Author: A.T.

Onward and upward.

Yikes.  Not sure I’d want to get in this woman’s way.  But hats off to her.

I think the difference is that where she is boiling mad — and rightly so — I am too fortunate, live too well, to be boiling mad.  For me, it’s more dismay than anger.  Deep sadness at seeing the American Century end; our leadership forfeited; our infrastructure crumble; the top 0.1% poised to become even richer at the expense of the middle class and poor.

Plus fear that our precious democracy, that “city on the hill,” could be lost at the hands of a deeply unhinged narcissist who frequently read from a book of Hitler’s speeches that he kept by his bedside.

But if I faced “real people problems,” as I sense this woman does?  Like worrying about how to feed my family?  Well, I might be every bit as volubly enraged.  Watch what she has to say.

Ron Sheldon: “Re your ‘fantasy‘ — would you accept the reverse order? That George and Barack recommend to the Court Mitt Romney and Joe Biden as interim president and vice president?”

☞ Sure.  Although that seems a little odd, since — even WITH the Russian attack — the Democrat got more votes than any Republican in history.  But if that’s what George and Barack decide, who am I to argue.

 Eugene Robinson asks in the Washington Post: what if lifelong-Republican Robert Mueller nails Trump and the Republican Congress decides not to do anything about it?  If the President and Republican National Committee will support a credibly-accused child molester for the Senate . . . even as the President works to tear down trust in the free press and in the FBI and in the courts . . . who is to say he couldn’t (say) walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without being removed from office?

And now back to sitting on the edge of my seat to see what the good people Alabama — and there are loads of them — decide.

But first, to get you in the mood . . . Conservative columnist and Republican David Brooks:

 

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. . . First, [Trump] asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.

There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.

That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.

The Republican Party is doing harm to every cause it purports to serve. If Republicans accept Roy Moore as a United States senator, they may, for a couple years, have one more vote for a justice or a tax cut, but they will have made their party loathsome for an entire generation. The pro-life cause will be forever associated with moral hypocrisy on an epic scale. The word “evangelical” is already being discredited for an entire generation. Young people and people of color look at the Trump-Moore G.O.P. and they are repulsed, maybe forever.

The GOP sold its soul a long time ago. Trump only revealed the black, evil monster that hid behind the doors. . . .

“What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question. Donald Trump seems to have made gaining the world at the cost of his soul his entire life’s motto. . . .

It’s amazing that there haven’t been more Republicans like Mitt Romney who have said: “Enough is enough! I can go no further!”

The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the G.O.P. traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism.

The Republican Party I grew up with admired excellence. It admired intellectual excellence (Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley), moral excellence (John Paul II, Natan Sharansky) and excellent leaders (James Baker, Jeane Kirkpatrick). Populism abandoned all that — and had to by its very nature. Excellence is hierarchical. Excellence requires work, time, experience and talent. Populism doesn’t believe in hierarchy. Populism doesn’t demand the effort required to understand the best that has been thought and said. Populism celebrates the quick slogan, the impulsive slash, the easy ignorant assertion. Populism is blind to mastery and embraces mediocrity.

Compare the tax cuts of the supply-side era with the tax cuts of today. There were three big cuts in the earlier era: the 1978 capital gains tax cut, the Kemp-Roth tax cut of 1981, and the 1986 tax reform. They were passed with bipartisan support, after a lengthy legislative process. All of them responded to the dominant problem of the moment, which was the stagflation and economic sclerosis. All rested on a body of serious intellectual work.

Liberals now associate supply-side economics with the Laffer Curve, but that was peripheral. Supply-side was based on Say’s Law, that supply creates its own demand. It was based on the idea that if you rearrange incentives for small entrepreneurs you are more likely to get start-ups and more innovation. Those cuts were embraced by Nobel Prize winners and represented an entire social vision, favoring the dispersed entrepreneurs over the concentrated corporate fat cats.

Today’s tax cuts have no bipartisan support. They have no intellectual grounding, no body of supporting evidence. They do not respond to the central crisis of our time. They have no vision of the common good, except that Republican donors should get more money and Democratic donors should have less.

