US Political System: A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party (US Political System) is - by Jennifer Rubin

Disaster: level explosive

President Trump has had more-scandalous weeks. He has had weeks with more bombshell bad-news stories. But no week has matched this one in revealing the moral and intellectual rot at the center of the GOP. Pandemic intellectual dishonesty and celebration of uncivilized conduct now permeate the party and its support in the conservative ecosystem. Consider what we saw and learned this week:

• Trump in Saudi Arabia disclaims any concern for human rights.
• Trump bullies NATO allies in public (and physically shoves one leader).
• Trump’s budget is built on a rickety scaffold of math errors, economic nonsense and fantasyland predictions.
• Trump’s advisers defend massive cuts to the safety net, coupled with huge giveaways to the rich.
• The Congressional Budget Office score, which the House did not require before voting on a mammoth health-care bill, confirms that GOP leaders falsely claimed they protected people with preexisting conditions.
• Trump’s lawyers contemptuously swat away a request for information relating to his receipt of foreign monies, finding that it is too impractical to abide by his own promise and the Constitution.
• Trump has nothing but praise for thuggish autocrats, including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
• Trump continues to pursue a Muslim ban, repeatedly struck down by the courts as bigotry disguised under the cloak of national security.
• A GOP congressional candidate, conclusive evidence suggests, attacks a reporter and apparently lies about it (he later apologizes for actions he denied less than 24 hours earlier), but party leaders do not repudiate him or demand that he withdraw.
• Jared Kushner, the beneficiary of egregious nepotism, now is a focus of the FBI’s Russia investigation, bringing a once-in-a-lifetime scandal one step closer to the presidency.
• Sean Hannity is forced to stop propagating a detestable hoax about a young man’s murder; Fox News after a week withdraws the original false report without much explanation or an apology.

This is the state of the GOP (and the US political system) — a refuge for intellectual frauds and bullies, for mean-spirited hypocrites who preach personal responsibility yet excuse the inexcusable.

Note EU-Digest: One can not only blame the Republicans for this political mess, but must also include Democrats and voters in general for creating it.   This is not business as usual, it is the recipe for disaster and the collapse of Western Democracy as we know it.

Read more: A week that reveals how rotten today’s Republican Party is - The Washington Post

The US Political Scene: Ideological purity comes back to bite the GOP - by Linda Killian

Amid the postmortem over everything that went wrong with the Republican health reform effort, we shouldn’t overlook the role of the system that elects members of Congress. It not only contributed to the massive failure, it is also predictive of what we will see from the Republican Congress moving forward.

Only about 15% of all congressional districts (about 50) are truly competitive. Most representatives come from heavily gerrymandered districts drawn to favor one party over the other by politicians interested in self-preservation and party dominance.

Partisan gerrymandering is largely responsible for the election of the House Freedom Caucus and its outsize influence on Republican health reform legislation. These hard-line conservatives revel in bucking House leadership and are in line with Tea Party ideology.Because of the lopsided tilt of their districts, they need only appeal to a narrow group of voters to get elected — a reality which has pulled Congress and the Republican Party far to the right, out of step with a majority of Americans.

Until recently President Trump seemed to be governing the same way, appealing only to the voters he considers his base.  At his February news conference, he dismissed citizens who defended the Affordable Care Act at Republican town halls this way: “They’re not the Republican people that the representatives are representing.”

As the White House and House Speaker Paul Ryan made ever more concessions on health care to try to win the votes of recalcitrant Freedom Caucus members, they wound up losing more centrist members who represent more diverse constituencies and are interested in actually governing rather than simply saying no.

One moderate who opposed the GOP plan was Pennsylvania Republican Charlie Dent. On NBC's Meet the Press last weekend, Dent confirmed a New York Times report that during a White House meeting on health reform, Trump angrily told Dent he was “destroying the Republican Party” and “was going to take down tax reform.”

