s veto-proof majority in the 2018 off-year elections, Walker convened an unseemly and unhurried lame-duck session of the legislature to enact a law to limit the powers of the Wisconsin Democrats. It restricted their ability to pull out of the ACA lawsuit that was working its way through the courts, shortened absentee and early voting windows to two weeks before the election, allowed lawmakers to select their own attorneys to represent the state in cases over the attorney general, narrowed the number of roads eligible for federal repair money, and gave the legislature greater control over the economic development corporation to incentivize economic growth, among other provisions.71

  The Koch brothers also backed the Tea Party protests and organization in North Carolina where Democrats had a strong hold on the state, yet won there in the 2012 national elections.72 Retail magnate James Arthur Pope alone was responsible for 80 percent of the funding for conservative groups in the state that spent over $60 million to help produce the GOP sweep of the legislature in 2010.

  They made North Carolina a laboratory for crony capitalism. After his election victory in 2012, Governor Pat McCrory made the retail magnate his budget director and they quickly made up for lost time. The North Carolina Republicans have proved themselves the most willing to break all conventions and the china.

  In the summer of 2013, they enacted a flat tax of 5.75 percent, saving millionaires a cool $10,000 a year in state taxes. They abolished the estate tax and cut the corporate tax rate from 6.9 percent to 2.5 percent in 2018. In all, those in the top 1 percent got tax breaks of $21,780 a year. At the same time they eliminated the earned income tax credit for low-wage workers, as discussed at many ALEC conferences.73

  And on schedule, “tax reform” produced an annual $3.5 billion deficit that had to be paid for from elsewhere in the budget and that elsewhere was education. In 2013, North Carolina moved immediately against the teachers, whose annual salaries have fallen 5 percent. They cut $66 million from the state university system and created a $4,200 voucher for children to attend private or religious schools. Over the past decade led by the state GOP, North Carolina cut K-12 funding by 7.9 percent and higher education by a stunning 15.9 percent. Tuition at the state’s public universities was raised 44.5 percent.74

  North Carolina voters elected Congressman Mark Meadows in 2012, who went to Washington and later led the Freedom Caucus and the government shutdown over health care.

  Job well done.

  Except voters turned out Governor Pat McCrory and elected Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and Attorney General Josh Stein in 2016; but North Carolina Republicans offered a new model on how to continue governing anyway. With the prospect of a Democratic governor, Governor McCrory signed a law that cut the number of governor-appointed positions in the state from 1,500 to 400, made cabinet appointments contingent on state senate confirmation, made partisan the state supreme court elections, and rigged county election boards to have Republicans in charge during election years.75 America saw how important this last change was in the swirling controversy around the 2018 congressional election in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO KANSAS?

  The Koch brothers and Koch Industries made sure their home state was a model that would get the nation’s attention, and Sam Brownback’s 2010 election as governor of Kansas and the 2014 credit downgrade of the state by Moody and Standard & Poor did just that. The Koch family was the biggest contributor to this Tea Party favorite in Congress and uncompromising pro-life conservative.76 “Our dependence is not on Big Government,” Brownback declared, “but on a Big God that loves us and lives within us.”77

  In the home of the Koch brothers’ Koch Industries, Brownback announced a goal of totally eliminating the personal income tax and the earned income tax credit for the working poor and capping spending increases at 2 percent a year, forcing immediate and major cuts in spending.78

  Governor Brownback cut taxes by $1.1 billion and eliminated the income tax for small businesses while cutting welfare by nearly half. With trickle-down zeal, the plan cut the tax rate from 6.4 to 4.9 percent for those earning $150,000, but only a half a percentage for those earning less. Of course, it eliminated the earned income tax credit, too. Later, the GOP enacted changes that cut the top rate another percentage point by 2018 and required it to fall incrementally after that. The tax plan relieved owners of 200,000 small businesses paying any state income tax, among which were around twenty Koch Industries LLCs.79

  The plan wiped out a budget surplus from before Brownback came to office and state revenue just evaporated as a result. His budget enacted, like other ALEC states, a 2.5 percent annual cap on spending increases and slashed education spending by $200 million, the largest cut in the state’s history. The cut put education spending 16.5 percent below the pre–financial crisis level. This was the closest thing to assault. Abolishing teacher tenure put the teachers further back.80

  When Kansas came slowly out of the recession, the GOP passed more tax cuts rather than fund education. That is why the state supreme court in 2013 found that school spending for poor districts was so low as to be unconstitutional and ordered that $129 million be restored. Despite that, the GOP proposed $44.5 million in further education cuts to fill a budget hole created by their accelerating income tax cuts.81

  After the election, a prospective budget shortfall of $143 million in 2016 forced Governor Brownback and the Republican legislature to consider increasing sales and excise taxes and cigarette and liquor taxes and to slow the reduction of income taxes that were his signature conservative policy.82

  THE RUST BELT STATES

  The Kochs got their 2010 Rust Belt opportunity in Pennsylvania and Michigan—and with the latter, home of the progressive labor movement and the American labor movement and the United Auto Workers, becoming a right-to-work state.

  Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania was swept into office by the 2010 wave, and he cut corporate taxes by $1.2 billion and angrily opposed the Democrats’ effort to impose a severance tax on the booming shale-gas industry. “It’s the property owner’s gas. I’m sorry. It’s the mineral owner’s gas,” he declared.83

  Corbett cut education spending by $841 million in his first budget, and twenty thousand teachers lost their jobs. The Republicans’ education cuts, however, were not aimed solely at getting to a smaller government or a balanced budget. Their purpose was to reduce education spending for the poor, minorities, and immigrants. The governor scrapped the funding formula that took account of the number of students in poverty and those who needed English instruction. This guaranteed that the brunt of the education cuts would fall on the poorest and Hispanic populations.

  Michigan was home of the UAW and progressive labor and Democratic leaders were powerful as well in education and the public sector. With 20.6 percent of the labor force belonging to unions, ranked first in the nation, Michigan had a history of supporting a strong state government, public education, and high environmental quality and regulation. So, the ALEC formula of corporate tax cuts, big corporate donations to the governor, and privatization took a dramatic toll here. The residents of Flint who paid with their lives stand as a testament to the withdrawal of effective government in this Tea Party period.

  After the Tea Party wave, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and the now GOP-dominated legislature passed $5.1 billion in tax cuts for corporations. They also eliminated the earned income tax credit, of course. They proceeded as the other Tea Party states had with cutting school funding by 9 percent until 2014. And when they needed to fund a business tax, they cut another $400 million from the education budget.84

  To pay for the corporate tax cuts, Governor Snyder led the country’s most widespread assault on public services, and in close alliance with his biggest corporate backers—Amway, Arama
rk, and Quicken Loans—spearheaded the widespread privatization of public services. He was constantly pressed to save money because of the massive corporate tax cuts at the outset of his term.

  The governor unapologetically identified with the need to diminish the public sector and expand the role of the private sector. Companies like Amway and the dark money group Moving Michigan Forward funded public service campaigns in support of privatization. Betsy DeVos promoted doubling the number of charter schools and spent $5.6 billion lobbying for private school vouchers.85

  In Flint, the governor’s appointed emergency manager switched the source of the city’s water to save money. That decision to divert water and reduce oversight led to the exposure of nearly one hundred thousand residents and their children to toxic levels of lead. In 2016, the Department of Environmental Quality, which supervised oversight of Detroit and Flint’s water supply, was cut to meet the ongoing funding crisis.

  During the special session 2012 election, Governor Snyder signed the bill that made Michigan a right-to-work state, which was shattering for the labor movement. Michigan unions suffered a net loss of 85,000 union members over a five-year period, or 137,000 members if one removes the United Auto Workers from the count, whose membership has rebounded with the auto industry. These unions also had to cut political spending by $26 million over those five years. State and local union membership also dropped 15 percent.86

  When the voters ignominiously threw out the entire slate of Republican constitutional officers and elected Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel, the Republicans rushed legislation in a lame-duck session to limit the damage.87 It made it harder to get petitions on the ballot in future elections to discourage the use of these initiatives to boost state turnout. They also passed revised paid sick and minimum wage hikes that reduced paid sick leave from 72 hours to 36 hours per year and extended the timeline for raising the minimum wage by 8 more years.

  DECONSTRUCTING GOVERNMENT NATIONALLY

  In 2017, President Trump and the GOP were able to pass unanimously in the House and Senate precisely this kind of massive, unfunded tax cut for corporations and billionaires and specific industries—to set up, Paul Ryan assures us, the “entitlement reform” that must surely follow and blockage on any new investments in education and infrastructure. Trump nationalized the GOP effort to deconstruct the state, which is to destroy its capacity to do anything—completing the Tea Party decade’s greatest work.

  The determination to deconstruct government in the states and now nationally has produced a Republican base that devalues education. In America’s modern history, it has educated each new generation of immigrants, but the GOP base does not want to educate the next.

  This battle to deconstruct government and slash education spending has had a huge impact on Republican attitudes toward education, and it has set them apart. A remarkable 55 percent of Republicans believe a college education is not necessary for success in America, according to Ron Brownstein’s national survey in October 2016.88 And when asked which would do more for your local economy—“spending more money on education, including K through 12 schools and public colleges and universities” or “cutting taxes for individuals and businesses”—Republicans backed cutting taxes by a landslide margin, 55 to 38 percent.89

  Deconstructing government has been deeply embraced by a party that has carried the spear for the Tea Party battle against big government and governmental activism.

