BY KAREN WEBB
The main goal and focus of the Trump Administration is to make the U.S. a place where no decent, loving, caring person would want to live. They seem to be succeeding with the full support of the GOP and I don’t mean the far-right KKK, white supremacist faction.
Most of my writing used to be political satire, but I find myself resorting to cynicism most of the time. There is nothing funny about calling yourself a Christian nation and claiming WWJD – “what would Jesus do?” – as your guiding principal to justify ripping children from their parents, housing them hundreds of miles apart, in animal control fencing, with little or no family contact.
Now they are going back to denying health care to people born here – even to poor white people – to energize their base.
One of the Justice Department’s primary duties is to defend the laws Congress writes in court, even ones that a different administration or a particular DOJ attorney doesn’t like. Most of the time if a DOJ attorney says he can’t defend a law, then they find one who can or he resigns. They tell me it rarely happens that the DOJ decides to just abandon that duty altogether.
In true GOP/Christian form, the Sessions/Trump Justice Department has decided to stop defending the right of taxpayers, especially the working poor, to have preventable, affordable health care with a big emphasis on pre-existing conditions. If you have been denied access to affordable health care outside of emergency rooms for your entire life, it is likely you have some kind of pre-existing condition, many that could have been avoided.
Do you want to know why they think they can do that? As usual with the GOP, backed by the evangelical right, they are claiming that during the Obama years they were discriminated against, because their particular interpretation of the Bible should allow them the right to control the personal lives of all taxpayers.
The precedent this time is the Obama DOJ’s decision to stop defending DOMA, Defense of Marriage Act. They are claiming that denying them the right to use their Biblical beliefs to tell taxpayers who they can and can’t marry, denying them access to around 2,000 benefits and responsibilitiesthat only marriage provides means they can now deny affordable, preventive health care to the working poor as payback.
Either they get to control marriage or they will just take away your health care.
Think about this: every time you fill out an application for work or any kind of agreement, if it includes the question “Are you married?” there will be either a benefit or responsibility for a spouse involved. It can have to do with housing, responsibility of owning someone’s debt, being able to adopt children, being able to make decisions about their children, inheriting the property you have both worked for all of your time together, without a will, being allowed in your ICU room, getting the benefits of your spouse’s Social Security, deciding whether to cut the machines off and allow you to die in peace and thousands of other benefits and responsibilities.
Franklin Graham and others in Trump’s theological cabal are upset they can’t do that for you.
Now, Franklin Graham and the rest of the cabal want to deny affordable healthcare to everyone as payback for not being allowed to control marriage. You say, “How can they be that vindictive in Jesus name?” Well, they think they can, just like they think people coming to this country because it is supposed to be a Christian country are criminals, ifthey are the wrong color or financial class.
It is now criminal for people of color to think they are good enough. These people are so bad the only thing to do is to take even their sick toddlers from them.
Back to health care: In May 2017, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-AL, told CNN’s Jake Tapper, regarding pre-existing conditions, that TrumpCare “will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher healthcare costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset the costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy.”
He is saying that people who can afford preventable health care are better than those who can’t. Healthcare costs force more people into bankruptcy than any other cause. He continues, “And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”
The right way for the GOP is to not be born poor.
Mo Brooks, I have heard that name somewhere. He must know a lot about life sciences and other science stuff. Fast forward to May 2018 and he claims that the scientists at the NASA facility in his state are telling him things they aren’t telling the rest of us. He is the guy who says that scientists at NASA told him that silt from rivers and rocks from cliffs falling into the ocean caused less space on the bottom and are the primary cause of rising sea levels. They do not believe in science.
Around 40 years ago, I realized that Donald Trump was a spoiled brat who insisted on getting his way and would do some really vindictive crap as payback, but I never thought he would get the regular GOP to just follow along.
We are not talking about refusing to bake a cake, we are talking about denying taxpayers health care in order to give wealthy people tax breaks, allowing Franklin Graham and the rest of the self-righteous cabal to be matchmakers for the entire country, and ripping children from their families to show brown people they will never be good enough for this Christian[?] GOP.
I will not say they can’t possibly get worse, because they always find a way to treat “the least of these” like garbage and blame it on Jesus.
– Longtime Oklahoma resident and Observer contributor Karen Webb now lives in Portland, OR