You can certainly argue over which of the two men is destroying the GOP, but Trump was referring to Medicaid cuts that would produce savings to finance tax cuts Republicans plan for the wealthy. This reverse Robin Hood act doesn’t sit well with GOP centrists like Dent or with the voters who elected him.

Read more: Ideological purity comes back to bite the GOP: Column

Obama breaks with Reagan legacy - con-game persuading millions of Americans voting against their own economic interests could be over - by Eric Reguly

When Barack Obama was declared the victor in the U.S. presidential race, the immediate reaction of some was, so what has changed?

But when the voter breakdown trickled out, we realized that the Democratic incumbent’s rather thorough trouncing of Republican rival Mitt Romney was anything but trivial. Instead, it looks like a pivotal moment in U.S. electioneering. The Great Republican con game, which had persuaded millions of Americans to vote against their economic interests since the start of the Reagan era, in 1980, is finally breaking down.

It looks like Mr. Obama’s efforts to label Mr. Romney a bloodless plutocrat scored some points. This is bad news for the country’s richest 1 per cent, who had benefited enormously from the great warping of the U.S. economy, in which financial capitalism – speculation, to use another term – took precedence over efficient markets dominated by manufacturing. It saw the rigging of tax codes to benefit the rich more than the poor. It saw sweeping deregulation that gave birth to creative financial products, such as collateralized debt obligations, that mere mortals (Warren Buffett among them) could not understand and ultimately turned toxic and biblically destructive.

It now appears that the Democrats can rely on a broad, and broadening, coalition of voters who are not enthralled with the social and economic agenda of the Republicans. Mr. Romney wanted to drop taxes for “job creators.” Mr. Obama campaigned for higher taxes on the wealthy and vowed to veto any fiscal proposal that did not allow the top tax rate for those earning more than $250,000 (U.S.) to rise to 39.6 per cent from 35 per cent.

Republicans have spent decades telling Americans that the country can un-tax its way to endless prosperity. It didn’t quite work that way. The rich got very rich and the income gap between the wealthy and everyone else widened to obscene proportions. Infrastructure and schools fell apart. Budget deficits exploded in the Bush years and kept rising in the first Obama term, when spending to rescue the economy, financial institutions and the car makers became the necessary economic strategy.

It wasn’t as if the super-rich and the Wall Street bankers suffered in Mr. Obama’s first term, thanks in part to the rescues financed by the Troubled Asset Relief Program launched in the dying days of the Bush presidency. But they could suffer in Mr. Obama’s second term as his administration tries to re-balance the economy away from the Wall Street speculation-and-bubble machine.

If Mr. Obama had won a razor-thin victory, you could draw different conclusions, that Mr. Romney’s loss was the result of a few slip-ups or bad luck as opposed to something fundamental. But Mr. Obama won a convincing victory. The 1-per-centers and the social conservatives and the angry white guys who are still kicking have every reason to worry.

Note EU-Digest: Europe should also take good note of this new US political  environment and stop protecting the financial interests of those which need to be put under far more scrutiny than has been the case in the past. 


Read more: Obama win marks sharp break from Reagan legacy - The Globe and Mail

US Political Scene: Decline of white might hurts right - by Ewen MacAskill and Gary Younge

It was telling that the greatest cheer during newly re-elected President Barack Obama's acceptance speech came when he reprised a version of the speech that made him famous when he introduced John Kerry at the Democratic convention in 2004.

"I believe we can keep the promise of our founders," he said. "The idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try."

For the best part of half a century the Republicans have invoked Richard Nixon's Southern strategy to take away suburban and southern whites away from the Democrats. 
 
This made electoral sense as recently as the 90s. But since 1980 the white share of the vote has fallen in every election bar one and over the last four election cycles fewer and fewer people of colour will have voted Republican. That leaves Republicans fishing for a larger number of voters in a smaller pool of white people.

It was therefore that a coalition of minority groups helped deliver Obama his victory.

Read more: Decline of white might hurts right