As elected officials gear up for hotly contested elections in 2024, congressional Democrats are reacting with glee as Pres. Joe Biden doubles down on a new strategy of enraging Republicans by exposing their far-right policies to the public.
Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., hailed Biden for shining a spotlight on congressional Republicans' desires to drastically cut or eliminate popular federal programs.
"It's not difficult to find statements and proposals from prominent Republicans, including Senator Scott, that would cut or sunset entirely Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid," Rochester told TYT. "I'm glad the President laid out the stark contrast between those dangerous proposals and our commitment to protect these programs that millions of Americans have earned and rely on."
"A lot of Republicans — their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare," Biden told an audience at a Wisconsin union training center, specifically naming Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah.
"They sure didn't like me calling them on it," Biden added, referring to a paroxysm of rage he set off during his Tuesday State of the Union Address in which he accurately pointed out that "some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset every five years" and that "other Republicans say if we don't cut Social Security and Medicare, they'll let America default on its debt for the first time in our history."
The president's factual representations of GOP positions in his formal speech badly triggered far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and many other Republicans who shouted out that he was lying.
As Biden demonstrated on Wednesday, however, it is Republicans who are deceiving about their party's radical views on Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. Even Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has admitted that Scott has put forward a plan that "sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years."
The howls of rage that Biden set off with his remarks suggest that Republicans are eager not to have their actual policy agenda discussed in public, according to Rep. Ro Khanna, R-Calif.
"What we saw last night was a clear recognition by Republicans that Social Security is an incredibly popular program and now they are trying to deflect and backtrack on their public plans to make major cuts to this critical program," Khanna told TYT. "President Biden did a great job highlighting the issue and calling out the hypocrisy."
Lee's domestic policy agenda is particularly radical, as the Utah Republican was seen in an old video that surfaced last year and went viral telling supporters that "it will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots, to get rid of it… Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort and need to be pulled up."
As TYT reported last November, additional clips from the same event show Lee also calling for the government to tax poor people and denouncing the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraception nationwide.
For nearly a decade, however, public attention has been turned away from the right-wing viewpoints of Lee and his fellow Republicans, thanks to a public relations strategy cooked up by McConnell, the party's long-serving leader in the Senate, in which Republicans would simply refrain from discussing their policy agenda at all and make their focus all about attacking Democrats.
It's been his communications framework since 2014, according to an Axios report which said that Republicans used it to take back the Senate after losing many elections in 2012.
"It happens all the time," an anonymous Republican operative told the outlet. "Donors especially are always asking for an agenda of some kind and McConnell pushes back hard. Because he knows that all it does is take the focus off unpopular Dem policies and gives Dems something tangible to tear apart."
With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 2019, the radical anti-government viewpoints of the party's far-right have new policy relevance since the GOP in the lower chamber is now obligated to pass legislation and work with the Democrats who control the Senate.
The Republican rage against Biden for putting the GOP agenda up for debate and his own zeal at pursuing the new strategy suggests that this is a communications tactic Democrats will be employing a lot more as the party prepares for the 2024 election.
