Unity As A Concept Is Neither Good Nor Bad... Though The Establishment Is Desperate To Unify Around Defeating Bernie And His Ideas

Beating Trump in 2020, as I've written before, is urgent-- if not existential-- but making sure we think long and hard about what we replace him with is just as important. The conservative establishment is not stupid. It senses Trump going down and the establishment does not want to see the kind of profound change America needs at this juncture. Jay Willis' GQ headline this week, The Republican Party Exists to Protect Millionaires and Billionaires, would be more historically accurate if it read "Conservatives exist to protect millionaires and billionaires. That's what conservatives are all about and have always been all about. The Republican Party is just the latest iteration in the U.S. "Other than 'downplaying federal crimes committed by the president,'" write Willis, "the modern Republican Party cherishes nothing more than finding innovative ways to lighten the financial burdens of the millionaires and billionaires who support it. This is most evident, of course, in its signature accomplishment of the 115th Congress: a $1.5 trillion tax cut for very wealthy people, propped up by the usual gamut of vague, Reaganomics-type assurances that the gaping new hole in the federal deficit would 'pay for itself.' During campaign season, after it became clear that this promise was a lie, Paul Ryan and company promptly pivoted to running ads about MS-13 instead.

An astonishing new report from The Atlantic and ProPublica, however, reveals that the party's most prominent display of corporate generosity is not necessarily the most lucrative one. Thanks to the GOP's decades-long war on the Internal Revenue Service, the federal government's ability to collect legally-owed taxes has reached a historical nadir, as deep budget cuts have hamstrung efforts to fulfill basic responsibilities-- like, among many others, hiring professionals to catch people who might be good at evading taxes.

And guess who stands to benefit the most from the agency's slow-motion failure?

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme-- and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.

Investigations of nonfilers-- people who skip submitting their returns altogether-- have plummeted, from 2.4 million in 2011 to just 362,000 last year, and untold billions of dollars in uncollected tax debts expire each year after the ten-year statue of limitations runs its course. Nearly every statistic reeks of good old-fashioned American inequality: Audits are down across all income brackets, but the drop has been most precipitous among the wealthy, from 8 percent of those making more than a half-million dollars in 2011 to just 2.5 percent in 2017. During that period, audits of filers making less than $25,000 per year fell by just one-half a point, from 1.2 percent to 0.7 percent. Current and former IRS employees interviewed for the piece fear that the country could be on the verge of an era of brazen tax cheating from which it cannot recover.

This is, by any objective metric, bad: a catastrophic failure of law enforcement that deprives an already cash-strapped government of, at the very least, hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year. (A properly-funded IRS, the article notes, is one of the few federal agencies that could actually operate in the black.) But as my colleague Drew Magary wrote earlier this year, conservatism is, at its core, a tool used to justify the continued exploitation of poor people. For Republicans, these strategic omissions are as important to their constituencies as the affirmative act of passing the tax reform bill. In public, the GOP delivers another long-awaited discount to the privileged; behind the scenes, it grins and winks-- a reminder that for them, in America, even paying that meager amount is optional.

The fact that a minority of Americans favor this fundamentally unjust arrangement is what drives literally everything the modern Republican Party does. Racists, bigots, and anodyne-sounding "social conservatives" have no inherent interest in kleptocracy, and vice versa. But the need to cobble together a coalition capable of winning elections has compelled the fiscal conservative establishment to make those groups' pet issues into key components of its political platform. The Venn diagram of climate change truthers and angry right-wingers consists of two concentric circles, because acknowledging science would create an undeniable moral obligation to do things that corporate benefactors do not want.

Even the aforementioned criminality denial is a pragmatic choice, because allowing a sitting president to break the law without consequences is, to Republicans, a less odious outcome than jeopardizing their power to enrich rich people, now and in 2020 and forever. The party of law and order always finds a way to forget about those things whenever remembering them might one day result in its donor class being held the tiniest bit accountable.

