Dear Majorities in Congress

What in red flying hell is wrong with you people?

Before y’all get carried away with your budget cuts, we need to talk. I understand you want to keep your big-money tax cuts, your four-trillion-dollar giveaway to the richest, most powerful, and whomever else can finance your careers. At the same time, you seem to realize that adding that cost to our national deficit would be dangerous. Dangerous, that is, to you. Since I see no evidence that you care about anything but your own interests, you’ll never figure out why your planned Medicaid cuts are bone stupid.

You’re currently trying to pay for tax cuts by making spending reductions. Programs that help people are the easiest to target because these are the cuts least likely to rattle your donors or yourselves. It’s just poor people — and everyone agrees that poor people are lazy freeloaders. You’ve found one attractive way to reduce the cost of Medicaid: add work requirements to the eligibility criteria. This would result in a $300 billion savings. It would take health insurance away from 7.6 million people.

We need to talk about why that is the most ridiculous, odious, galactically stupid idea in the universe.

Congress, your slip is showing

The social safety net is our primary antidote to structural economic inequality. Left unaddressed, you’d wind up with social unrest to rival that of the French Revolution. If you think losing your perks and entitlements would be harsh, imagine how rough it’d be if you lost your head.

The point you are missing is that mitigating inequality is in everyone’s — even your own — enlightened self-interest.

Each of you ran for and won positions of public service. I don’t see your service; I only see your ignorance and contempt for your fellow citizens. You tout the proposed work requirements as a gift rather than a burden. You tell us putting Medicaid recipients to work is about lifting them out of poverty and restoring their dignity. You think these attitudes show compassion, but in reality, they convey contempt. Want to know how?

• Adding work requirements to public aid recipients has been tried, retried, and has failed. I suspect you know this, but if you don’t, just go to your Google machine and search for Arkansas in 2018. Check out what happened in Georgia in 2023.

It takes five minutes to research whether your plan will work. That’s why you don’t look fiscally prudent, you look lazy and willfully ignorant.

• Adding work requirements also adds government costs. Government aid programs are, of necessity, bureaucratic hoop-jumping ordeals. When Georgia tried it, they spent five times as much money on policing eligibility as they spent on the healthcare itself.

In short, your cost-saving measures will cause your costs to balloon. That’s why you appear either stupid or crazy or both.

• Your tax cuts for rich people and corporations are nothing but trickle-down economics. It is painfully obvious, after forty-plus years, that these policies simply don't work as advertised. The rich are supposed to reinvest their up-front tax savings and lift the entire economy, but they don’t. They hoard it. This is why I don’t buy it that you’re “compassionate.” You’re cruel.

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

- William Jennings Bryan (1896)

Where do you think you’re taking us?

You want poor people to get off the couch and get a job, even though you have a job that you aren’t willing to do. This is why the word “hypocrisy” keeps coming up.

You also fail to grasp that the real causes of poverty are structural, not personal. Our national wealth gap is too large to be caused by the few people on Medicaid who are drug addicts, criminals, or freeloaders. Roughly 7% of Medicaid recipients have been diagnosed with substance use disorders. 7% of anything is not enough to move the needle. For another thing, you talk about addiction as though it was nothing but a nasty habit. Evidence shows addiction is a disorder amenable to treatment and recovery. Is it too much to expect people in leadership to know the relevant facts before rendering judgments that affect millions?

The time you spend putting the burden of tax cuts for the richest on the backs of the poorest would be better spent addressing the illegality and corruption in our current government. We currently suffer with the most unqualified and corrupt administration in American history. The only people who can deal with that is Congress — but there you sit, like the lazy poor person you look down on — refusing to do your job.

How long do you plan to go on this way? Seriously, have you not ridden this horse as far as it can go? Most of you would agree that democracy is sacred, so why aren’t you protecting it? I understand the need to protect yourself from getting primaried or facing the retribution of Donald Trump and his supporters. Still, they are in the same handbasket we’re in, crashing toward hell. Who should follow them? They are weak, morally compromised people who don’t hold up under pushback. They aren’t leaders — you are. Because of your cowardice and fecklessness, all three branches of government are severely wounded — but not beyond repair.

What we need now

Plainly stated, we need a more perfect union. This can only happen if we make major reforms to the way we govern so that everyone is truly equal and every vote counts. I doubt we can make it much further with gerrymandering and voter suppression. I get the impression that equality under the law scares you. It appears to me that, in your heart of hearts, you don’t think you would win if elections were fair. Otherwise, why continue to rig the system?

We need to raise our moral standards by a great big lot. I was a huge supporter of Bill Clinton, but I felt he should have resigned when his dalliance with an intern was revealed. At the time, though, it was obvious that the Republican party was simply gunning for him, trying everything they could think of to drive him from office. A run-amok Republican party was more dangerous at that moment than Bill Clinton’s lack of integrity.

It’s a generation later, and look where we’ve landed. Donald Trump was blatantly corrupt and incompetent the first time he was elected. With the near-total immunity, our compromised Supreme Court gave him on top of the timidity of Congress, he is even more wildly corrupt today.

How much lower can we go? The message we’ve conveyed to our citizens is that they are disposable. We are showing the world that we’re only out for ourselves. We are treating immigrants — primarily black and brown people — with breathtaking cruelty.

You all behave as if this is simply a policy, a mere strategy to make America great again. I’m writing to tell you that you are dead-ass totally wrong. Political decisions are rooted in values. Before I let go of your lapels, let me educate you on the values we need most and how to develop them. Values are like the ground we walk on. You have to tend to that ground and not think you can impose values from the top down. If values don’t abide, if they’re only relevant when you think they work to your advantage, they are nothing more than cynicism masquerading as values.

Congress has devolved into a horde of spineless opportunists, going about its business as if that didn’t show. I’m here to help you out by telling you that it couldn’t be more obvious. Everyone everywhere can see what you’re made of, who matters to you, and who does not.

You know it. I know it. The whole world can see it plainly as day.

Before we can reform, we have to cultivate values

Simply put, Americans far and wide need to understand that we will rise and fall together. We need to know that our system is rooted in democracy and integrity and that the only identity we care about is that of an American. Before you can get people to stop bullying people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and a host of other characteristics, you have to help them learn how to care.

Cultivate empathy. Build into our very structure opportunities to talk to each other and learn to understand differences and opposing points of view.

Value relationships above positions. Demonstrate that community matters and that how we treat one another is a civic concern.

Learn to trust our interdependence. Go back and reread “Bowling Alone.” That book tells what it costs for Americans to hold themselves apart from each other. You say you don’t want the French Revolution 2.0? Then, do a deep dive into all of the ways community welfare is imperative for personal welfare. See if you can connect the dots between community well-being and national security.

In short, Congress, stop being assholes. If you want to hold positions of leadership, you have to help us not only change the system but also to change our culture. Here’s the secret, people: we really are all created equal. We aren’t meant to demonize people who are different from us. We’re not designed to acquire riches on the backs of those who struggle. Right now, we look like a nation of sociopaths. We can’t do it forever and expect America to survive.

I’m serious. Settle down. Do not make me stop this car.

Love, Cindy

Song of the Day

“on the way down” — Wrabel

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Keep on keepin’ on,

Cindy