The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational. More and more former Republicans wake up every day and realize: “I’m homeless. I’m politically homeless.”

OK?

Now here is Ezra Klein making the case for impeachment in an interview with Chris Hayes.  (“Impeachment seems like a big deal?  Nuclear holocaust seems like a big deal!”)  It stems from his recent piece in Vox.

Every Republican we know — it seems to me — should see Brooks’ column, above.

And every American we know — it again seems to me — should see Klein’s Vox piece, excerpted below.

Please share both widely.

The Case for Normalizing Impeachment
Impeaching an unfit president has consequences.But leaving one in office could be worse.
By Ezra Klein
Updated Dec 6, 2017, 3:29pm EST

. . . Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the widely respected chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, warned that the president was treating his office like “a reality show” and setting the country “on the path to World War III.” In an interview with the New York Times, he said of Trump, “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.” These concerns, Corker told the Times, “were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.”

It’s not just Senate Republicans who worry over the president’s stability. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, told CNN that his reporting found “a consensus developing in the military, at the highest levels in the intelligence community, among Republicans in Congress, including the leaders in the business community,” that Trump “is unfit to be the president of the United States.” A subsequent poll by the Military Times found only 30 percent of commissioned officers approved of the job Trump was doing.

The fear is shared by members of Trump’s own staff. Axios’s Mike Allen reported that a collection of top White House advisers see themselves as an informal “Committee to Save America,” and they measure their success “mostly in terms of bad decisions prevented, rather than accomplishments chalked up.” The Associated Press reported that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly “agreed in the earliest weeks of Trump’s presidency that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House.” . . .

. . . We talk often about running the US government like a business, but businesses — at least public ones — have clear methods for deposing a disastrous executive. The president of the United States controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, not to mention the vast resources and powers of the federal government, and so the possible damage of letting the wrong person inhabit the Oval Office stretches all the way to global catastrophe. But is there anything we can do about it?

. . . Sometimes I imagine this era going catastrophically wrong — a nuclear exchange with North Korea, perhaps, or a genuine crisis in American democracy — and historians writing about it in the future. They will go back and read Trump’s tweets and his words and read what we were saying, and they will wonder what the hell was wrong with us. You knew, they’ll say. You knew everything you needed to know to stop this. And what will we say in response?

. . . What is clear is that high crimes and misdemeanors described far more than mere legal infractions. . . .

Asked, for instance, about a president who removed executive officials without good reason, James Madison replied that “the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal.” Capricious firings are not a crime, but they were, according to the founders, an impeachable offense.

“The grounds for impeachment can be extremely broad and need not involve a crime,” says political scientist Allan Lichtman, author of The Case for Impeachment. “That’s why they put impeachment not in the courts but in a political body. They could have put it in the Supreme Court, but they put it in the Senate.”

. . . “We’ve talked ourselves into believing impeachment is some kind of constitutional doomsday device: ‘Break glass in case of existential emergency,’” says Gene Healy, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The result is we almost never break the glass.”

In its roughly 240 years of existence, America has had 45 presidents and three serious impeachment proceedings. None of them has led to the removal of a president, though Richard Nixon’s would have if he hadn’t resigned. “It’s very hard to say of 45 presidents in 240 years [that] never, or once if you count Nixon, is the right number of impeachments historically,” Healy continues. “It’s a much easier case to make that we’ve impeached far too infrequently.”

. . . It would have been simple enough to enumerate the offenses that could lead to impeachment, and some at the Constitutional Convention proposed doing so. Instead, “high crimes and misdemeanors” was the result — a recognition that flexibility would be needed and future generations would need a term they could define for themselves.

. . . It is time to reassess. Impeachment, in Donald Trump’s case, would lead to the elevation of Mike Pence — a Republican who is better liked by his party and who, to Democrats’ chagrin, would likely be much more effective at pushing a conservative legislative agenda. But it would mean less danger of an accidental war with North Korea, less daily degradation of democratic norms and civil discourse, an executive who has the attention span to follow briefings and the temperament to stay off Twitter when he’s angry, and the precedent that there is some minimal level of job performance that the American people and their political representatives are willing to demand of their president.

