Obamacare Repeal Begins | Trump Week 2 | January 8-14 2017

In this second week of the Trump era, we're still in what you might call the prelude. Republicans control the House and Senate, but Donald Trump is still a week or so away from being sworn in as President.

The Republican Congress spends the week processing Trump's cabinet nominees, preparing to try to repeal Obamacare, and passing more bills that will signal to their oligarch owners their willingness to hand the country over to corporations.

In Congress

This week, the Republican controlled House and Senate each voted on party lines to begin the months-long budget reconciliation process which, if successful, would allow Republicans to repeal Obamacare by avoiding a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

At this point, nobody, including Republican politicians, knew the exact specifics of what policy changes the Republicans were going to eventually try to pass, but everyone knew the rough outlines of it: Close to a trillion dollars cut from the medicaid budget, which funds healthcare for low-income Americans, mostly children and the disabled, and then using that money to give close to a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the oligarchs that fund the Republican party. If successful, they would then come back and try to do the same to medicare and social security.

In the House, Democratic Congressmen Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Hakeem Jeffries of New York argued against this psychotic attack on the physical health of millions and millions of Americans.

In the Senate, Bernie Sanders and Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tried to make the same argument.

The Republican-controlled Senate this week also began moving Trump’s cabinet nominees towards confirmation.

At the confirmation hearing for incoming Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island tried to highlight Sessions' christian nationalism and refusal to acknowledge that climate change is real:

And in the House this week, the Republican majority passed three more oligarch protection bills on party line votes, which collectively would have made it virtually impossible for the government to regulate Wall Street.

One bill would have prevented the Securities and Exchange Commission from effectively regulating the securities market, one would have prevented the Commodities Futures Trading Commission from effectively regulating the derivatives market, and one would have created massive procedural bottlenecks in the creation of all federal regulations on corporations.

None of the three bills became law, because Democratic Senators would have filibustered them if the Republican Senate tried to pass them.

But in the next few weeks, once President Trump takes office, we'll see Republicans actually get rid of a number of important regulations that protect the American people, through the use of the Congressional Review Act, which allows for an end-run around the filibuster.