The idea of a Unity Ticket this year, was first floated as a way to get people to take the candidacy of conservative Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) seriously. Then to take the candidacy of conservative Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (D) seriously. Then Deval Patrick (D-MA), Steve Bullock (D-MT), Jason Kander (D-MO), Mark Warner (D-VA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Michael Bloomberg (?$?$?-NY)... Might as well thrown some more ground-up dried vomit into the kettle as well-- Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker... The latest: Biden Should Run on a Unity Ticket With Romney. Anything-- anything at all-- to grind down working people into the mud and pig shit. "It could actually work," chirped Juleanna Glover in Politico. "Here's How." First imagine how wonderful the world would have been had McCain picked Lieberman has his VP and they would have vanquished Obama-- "diverting us from the dangerous polarization now plaguing our political system." Juleanna wants Corporate Joe Biden to learn from McCain's regret (picking Sarah Palin instead of Lieberman).

Biden has declared himself the "most qualified person in the country to be president," which Chirpy-- who lies about his standing in the polls, accepts on face value. (I beg to differ.) Chirpy worried that "in a Democratic primary [Biden] could be cannibalized by his own kind. Other Democratic candidates with more ambition than ability to win a general election against Donald Trump will inexorably and gleefully erode his standing by rehashing the Anita Hill hearings, pushing him to the left on domestic policy and endlessly reminding voters of his support for the Gulf War. Biden is the clear front-runner now-- with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at 13 percent-- but plenty of early favorites have ended up as also-rans (i.e. Jesse Jackson in 1988, Jerry Brown in 1992, Howard Dean in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008). Running in a Democratic primary could deeply damage Biden’s legacy." LOL... yes; Idiot finally got something right.

She calls Biden "one of our most esteemed and admired leaders." That's true as well-- IF we're talking about inside they Beltway establishment corporate shills like Chirpy. They've been pushing Corporate Joe Biden for President since the 1980s. He always their favorite candidate, and always utterly rejected by actual humans. He has never-- if any of his multiple campaigns for president-- most still-born-- gotten beyond single digit polling, usually around 1%. But the Chirpies of the world love him. "[H]ere’s what Biden should do next," she confides in us: "Pick a Republican running mate in a 'trans-party' third-party run for the White House." Does that make your leg tingle?

Should Trump run again, this could be a “break-the-glass” moment for many Americans, creating an opening for a radical departure from our malfunctioning two-party political system. By injecting some ideological innovation into the process, we can break the hidebound precedents of two narrow parties running their ceremonious and illogical nominating process to select a candidate. (Why do Iowa and New Hampshire play such outsized roles? Why do independents, who outnumber both Democrats and Republicans, have only a binary political choice?) The system certainly suffered a critical failure in 2016, with both parties producing terribly flawed candidates in a race to the bottom.

The Democratic primary is shaping up to be cacophonous and chaotic. Biden should capitalize on his status as one of America’s most popular politicians, skip the risk and potential indignities of running and losing in what will be a vicious and mulish, leftward-lurching primary, and slingshot straight to the general election debate stage on a third-party ticket. Biden may not know it, but he is already well-positioned to win a three-way election outright. Here’s how:

Biden could run as the major third-party candidate with a principled conservative by his side (Lieberman, a one-time Democrat, technically categorized himself as an independent at the time McCain ran for president). A number of Republicans stand out: Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, outgoing Ohio Gov. John Kasich and newly minted Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. Many past third-party bids have failed because they came from the lunatic fringes-- think Jill Stein and Ralph Nader of the Green Party or Ross Perot with his quirky North American Free Trade Agreement obsession. Biden, by picking someone from the principled wing of the GOP, would instantly signal that he intends to run from the center.

Aside from being the most repulsive writer who has ever done a column for Politico, who, exactly is Chirpy? "Juleanna Glover has worked as an adviser for several Republican politicians, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani and advised the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Jeb Bush. She is on the Biden Institute Policy Advisory Board." She also worked for Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, Dan Quayle and Phyllis Schlafly and made a bundle as a lobbyist and was a senior advisor to the 2000 Steve Forbes presidential campaign. The New York Times once described Chirpy as "the consummate political insider.” Getting the picture? Anything and everything Chirpy chirps should be instantly ignored or, better yet, the opposite would always be something to consider. (One more thing, she seems to have played some kind of role in the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the Russians, working for Bill Browder, an investor in Russia who gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998 to avoid paying taxes and later became famous for his part in passing the Magnitsky Act.)

Please consider helping to defeat Biden, Romney, Kasich, Hickenlooper, Cheney, Quayle, Chirpy, Bloomberg, Giuliani... here.