Opinion: The Cheney magic vanishes in Wyoming
Opinion by Richard Galant, CNNUpdated: Sun, 21 Aug 2022 12:28:57 GMTSource: CNNEditor's Note: Sign up to get this weekly column as a newsletter. We're looking back at the strongest, smartest
Opinion by Richard Galant, CNNUpdated: Sun, 21 Aug 2022 12:28:57 GMT
Source: CNN
Editor's Note: Sign up to get this weekly column as a newsletter. We're looking back at the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets.
The Cheney name has long been golden in Wyoming. Dick Cheney was elected six times to the state's only seat in the House, where he joined the Republican Party's leadership before becoming defense secretary and eventually vice president. And it was only two years ago that his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, won 68% of the vote as she cruised to victory for the third time.
But in Tuesday's Republican primary, the ardent critic of former President Donald Trump's refusal to concede that he lost in 2020 suffered a crushing defeat of her own.
The Trump-endorsed candidate in the race, Harriet Hageman, won 66% of the primary vote, compared to Cheney's 28.9%. The margin of defeat "appears to be the second worst for a House incumbent in the last 60 years, when you look at races featuring only one incumbent," wrote CNN's Harry Enten. Could there be any stronger indication that the party's voter base is fiercely loyal to Trump?
"Liz Cheney made it clear in her barn burner of a concession speech that she is not planning to ride off quietly into the sunset," observed Arick Wierson and Bradley Honan. "Rather, she plans to 'do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office, and I mean it.'" A Cheney run for the GOP nomination in 2024, though, "would likely be nothing more a constant irritant" to Trump supporters, Wierson and Honan argued.
"Cheney's smartest move would be to join the Biden administration in a bespoke senior-level role where her mandate is clear: coordinate the fight for free and fair elections and wage all-out war against the anti-American and undemocratic forces that Trumpism has unleashed. Cheney is the ideal crusader in this fight."
Rich Lowry, writing for Politico, observed that it "was an admirable loss. It is rare that any elected official is willing to sacrifice his or her office over a matter of deeply felt principle. Cheney did it unhesitatingly. She will be remembered fondly by history, and better than other members of her party who have repeated or tolerated lies merely to maintain or gain political power." But he argued that a Cheney campaign for president in 2024 would fail and could even help Trump's prospects.
In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin took a different tack on the 2024 question, suggesting Cheney could achieve her goal if she is able to "turn a partisan primary into a national crusade enlisting Republicans, Democrats and independents against Trump. It will take a unique primary strategy unlike anything we've seen to remove a unique threat to our democracy."
Marc A. Thiessen, also in the Post, wrote that the reason for Cheney's defeat was clear: "Cheney believes that Trump is the greatest threat facing our country today, greater than the serial disasters President Biden has unleashed since taking office — among them, the worst inflation in 40 years..." He added, "The vast majority of Republicans disagree."
"The way to persuade GOP voters to move beyond Trump is not to attack him but to convince them that he is the candidate most likely to lose in 2024. Republican voters' top priority is to defeat Joe Biden. And that means no one wants to join Liz Cheney on her suicide run."
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The Inflation Reduction Act won't
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed the $750 billion bill Sen. Joe Manchin touted as the "Inflation Reduction Act." It has been hailed by climate activists for provisions that will speed up America's transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and by health care advocates for enabling Medicare to negotiate the price of many commonly used prescription drugs.
But have the bill's benefits been oversold? That's the view of economist Jeffrey D. Sachs. "Despite its title, the new legislation will have essentially no effect on reducing inflation during the next few years. Today's inflation, running at 8.5% year-over-year in July, results from economy-wide imbalances of supply and demand. Even the small steps on drug pricing in the new law -- allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of some drugs as of 2026 -- will have no effect on current inflation, and only tiny effects later."
Sachs argued that the climate provisions will only deliver "modest results" and that the bill falls far short of what progressives were seeking from the Biden administration: "The Dems abandoned earlier proposals for universal pre-kindergarten and subsidized child care, paid family and medical leave, free community college and expanded child tax credits, among other initiatives."
Republicans have criticized the bill's big increase in funding for the Internal Revenue Service, Casey Michel noted. "The GOP has been trying for years to starve the IRS of revenue and resources, in the hope -- to borrow a phrase from anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist -- to make it small enough to drown in a bathtub."
"Republicans have been making the scurrilous claim that the Biden administration aims to deploy a ramped-up 'army' of IRS agents to target middle-income workers and small businesses. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig -- who was appointed by former President Donald Trump -- said earlier this month that the agency will only be increasing audits of the wealthiest Americans."
Democrats have gotten a psychological boost from the bill's passage, but historian Julian Zelizer warned that "historically, legislative success rarely translates into electoral gains. ...the fact of the matter is that presidents who have achieved huge, legacy-making bills on Capitol Hill often suffer through miserable midterms. Voters don't often feel the benefits in the short term, and if the opposition frames the policies in an unflattering light, big bills can prompt a backlash." Still, he noted they should take heart from the struggles of some GOP Senate candidates in swing states, such as Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania.
Oz tried to highlight the effects of inflation in a video he posted of himself shopping for ingredients to make "crudités," only to be lampooned by his challenger John Fetterman, whose campaign said it raised $500,000 after the Democrat tweeted, "In PA we call this a...veggie tray."
Married vs. single life
"It pays to be married," wrote Jill Filipovic, commenting on new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal. Married couples are now worth nearly nine times as much as single households -- a significant jump from 2010, when couples were worth four times as much.
"Some of this is just math: Households with two adults in them have more resources," she noted. "They will be able to split the cost of rent and groceries and more easily qualify for a mortgage or save for a down payment on a house."
