McConnell Supports Slashing Medicare and Social Security — but Wants It Done in Darkness

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Mitch McConnell in recent days has sought to distance himself from the Republican Senator from Florida Rick Scott, whose plan to “Rescue America” involves “sunsetting” entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid every five years, meaning it would be at the discretion — indeed political whims — of Congress every five years to re-enact the legislation that makes these programs possible.

Looking at the political composition of Congress today, that basically means Americans could kiss good-bye to their retirement and health insurance.

McConnell’s sudden antipathy to Scott’s proposal isn’t so much to the content of the proposal itself but, rather, to saying it out loud. This stance of McConnell’s — advocating for cuts to entitlement programs but being opposed to talking about it — accords with the standard line of Congressional Republicans, who harangued President Biden during his State of the Union address with irate denials when he called them out for their plans to cut Social Security and Medicare and potentially to exploit the need to raise the debt ceiling to demand these cuts.

These denials represent, it must be underlined, pure and unadulterated gaslighting.

Indeed, we can just look to the resolution House Republicans introduced and passed just the week before Biden’s State of the Union address. The resolution called for Congress to reject socialism in all its forms and oppose “the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.” When Rep. Mark Takano pushed for an amendment clarifying that programs such as Medicare and Social Security did not constitute socialism, House Republicans rejected it.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery of where Republicans unanimously stand on the plan to cut Medicare and Social Security. They think these programs constitute socialism and thus should not be implemented.

And unless America suffers severe amnesia or possesses absolutely no short-term memory, we know quite unequivocally that McConnell and those “establishment” Republicans of the past and present have long held to this agenda, which is part and parcel of their more extensive master plan of…