The Democratic Agenda
ByNayyer Ali MD
I am not counting any chickens, but I’m hoping the Democrats win the House back, and enough big state governors so that they undo the big gerrymanders that hurt them in 2012 to 2018 in Congress. After that, investigations and the Mueller report will cripple Trump, and Democrats will be well-positioned to get the White House and Senate back in 2020. If that occurs, what will the Democrats set out to achieve, what will be the purpose of their power?
In no particular order these are the main items that are critical for the Dems to enact when they can. First is action on climate change. We should reenter the Paris Agreement and make clear the US is going to lead the globe on fighting climate change. Supporting clean energy and winding down the use of coal and oil is imperative. Putting in place EV requirements and supporting the infrastructure to expand the electric grid to accommodate renewables is vital. We can put the US on a path to decarbonize, just as California has already committed to. Major research funding should be amped up, particularly in crucial carbon capture technology. That is way in the future, because by 2070 we will probably be needing to suck 20 gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the air annually, which is about half of what we are currently putting in.
Immigration reform is essential. There is already a pathway, the bipartisan Senate immigration bill that passed in 2013 should get a vote in Congress, and it will pass. Creating a humane way to deal with refugees and asylum seekers, especially children, is also important.
Reducing income inequality and supporting the middle class is crucial. The minimum wage should be increased from 7.50 per hour to 12 dollars, then annually to 15. Minimum wage should then be indexed to median wage so that it does not take a Democratic Congress to raise it whenever inflation erodes its value, like it has happened in the last 11 years. The corporate tax cut Trump got should be repealed, and estate taxes raised so that we are not creating a hereditary aristocracy that can buy our government (see Koch, brothers).
Universal healthcare finally needs to be enacted. The ACA was a huge advance, but we now need to expand Medicaid to the holdout Red states who have rejected it. We should also open up Medicare to allow all citizens to buy Medicare instead of private insurance, and to allow large companies to offer Medicare as an insurance option. Medicare is much cheaper than private insurance and more flexible, which will help hold down costs while increasing choice of providers for patients.
America’s global leadership needs to be rebuilt. Our foremost friends and allies are the other liberal democracies and we need to make that clear. We should again stand for the expansion of human rights, the rule of law, and democracy around the world, even with some of our autocratic allies. We need to rejoin the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal). NATO needs to be strengthened and Russia’s adventurism needs to be restrained.
Criminal justice reform should be enacted. The current system is far too punitive and racially biased. We need to make sure that punishments are evenly given, and that we stop locking people up for long periods for non-violent crimes. Marijuana should be taken off schedule 1 at a minimum allowing scientists to do research, and if the experience of legalization in the states does not raise major red flags, we should consider legalization. Creating a prison system that is more humane, that protects its inmates from sexual violence, and that provides meaningful rehabilitation so that parolees can reenter society successfully is vital. The Feds only house about 10% of inmates, most are in state prisons, but the Feds can set the tone and the bully pulpit can be quite useful. Ending cash bail is also important and many Blue states are moving in that direction (California just did so). The Feds should also use their grant money to get body cams on most big city police department, and to help departments to clear out the unconscionable backlog of rape kits that have not been tested.
Helping people get educated and find work so they can be part of the middle class is also vital. The for-profit educational system is mostly a rip-off that subsists off the government student loan program, so we should not do anything that helps them. Making college free sounds like a good idea, but implementation is complex. My kids don’t need free college, I can afford full tuition at a private university, so giving me a subsidy is a waste of tax dollars. I think a Federal-State partnership that makes community and public universities tuition free for anyone from a family with less than 100k in income, with perhaps some sliding scale benefit above that if a family has multiple kids in college would be a good idea. The student would still need to buy books and pay for living expenses, but that can be done with a part-time and summer job. In addition to making college affordable, a similar program for trade schools might be reasonable. Affordable child care for young families would allow women to more easily go back to work and needs to be expanded.
The GOP has no agenda, because as the conservative/reactionary party, they are incapable of solving any problem. Conservatives believe we live in the best of all possible worlds, so there is nothing to fix. If there is something that should be fixed, we can’t actually do it. Even if we could do it, philosophically speaking, we shouldn’t do it anyway. And even if we should do it, it is wrong to spend taxpayer money on any new initiative. The GOP is a plutocratic party that exists to serve its donor class. It has bolted on an evangelical base that exists primarily to outlaw abortion, a goal the plutocrats don’t care about because their daughters can always get an abortion if they need one, whether it is legal or not. It also has a racist/White nationalist core that votes GOP because they don’t want the wrong kind of Americans to get any help from the government or to succeed in society and outdo them. These two groups give the plutocrats the votes they need to be competitive, but they are being played for suckers. Someday they might wise up to the con in conservative.
I find the bleating among conservatives about how radical and socialist and communist the Democratic Party is rather ridiculous. The agenda is obvious and most Democrats in 2020 will be running basically on some version of the above. There is nothing radical there at all. It is common sense reforms and improvements and solutions to problems the country faces. What is the conservative alternative solution on all of these issues that makes any sense? There is none.
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