"But some of it is also about the privileges the US continues to bestow on married couples, and the ways in which our workplaces, norms and expectations have not significantly shifted since the era of the patriarchal nuclear family, with a dad out earning the bread and a mom at home raising children -- even as our families and our lives have radically changed..."
"Being married provides a slew of advantages, from tax breaks to Social Security benefits to health insurance."
Insulin
It was only after Jesse Lutgen's death four years ago that his mother found out he had been rationing doses of insulin after losing his full-time job and health insurance. Janelle Lutgen, a health care advocate and former chair of the Republican Central Committee in Jackson County, Iowa, pointed out that Jesse is one of at least 14 diabetic Americans to die as a result of rationing since 2017.
"What happened to my son, who felt like he had no choice but to ration his insulin, is happening all over America -- because insulin is not affordable for most people who are uninsured. A month's supply can cost over $1,000 out-of-pocket, something I only learned after Jesse was gone..."
"While I am thankful for legislation that will do so much for some, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) falls short for most diabetics. It will cap insulin co-payments for Medicare beneficiaries but will not lower the list price of insulin. Instead, the high costs will be shifted elsewhere.
"And uninsured diabetics, like my late son, remain vulnerable. The IRA will have no impact on list prices paid by the uninsured."
FBI
Controversy continued to swirl around the FBI's search at Mar-a-Lago for documents, including some highly classified ones, that were taken from the White House in the closing days of the Trump administration. On Thursday, a federal magistrate judge released more information on the potential offenses the Justice Department is investigating, including "willful retention of national defense information."
FBI and Homeland Security officials have warned of a wave of "violent threats" against federal law enforcement. An armed man tried to enter the FBI's office in Cincinnati on August 11 and was later killed after he fled from the scene and exchanged gunfire with authorities in a standoff that lasted hours.
Dean Obeidallah argued that GOP officials should be "condemning those who have contributed to an 'unprecedented' number of threats against the FBI -- including the two agents who signed the search warrant ... The silence of GOP leaders sends a message that they are angrier at the FBI for conducting a lawful search of Trump's property than with those making death threats against the bureau. In a post-January 6 America, GOP leaders have an even greater obligation to speak out loudly to denounce any violent acts or even threats from their supporters."
Don't expect the legal issues over the Mar-a-Lago documents to be resolved soon, wrote Norman Eisen, Asha Rangappa and Dennis Aftergut. They noted that Attorney General Merrick Garland recently issued a memo instructing to Justice Department to avoid "any actions that could be perceived as affecting an election before it takes place." Trump isn't on the ballot this fall but he "remains one of the most polarizing characters in American politics, and any action taken could have an impact on the midterm elections."
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New and old diseases
While Covid-19 continues to take its toll, scientists are sharing their concerns about other diseases, some new, like the Langya virus in eastern China, and some old, like the possible recurrence of polio in the US.
"Just when you thought that 2022 already provided a century's worth of scary infectious diseases, from Covid-19 to monkeypox to polio, last week's headlines warned of yet another," wrote infectious disease expert Dr. Kent Sepkowitz. "The Langya virus may have jumped from the white-toothed shrew to humans. It has sickened dozens of people, but has caused no reported deaths.
"Many may wonder just what is going on here. Why are so many infections appearing so quickly? Several explanations are plausible: Perhaps a globally warmed and densely populated world is more hospitable to all sorts of new pathogens; perhaps new molecular techniques are allowing us only now to diagnose the cause of the endless unnamed sniffles, colds and rashes that previous generations could not name, creating a concrete 'outbreak,' not just a 'lousy winter.'"
The most unnerving part is that even the experts have to admit they can't predict the future. Sepkowitz observed, "Adjusting to news of yet another pathogen surely is unsettling and seeking guidance makes perfect sense. Perhaps though, we should receive the prediction not as an infallible collection of future facts but rather with the same mixture of wariness and hope that we would greet the prediction of a baseball expert who, in August, is tasked with predicting who will win the World Series in October."
As epidemiologist Syra Madad wrote, the discovery of a polio vaccine in the 1950s was a huge triumph. "Church bells rang out across America and people flooded into the streets to celebrate with parents hugging their children in relief ... The celebration was warranted; through vaccination, the US eliminated wild, or naturally occurring, poliovirus more than 40 years ago."
But now, "immunization coverage is dropping worldwide, and the immunity wall generations past have built is slowly being chipped away. The vaccine distrust that unwarrantedly grew out of the Covid-19 pandemic is only driving more people to opt out of vaccinations or under-vaccinate themselves and their children. ... Polio should have been a disease relegated to the pages in our history books. It is human behavior and the choices we make that prevent it from become another lasting public health success story."
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AND...
Fleeing autocracies
Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine has prompted thousands -- and perhaps hundreds of thousands -- of Russians to flee the country, noted Frida Ghitis. In China, where discontent over the zero-Covid policy has flared up, "escaping from autocracy is becoming more and more attractive. In China, the term is 'run xue,' or 'run philosophy.' The expression -- so far not blocked by Chinese web censors -- is drawing intense interest online."
Since Xi Jinping "took power in China in 2013, the number of asylum applications has grown nearly eight times, reaching nearly 120,000 last year, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, with about 75% of asylum-seekers requesting to live in the United States. ... Putin and Xi will continue to claim their systems are superior to democracy. They will point to the flaws, to the struggles of democratic systems, which certainly exist. But those who disagree with them at home, unable to speak out, will either keep quiet, keep their criticism to barely-audible whispers, or vote with their feet, heading toward freer lands."
