Now Let's Define Morality… And Connect It To A Primary Color

Since 2007, Democrats have been predicting that demographics, coupled with Republican knee-jerk bigotry and xenophobia, will turn Texas blue within a decade. When Texas-born Rand Paul confirmed this yesterday, he neglected to mention that Georgia is turning blue just as quickly. Watch Chris Hayes and his guests, Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams and former NAACP President Ben Jealous, above.

At a GOP dinner in Houston while Hayes was on TV talking about turning Georgia blue, Rand Paul warned Republican officials, big money contributors and operatives that "What I do believe is Texas is going to be a Democrat state within 10 years if we don’t change. That means we evolve, it doesn’t mean we give up on what we believe in, but it means we have to be a welcoming party… We won’t all agree on it. But I’ll tell you, what I will say and what I’ll continue to say, and it’s not an exact policy prescription… but if you want to work and you want a job and you want to be part of America, we’ll find a place for you… Immigrants are assets, not liabilities. We were all immigrants once." Paul noticed-- and commented-- that the response was "kind of tepid" from the assembled GOP muckety-mucks. The one-eyed aunt sharing the room with the elephant were the 40% of the Texas population who are now Hispanics-- except they weren't actually in the room… except as underpaid waiters and busboys.

So while Hayes was on MSNBC explaining how Georgia could be slipping out of the GOP's grasp and Rand Paul was doing the same thing-- albeit with less relish-- in Houston, the Washington Post was publishing a column by Dana Milbank that summed up exactly why Republicans have fallen into such palpable disrepute with ordinary American voters of late. Pete Sessions is one of the highest-ranking Republicans in Texas' massive GOP House delegation-- the biggest and most influential in the Republican Caucus.

Pete Sessions raising campaign cash with Vegas strippers

“It is immoral.”

That was the judgment of Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican and committee chairman, on the House floor this week. But the subject of his sermon wasn’t the Assad regime in Syria or human trafficking. What Sessions found immoral was the repugnant notion that the government would help Americans who lost their jobs and are looking for work.

Sessions was preaching in response to Democrats’ pleas that the Republican majority hold a vote on restoring unemployment-insurance benefits to the 1.7 million who have lost them since the benefits expired six weeks ago and the 70,000 or so who are losing them each week. Sessions, on the floor to usher through the House “sportsmen’s heritage and recreational enhancement” legislation, explained why he wouldn’t bring up jobless benefits: “I believe it is immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployment to people rather than us working on creation of jobs.”

In fact, the economy has added about 8.5 million private-sector jobs in the last 47 months, and overall unemployment, at 6.6 percent in January, would be substantially lower if Sessions and his colleagues hadn’t been so successful in their “work” of cutting government spending when the recovery was fragile.

…Republican opponents of the benefits extension said they would consider extending that help if it were “paid for” by saving money elsewhere. So Senate Democrats drafted a three-month extension that was paid for using an accounting method Republicans have supported in the past. Republicans responded with another filibuster-- and on Thursday they again succeeded in blocking an extension of benefits.

…This morality is also at work in the decisions by 25 states under Republican control to reject the expansion of Medicaid offered under Obamacare. The states generally object because they are philosophically opposed to entitlement programs. But a new study from researchers at Harvard Medical School and City University of New York calculates that 7,115 to 17,104 more people will die annually than would have if their states had accepted the Medicaid expansion. The researchers, who favor a single-payer health system, examined demographic data and past insurance expansions.

Conservatives dispute the study’s findings, and I hope the critics are right. Allowing people to die to advance your political philosophy isn’t just bad policy. It’s immoral.