  STOPPED UNIVERSAL HEALTH INSURANCE IN GOP-CONTROLLED STATES

  Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro reminds us that both parties contributed to the creation of America’s safety net and, almost immediately after their passage, accepted Social Security and regularly raised benefits, accepted Medicare and Medicaid. Ronald Reagan never sought to change or reduce spending levels for social programs. George Bush introduced his plan to privatize Social Security, but promised not to reduce spending levels.90

  But after the 2010 election, stopping the implementation of the Affordable Care Act became a litmus test for the Tea Party groups. Federally, the Tea Party bloc in the House and Senate would not entertain any “fixes.” And in the states, they stopped it in its tracks, even though nationally, the ACA had dropped the proportion of uninsured from 16 to 11 percent between 2011 and 2017.91

  The GOP governors were under pressure from state businesses and civic groups to participate in the health program and to accept the expansion of Medicaid in their states, but the Tea Party fought them for taking even a planning grant.92 The Tea Party governors proudly announced their refusal to cooperate in any way.

  Fully twenty-four states where the GOP had effective control refused to set up health care exchanges to allow people to select private health insurance plans and joined the suit to get the Supreme Court to rule that the ACA was unconstitutional. And I list them because it gives you some sense of the exceptional scale of the Tea Party resistance to President Obama and Obamacare. The state resisters included Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.93 All but Arizona and Michigan refused to expand Medicaid, with huge consequences for public health. Most tried to introduce work requirements for receiving Medicaid, though that was blocked by the Obama administration until President Trump’s election.94

  In 2019, the Trump administration Justice Department decided to join the suit brought by thirteen Republican attorneys general contending the ACA mandate that health insurance policies must cover anyone, regardless of preexisting conditions. If they succeed, the ACA consumer protection guarantees, including the ban on using preexisting conditions as a factor in health insurance, will be history.

  The results of boycott of the ACA were pretty evident and poignant: the first peer-reviewed study analyzing the effects of Medicaid expansion showed that two thirds of poor uninsured blacks in the country live in these “refusenik” states, where almost 6 million residents did not get health insurance.95

  Medicaid expansion showed, more than any single act, that government can be effective in improving the well-being of Americans, if government weren’t being suffocated by Tea Party governance. In Maine, voters by referendum forced their Tea Party governor to expand Medicaid but Paul LePage would not yield until forced to by the courts, while the voters elected a Democratic governor in 2018 to move forward. In Utah in 2018, one of the most Republican states in the country, 53 percent of the voters approved Proposition 3, forcing the elected leaders to expand Medicaid. Idaho and Nebraska, neither of them bastions of liberalism, passed an expansion of Medicaid by referendum, by 61 and 54 percent respectively.96 Those broad mandates from the citizenry say voters welcome greater activism in health care.

  When Donald Trump was elected, the GOP fought dramatically to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the replacement version that almost became law, the Graham-Cassidy plan, would have turned the ACA into a state block grant and ended the essential benefits, like no penalty for preexisting conditions.97 Having failed to repeal it, the Trump administration has sought to sabotage it in every possible way and won the repeal of the individual mandate in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The Tea Party–dominated GOP perversely increased the number of uninsured by 4 million in 2019 and an expected 12 million by 2021.98

  America had been headed toward achieving universal health care. Government was demonstrably successful in achieving this public goal popular with the voters, but progress was stalled in the GOP-controlled states after 2010 and, now, the GOP owns Americans’ having to face even more health care insecurity and rising costs, as a Tea Party–dominated government leads the retreat.

  ACHIEVING AN END TO ABORTIONS IN GOP-CONTROLLED STATES

  The Tea Party movement and activists in 2010 were vehemently hostile to government, but they were socially conservative as well, determined to end the murderous policies that legalized abortion. The Evangel
icals were the largest bloc in the GOP base and they cheered the Tea Party groups that were brave enough to challenge the GOP establishment and gridlock the country.

  So, fully half of the GOP members were determined to end legal abortion, and their pro-life elected leaders pressed for changes in law and regulations that would mean women could not get a legal abortion in GOP-controlled states.

  The Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey maintained the legal standards of Roe v. Wade, but allowed the states to regulate access to abortion, as long as no “undue burden” was placed on women.99 Well, the Tea Party wave in 2010 was the firing of the starter pistol in the GOP-controlled states to push the limits of “undue burden.”

  Look how determined the most prominent pro-life governors and legislators were.

  In Texas, Governor Rick Perry was a pro-life innovator. Texas was the first state to try to defund Planned Parenthood in 2010. The state mandated that a woman see a sonogram twenty-four hours in advance of an abortion, with no exception, and that there be a like waiting period for even a medically induced abortion in 2011. The pro-lifers set the state against family planning and women’s health services for “spiritual reasons.” In 2013, Texas pushed the limits. On one hand, it outlawed abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy unless it would involve major physical risk to the woman and then embraced in 2013 requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of a facility that performed abortions. In this vast state, Tea Party government brought the number of abortion clinics down from forty-two to five for a population of 26 million, all in urban areas and none in the western part of the state. In 2016, it required the burial or cremation of aborted fetuses. And to adapt to the passage of the ACA, in 2017 it banned insurance coverage for abortions.100