The Huffington Post reports, House GOP Releases ‘Commitment to America’ Platform — And Then Takes It Offline:
House Republicans are apparently set to announce a policy platform that criticizes Democrats’ popular prescription drug cost reductions and opens the door to Social Security and Medicare cuts, according to a document that leaked online Wednesday.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) was supposed to announce the party’s “Commitment to America” on Friday, but instead, a multi-page document bearing that name briefly appeared online Wednesday on McCarthy’s website. Approximately an hour after New York Times reporter Annie Karni tweeted it out, the part of McCarthy’s site with the document was locked down and accessible only with a password.
It’s not clear if the one-page document was the entirety of what Republicans plan to release or just a summary or a draft.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) communications director knocked the GOP platform on Twitter with a series of screenshots from the now protected website.
OOPS. Looks like @GOPLeader McCarthy fumbled his agenda rollout by accidentally posting the webpage of @HouseGOP’s extreme MAGA “Commitment to America” – and then scrambled to password protect the website again…
…but not before we got screenshots. THREAD pic.twitter.com/VQULiv4Jvk
— Henry Connelly (@HenryVConnelly) September 21, 2022
Hello, you can read it here: https://t.co/On34lqGMla Enjoy :) 🤖
— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) September 21, 2022
Kevin McCarthy claimed to be unaware of the apparent foul-up. “I haven’t seen it,” McCarthy told HuffPost on Wednesday afternoon.
The website placed policies into four separate categories: economic policies; immigration and national security; schools, health care and technology; and an amorphous grouping of so-called government reforms.
The GOP document promises to “fight inflation and curb the cost of living,” but the only policies it proposes are federal government spending cuts. It also promises to cut taxes, which could increase inflation, and government regulations.
The platform also promises to “save and strengthen Social Security and Medicare,” but lists no policies to do so. In June, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee held a roundtable on Social Security where they discussed policies that would reduce coverage and cut benefits to seniors. The Republican Study Committee, a bloc of conservative House GOP lawmakers, included a plan to massively slash Social Security in its proposed 2023 budget.
It also criticizes a provision in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act that cut the price of some prescription drugs for Medicare patients, calling it a “drug takeover scheme” that “could lead to 135 fewer lifesaving treatments and cures.” Alongside this criticism comes a promise to “invest in lifesaving cures.”
While GOP candidates have sought to avoid talking about their position on abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the platform promises to “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.”
A section on elections and voting rights nods to former President Donald Trump’s election lies by stating that there is a “crisis among voters who have lost faith in our elections.” It then promises to enact new restrictions on voter access including mandating voter ID, loosening rules on voter roll purges and increasing access for observers during elections.
The platform is intended to recall the “Contract with America” proposed by former Speaker Newt Gingrich ahead of the 1994 elections as a list of promises of what Republicans would do if they won control of Congress for the first time in 50 years.
Where Gingrich’s contract included a list of 10 bills that he promised would get floor votes, the only piece of legislation directly mentioned in McCarthy’s Commitment is a Parental Bill of Rights the party rolled out following a ginned-up controversy over the teaching of so-called critical race theory. McCarthy’s platform also includes more socio-cultural policy issues than Gingrich’s, which focused heavily on supply-side economic policies, government reform and changes to the government’s welfare program.
The document was expected to be vague, as have been several Republican party agendas in the past. A Politico story previewing the document warned it would not go into policy specifics, in part to make it easier to digest across the House GOP’s ideological spectrum. The plan, for example, includes promises to cut inflation without providing any specifics.
Before the apparent online disclosure, HuffPost asked McCarthy about criticism that the document would be too vague. “Only one party has a plan to put America in a new
direction,” McCarthy replied.
The rollout was originally planned for Monday but was postponed in light of the wall-to-wall news coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It was rescheduled to be formally unveiled Friday in Monongahela, a small town just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The House platform follows a similar set of policy prescriptions released by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Scott’s platform called for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, increasing taxes on the poorest Americans, the completion of a U.S.-Mexico border wall and various hot-button socio-cultural issues. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has distanced himself from Scott’s platform.
