The Top Five Ways the Republicans Plan to Destroy Our Democracy and Rights in 2023 and Beyond

Five Actual Threats the Republicans have made

Oct 20, 2022

Our very democracy is on the line.

Issue #156 Government October 20, 2022

No ads or annoying popups ever! So instead, please see the important information at the bottom of this post. Please keep those “Likes” and comments coming! Thanks!

At the time of this writing, we are less than three weeks away from the end of the 2022 midterm election season. Early/absentee voting has started in many jurisdictions, and the official Election Day is Tuesday, November 8, 2022.

The Democrats had a lot of momentum going into the election season due to the destruction of reproductive rights by the Supreme Court and several legislative wins by President Biden and the Democrats in Congress.

However, in the last few weeks, the Republicans have resorted to their tried and true “boogey-man” talking points about the Democrats and their policies: inflation and the economy, crimes by Black people, and marauding hordes of illegal immigrants coming over the border. These attacks, despite the Republicans having so many “bad quality” candidates and actual election deniers on ballots around the country, have served to make many races much tighter than they were.

We’ve heard “this is the most important election of our lifetime” before (we said that in 2016, but people didn’t believe us), but this time that statement is more accurate than ever. Many of the rights we still have, as well as our very democratic republic, are on the ballot in every state. There is no national election this year, and historically, the party in power usually loses seats in Congress in the midterms.

As of September 30, 2022, there is a very slim Democratic majority in the House of Representatives: 220 Democrats (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats), 217 Republicans, and 3 vacancies. The Republicans only have to pick up five new seats to re-take the majority.

In the Senate, there is a 50/50 split between Democrats and Republicans, with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in her role as president of the Senate able to cast the deciding vote. The Republicans only have to pick up one additional seat to re-take the majority.

Since 1980, the Republicans have known that they cannot win elections based on their policies that are unpopular with the majority of Americans. They have lost the popular vote for president in 7 out of the last 8 elections. They can only hold onto power by political and literal force.

In this article, I will discuss the threats from the Republicans that would destroy our democracy and take away even more of our rights if the Republicans take over one of both houses of Congress.

The Top Five Threats the Republicans Promise to Put Into Place in 2023 and 2024

The House Republicans have promised to spend all of their time impeaching current and past members of the Biden administration, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is retiring in December. They will do nothing and have no policy proposals that will actually help people. This a reminder that federal officials can be impeached (charged) by the House of Representatives only for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. It doesn’t matter to Republicans that the people they are planning to impeach have done none of those crimes. They stopped applying the rule of law a long time ago, and their primary objective is to sow seeds of chaos in the government in order to retain permanent minority rule.
The Republicans in the Senate plan to reduce or totally eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, calling them socialist entitlements and “free money” handed out by the Democrats. Social Security, which started in 1935, is one of the most successful anti-poverty programs in our nation's history and includes retirement, disability, and survivor benefits for tens of millions of Americans. Medicare and Medicaid started as basic insurance programs for Americans who didn’t have health insurance, but now also provide more and more Americans, including children through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), access to the quality and affordable health care they need. Again, Republicans view these programs that serve millions of Americans as “socialism.” They have promised to hold hostage the annual raising of the debt ceiling in order to keep President Biden from vetoing their initiatives. That means the Republicans are willing to risk and destroy the “faith and credit” of the United States and cause a global economic crisis just to destroy the social safety net. They conveniently “forget” that the 2017 Trump tax cuts added $7 TRILLION to the national debt. They are planning more tax cuts for the wealthy, while suing to reverse the Student Loan Forgiveness program, falsely stating that it helps only wealthy people. (The upper-income limit for the program is $125K, and the majority of potential forgiveness recipients make less than $70K annually.)
The Republicans are always demanding that the government respect “states’ rights.” But as soon as the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and sent the decisions about abortion rights back to the states, the Republicans announced that they will initiate a nationwide abortion ban that cannot be overridden by states, in spite of the fact that over 61% of Americans feel that abortion and reproductive rights should be only the woman’s decision. They also want the conservative-majority Supreme Court to take away rights for same-sex marriage and even birth control. The Republicans say that those rights are stare decisis or “settled law,” but that’s what they said about Roe. They lied then and they’ll lie again.
Kevin McCarthy has promised that when he is Speaker again, he will end U.S. support for Ukraine as they fight against being overtaken by Russia. Many Republicans are MAGA Putin-supporters, taking after Trump, and do not realize that 1) if Ukraine falls, other smaller European countries are next, and 2) the United States has pledged support to Ukraine as part of NATO. Of course, the “America First” MAGA people, of which McCarthy and most Republicans are now a part, have aligned themselves with Putin, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and call President Zelenskyy of Ukraine a common criminal. They feel that the United States should not be part of international organizations such as NATO, the World Health Organization, and any organization fighting climate change, which they also do not believe in.
The majority of Republican candidates in the midterms are Trump-supporting election deniers continuing to spout the false “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Weren’t all the other Republicans on the very same ballot as Donald Trump? Why weren’t their elections “stolen?” They have stated that if they had been in office in 2020, they would not have certified any election won by Joe Biden or other Democrats, and if they get in office now, they will not honor the votes of the people in 2024 for any election where they are not the winners. They will work with the Supreme Court to complete the destruction of the Voting Rights Act so that they can gerrymander voting districts and otherwise suppress the voting rights of people who they feel will not vote for them. Their goal is complete and permanent minority rule.

The only way to stop these things from happening is to ensure that we have Democratic wins for governor, the House, and the Senate in November. Period.

Let us know what you think!

We Are Speaking

Discussion about this post