An objection to this is that it might lead to more common impeachment proceedings in the future. And indeed it might. Other developed countries operate on roughly that basis, with occasional no-confidence votes and snap elections being used to impose midterm accountability, and they get along just fine.

Impeachment under the American political system requires a majority in the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority in the Senate; it is not easy to use and, as Republicans learned in the aftermath of their attempt to impeach Clinton, can backfire on those who use attempt it frivolously. It seems unlikely that America is at risk of regular or trivial impeachments even as it seems quite likely that the holders of an office as powerful as the American presidency might be well served to believe that impeachment is a real possibility if they perform their duties unacceptably poorly.

A lesson of Trump’s presidency, thus far, is that we have come to see the impeachment power as too sacrosanct, as too limited. While I was writing this piece, Trump embarked on a diplomatic trip to Asia. While there, he sent [a tweet about Kim Jong Un being short and fat].

There are plenty of people who simply should not be president of a nuclear hyperpower, and Trump is one of them. This is a truth known by his staff, known by Republicans in Congress, and known by most of the country.That so few feel able to even suggest doing the obvious thing and replacing him with another Republican who is better suited to the single most important job in the world is bizarre. (It is a particular irony in this case, given that Trump’s entire public persona is based on the idea that well-run organizations need to swiftly and ruthlessly fire poor performers.)

We have grown too afraid of the consequences of impeachment and too complacent about the consequences of leaving an unfit president in office. If the worst happens, and Trump’s presidency results in calamity, we will have no excuse to make, no answer to give. This is an emergency. We should break the glass.

But even if we muddle through Trump’s presidency, it should be a reminder that the presidential elections are as fallible a method of selecting an executive as any other. American government is built so that a president can be removed and a duly elected co-partisan is always present to step in and take his place. Impeachment is not a power we should take lightly; nor is it one we should treat as too explosive to use. There will be presidents who are neither criminals nor mental incompetents but who are wrong for the role, who pose a danger to the country and the world.

It is a principle that sounds radical until you say it, at which point it sounds obvious: Being extremely bad at the job of president of the United States should be enough to get you fired.

I refer you again to “my fantasy” Supreme Court ruling (once a case were brought), which — however unlikely — would be even better than impeachment. Putin attacked us and won.  The Court, if asked to rule, has what seems to me a perfectly reasonable way forward.

But first (and trust me, you don’t want to miss the bee-yuh):

My friend Peter Kinzler is seeking seven patriots.  To wit:

On June 1, 1950, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith took the floor of the Senate to address what she described as “a serous national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.”

Her concern was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on American citizens as communists or fascists. Today, we face similar attacks on American citizens and institutions from a reckless president, but where is the Republican response?

With the support of six other Republicans, Senator Smith delivered a “Declaration of Conscience” criticizing the statements and tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among Senator Smith’s indictment were the following points: . . .

As you’ll see if you read the full piece (the bee-yuh will still be hee-yuh), he quotes that declaration; identifies seven current Republican senators of conscience; and goes on to say:

. . . What [these] seven haven’t done is emulate Senator Smith by making it clear—together—that Trump’s actions represent a clear and present danger to our democracy, one that requires that they act on the premise that, “We are Republicans, but we are Americans first.” On the contrary, every one except Corker worked with Trump and voted for tax legislation that was crammed though the Senate without any semblance of normal legislative process.

If they act together, these Republicans can save the nation from Trump’s deepening autocracy. If they do not and American democracy goes down, it will be to their everlasting shame that they knew the danger but lacked the principles and courage to stand up.

December 15, the day the Bill of Rights was adopted 226 years ago, is rapidly approaching.  Wouldn’t it be fine if these seven honored the day by emulating Senator Smith and her six fellow Republicans with an updated Declaration of Conscience?

☞ Spread the word?

OK: Forget bitcoin (more on that soon) — he-yuh’s the alt-currency you can rely on.

(And if you enjoyed that, you might get a kick out of this.)

My ironic friend texted me this link with the heading: “But finally some good news.”

Have a great weekend!