See the document below:
Huffington Post reports, “House Democrats Preemptively Pan GOP’s ‘Extreme’ Policy Agenda”, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-democrats-pan-extreme-gop-policy-agenda_n_632cfce2e4b05db5206cd4e9
House Democrats delivered a preemptive rebuttal of their Republican peers’ policy rollout on Thursday, branding it as an “extreme” and “cynical” fusion of Donald Trump-inspired authoritarianism, infringements on key personal freedoms and traditional trickle-down economics.
In a conference call with reporters, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who chairs House Democrats’ campaign arm, cited Democratic special-election wins in vacant House seats in Alaska and New York as evidence that the Republican policy agenda is already unpopular.
“Voters are rejecting the cynical reality that is the MAGA Republican movement, that is extreme and dangerous, that has taken away our reproductive freedom, that’s threatening our political freedom by ignoring the attack on our Capitol, and by making it harder to vote,” said Maloney, who spoke alongside Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison.
The Democrats’ frontal assault was timed to precede House Republicans’ rollout of the “Commitment to America,” a policy framework for a potential GOP governing majority. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other top Republicans are unveiling the plan in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, an industrial town outside of Pittsburgh, on Friday. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is due to respond to McCarthy with remarks in Pittsburgh itself.
[H]ouse Democrats seized, in particular, on a part of the webpage where Republicans committed to “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” Coming on the heels of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s introduction of a national bill forbidding abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Democrats pointed to this section as a sign that House Republicans have a similar federal prohibition in store.
“Don’t let them fool you,” said Jacobs, the freshman cohort’s representative to House Democratic leadership, who is on a cross-country tour campaigning in support of swing-seat Democratic candidates. “Kevin McCarthy has promised that a Republican majority will pass a national abortion ban.”
“We’ve all seen just how dangerous the Republican Party’s war on women has been,” she added.
Jacobs went on to outline extreme cases of young women who suffered because of state-level abortion restrictions that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned a constitutional right. Those examples include the ordeal of 10-year-old girl in Ohio whose mother had to drive her to another state to receive an abortion after she became pregnant from a rape.
As of Thursday night, the materials publicly available on the “Commitment to America” webpage still contained a pledge to protect “unborn children” in a section on “defending Americans’ rights under the Constitution.”
It also criticized the provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that would empower Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices.
“The Democrats’ drug takeover scheme could lead to 135 fewer lifesaving treatments and cures,” the site says in a section discussing health care policy.
House Democrats have also interpreted a Republican promise to “save and strengthen Social Security and Medicare” as a veiled threat to cut the beloved programs’ benefits.
“They want to undo all of the legislation that Democrats have passed to lower prescription drug costs, and they want to cut Social Security and Medicare, and their agenda will continue to undermine our democracy,” Harrison said. “They want to roll back our rights and make it harder to vote. They are relentlessly committed to Donald Trump’s big lie [that the 2020 election was stolen].”
[D]emocrats hope to turn a proposal that Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chair of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, introduced in February into a liability for Scott’s colleagues in the House. Among other things, Scott’s plan, which has not been embraced by GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, would require all federal laws to be reauthorized every five years. That would turn Social Security and Medicare from mandatory budget items to perpetual targets of legislative wrangling.
[H]ouse Democrats’ efforts to force Republicans to answer for their traditional economic agenda, the actions of a conservative Supreme Court they helped appoint and Trump’s election denial movement reflect what some Democratic pollsters are seeing as an effective one-two punch against the GOP.
There is a particular body of research backing up Democrats’ decision to associate conservative lawmakers with the term “MAGA,” an acronym for the Trump slogan “Make America Great Again.” In a new poll conducted by Hart Research for the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank, pollster Geoff Garin found that 58% of independent voters would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is identified as a “MAGA Republican,” compared with 12% who would be more likely to do so. A slim majority (51%) of all voters believe that “MAGA Republicans” are “extreme.”
I found the LincolnProject’s new ads on McCarthy’s bullshit ‘plan’ to be on point:
https://youtu.be/nwUjAO8ZKMU
https://youtu.be/mt8DjRDErfg