I woke in the still darkness of early morning earlier this month to discover that sleep for the night was a thing of the past.
I knew that Congress was poised to vote on a sweeping tax bill that night, so I picked up my phone to check the news. Of course, I found what I had been dreading, that the bill had passed in the Senate on a purely partisan basis, 51 to 48. Every single Republican senator had voted for this bill and against the people they are supposed to represent and serve.
For at least the millionth time this year, I had difficulty believing what I was reading, that this disaster of a bill was now the law of the land. My brain simply rejected this news, refused to accept it as fact. But in the end, I knew that it was true, realized that it was just the next in a very long line of policy reversals, regulation repeals, and destructive pieces of legislation — what I have come to think of as a war on the American people.
This tax bill, that has now been signed into law, was very deceitfully and relentlessly sold, not as the enormous tax cut for corporations and the wealthy that it is, but as a boon to the middle class and the poor. The president and his party pushed this bill through by using the questionable tale of tax cuts for the rich “trickling down” to the rest of us, something that has been proven to fail multiple times in the past.
And push they did and in record time, with mere days or hours to read and understand what they were voting for. The bill had over 500 pages with an additional 600-page conference report that explained what was actually in it. I assume that it was enough for them just to know that it contained an arrow to the heart of the Affordable Care Act with the repeal of the individual mandate, and that they could finally stand up and proclaim that they had killed Obamacare at last.
Only they forgot to notice that we the people didn’t want it killed. After all, the Congressional Budget Office estimates around 13 million people will eventually lose health coverage due to the premium increases that will surely come as fewer young and currently healthy people sign up. Polling showed the Republican members of Congress just how unpopular this bill was, but the president and his party decided that polls are “fake polls,” put out by the “fake news,” so to heck with them.
And what of the talk by House Speaker Paul Ryan about having to trim entitlements to rein in the budget deficit, saying this even before the final vote? Let me see if I get this right: The tax bill adds approximately $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit and that is a major concern to Ryan. So, to remedy this dangerous situation, a situation that he and his party just created by passing an unnecessary $1.5 trillion tax cut for the rich, he will cut Medicare and Medicaid, and maybe privatize Social Security while he’s at it, something he’s been wanting to do for years.
The president himself came right out and revealed the extent of his lies regarding who really benefits from this tax bill, when he told a group of his ultra-rich Mar-a-Lago club members that “You all just got a lot richer” right after signing the bill into law. In case you didn’t know, initiation into this club costs $200,000, with an annual membership fee reported at between $14,000 and $16,000. Let that sink in for a minute.
Of course, Donald Trump also has said that his own taxes will increase under the new law, an obvious lie, given what he just told his club members. But we can’t know for sure, since the IRS is still auditing his taxes.
There just seems to be a never-ending stream of bad news and bad policies coming from this government. Just to name a few, there’s the repeal of the net neutrality rules by the Federal Communications Commission, Trump’s rescinding of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and the undoing of multiple EPA regulations that keep our air and water clean. The trained scientists and experts that we need to keep us safe are leaving government work in droves because their work is no longer valued.
And then there’s the ban on certain words, like fetus, science-based, evidence-based, transgender, climate change. And the constant stream of lies, and the cruel, reckless and utterly juvenile insults coming straight out of the mouth of the most powerful man on the planet. I can’t make sense of this new world we’re living in because it simply doesn’t make sense.
No wonder I don’t sleep much anymore, knowing what I know. It’s clearer than ever that this president and his party are hell-bent on dismantling all government policies that might benefit the people in their effort to please the 1 percent. These few extremely wealthy people are their true constituency, not the 30 percent of Americans that somehow still support them.
How do I watch this destruction, this corruption take place and not feel like I’m in the middle of some really well-written horror story where up is down and in is out, where the truth is subverted, and lying is the norm, not the exception?
So, to get any sleep at all these days, I try to remind myself that there is now an enormous grassroots movement — a huge wave of women, the young and people of color — all lining up to run for elective office, from congressional seats all the way down to the local dog catcher. They intend to move us out of this Trumpian darkness, toward the brilliant light of a more equal and fair, a more caring and compassionate America.
I’ll be voting for those on my ballot and doing what I can to support all the rest. I hope you’ll do the same.
Karen Gardner, of Haydenville, a retired computer programmer, is a bird watcher, nature photographer and ukulele player. She can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.