Welcome to ‘Death Panels: Build Back Better Edition’
In what may be the most important moment in the legislative history of Joe Biden’s presidency, Republicans are largely bystanders. Though 19 of them voted in the Senate for the bipartisan infrastructure bill (now known as BIF), its fate is now tied to the social infrastructure bill known as Build Back Better (BBB). Both bills will rise or fall together.
But Republicans have the beginnings of a plan to destroy both pieces of legislation — or at the very least ensure that rather than being a triumph for Biden and his party, they become the vehicle of Democrats’ electoral doom.
It’s one they’ve used quite successfully before. The idea is to find the perfect claim they can make about the BBB that will make Americans (especially the GOP base) recoil in horror, mobilize in anger, then punish any member of Congress who supported the bill.
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That message doesn’t have to be true. In fact, it’s better for Republicans if it isn’t true, since the truth is that the things the bill will actually do are either quite popular or rather mundane. So they have to come up with a lie, one sufficiently extravagant that it has the potential to alter the entire discussion of Biden’s signature legislation.
Welcome to “Death Panels: Build Back Better Edition.”
The history of “death panels” is the template for what Republicans now hope to do to the BBB. In 2009, when Congress was working through the incredibly complex Affordable Care Act, conservatives pored over the legislative language and found a relatively minor provision that would pay doctors of Medicare patients for end-of-life counseling; at the time, your doctor would be paid for examining your elbow, but not for helping you work out treatment at the end of life.
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Republicans took an uncontroversial idea about how Medicare reimburses physicians and said that elderly and disabled people would have to come before a panel of federal bureaucrats and literally beg for their lives or be denied medical care.
You can still read the Facebook post by Sarah Palin, who cried that “my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide” whether they should live or die. On Fox News, on conservative talk radio, from Republican pundits and politicians across the land, the death panel lie was repeated thousands and thousands of times. The media debunked it at length, but a significant number of Americans believed it.
While it didn’t stop the bill, it helped create an atmosphere of doubt and anger that kept the ACA from becoming widely popular and enabled Republicans to win a huge victory in the 2010 midterm elections. It took years until most Americans looked favorably on the law, and while in the long run it became a political benefit to Democrats, in the short run the controversy was a boon to Republicans.
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Which brings us to today. While Republicans have substantive objections to much if not all of the BBB — they’d rather the government didn’t guarantee family and medical leave, or create universal pre-K, or act to address climate change — they’re searching for that magic bullet, the new “death panels.” They are no more constrained by the need to be honest than they were in 2009.
You can bet they’re running polls, gathering focus groups and testing out every message they can think of to turn voters against the BBB.
Sometimes they take something true and twist it in ridiculous ways; one conservative ad says the “rich friends” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will “get tax breaks on electric cars with Chinese parts.” The bill would enhance long-standing tax credits for the purchase electric cars; you can use them on American cars, and you don’t have to be Pelosi’s friend.
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At other times they just repeat the same scare words over and over again, calling the BBB a “big government socialism reckless spending bill,” as Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.) did on Sunday.
But Republicans are also experimenting with ludicrous lies. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said on Fox that the bill showed that Democrats “want government control of your kids,” as well as to “demoralize the military” and “close the churches.” While you might not have heard about this shocking church-closing provision, if it seems like it’s riling people up, that lie will soon appear on every Fox show and right-wing talk radio program in the country.
Or perhaps it will be something else. They clearly haven’t settled on an attack yet, other than repeating the word “socialism” ad nauseam. But rest assured, they’ll put all their creative powers to work, so that even if the bill passes, the same Americans it helps can be convinced to hate it.
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