My centrist friend Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, co-wrote this for the New York Times Sunday:

In the past three days, Republican leaders in the Senate scrambled to corral votes for a tax bill that the Joint Committee on Taxation said would add $1 trillion to the deficit — without holding any meaningful committee hearings. Worse, Republican leaders have been blunt about their motivation: to deliver on their promises to wealthy donors, and down the road, to use the leverage of huge deficits to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security.

Congress no longer works the way it’s supposed to.

. . .  If in 2006 one could cast aspersions on both parties, over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.

. . . Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics. The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.

This is a far cry from the aspirations of Republican presidential giants like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as legions of former Republican senators and representatives who identified critical roles for government and worked tirelessly to make them succeed. It’s an agenda bereft of any serious efforts to remedy the problems that trouble vast segments of the American public, including the disaffected voters who flocked to Mr. Trump.

. . .

We have never suggested that Democrats are angels and Republicans devils. Parties exist to win elections and organize government, and they are shaped by the interests, ideas and donors that constitute their coalitions. Neither party is immune from a pull to the extreme.

But the imbalance today is striking, and frightening. Our democracy requires vigorous competition between two serious and ideologically distinct parties, both of which operate in the realm of truth, see governing as an essential and ennobling responsibility, and believe that the acceptance of republican institutions and democratic values define what it is to be an American. The Republican Party must reclaim its purpose.

India looks to save 20 billion rupees on airport taxiing . . . which may not be the most pressing thing on your mind, but now I probably have you wondering how much that is in dollars ($310 million), which I know because I asked Alexa.  I had previously asked her, with regard to the Pilgrims, “How long did it take the Mayflower to reach America?” and she said, “You are 234 miles from America [actually, I was in New York, so maybe she meant the real America] but I don’t know how fast you’re traveling so I can’t calculate your travel time.”

You know I don’t eat.  Saves time, saves money, saves the planet, good for health and weight, and much easier on the cows and chickens.  Especially the chickens.

That said, one has to eat something, and if you’re the kind of person who does, let alone “meals” (I graze), MealPal may be worth a look.

You sign up for either 12 or 20 lunches a month (or, now, in some cities, dinners), at a rate ranging from $5.19/meal in Miami to $6.39/meal in cities like New York, Boston, DC, and San Francisco.

No beverage; but you get a full hot lunch or dinner (and plastic utensils and a napkin).  Not bad for $6.39.  I just watched a friend eat his moules frites from Café Tallulah — $24 plus tax and tip if he had sat there to eat it instead of coming by my place — and because he couldn’t finish it all, I made out like un bandit. 

Plus, he got a beer from my fridge that cost him nothing (and me, just a buck) instead of $8.

Each night (or early the day-of), you peruse nearby restaurants to see what’s offered — no choices or substitutions, but a wide variety of chefs — and click to reserve one.  Then just drop in at lunch time, give your name, grab your bag.  No lines.  No cash register.  Real fast.

And you might want to have a Heineken with that.  I guess it’s five years old, but have you ever seen this ad? (Watch all the way to the end.)  Thanks, Mel!

Not me!  But how can one not be excited by this: a 90-day journey to Mars in 2024.  Less time than it took the Mayflower to reach Cape Cod (all things considered) — and with comforts and luxuries of which the Pilgrims could never have dreamed.  (Thanks, John!)

Back here on Earth . . .

Rex Tillerson has largely destroyed the State Department — a huge win for Vladimir Putin and his fellow murderous autocrats around the world.

But the Republicans in the House and Senate don’t seem to care.

They are making America great again by making health insurance less affordable, higher education less affordable, inequality more pronounced, our National Debt needlessly higher . . . all the while letting our infrastructure crumble.  An almost certain prescription for progress and prosperity.

It’s almost funny.  As president, we have a genuine fake-wrestling hall of fame inductee.  As secretary of state, we have a genuine Russian Order of Friendship Medal recipient.  The latter calls the former “a fucking moron.”  The former calls the latter “an idiot.”

Maybe it’s time to remind you of my fantasy:

My fantasy — and it is only that — is that some crisis a month or three down the road triggers a lawsuit that can only be decided by the Supreme Court.  And that that Court, though captured by the right, somehow finds the fundamental patriotism and fairness to say something like this:

“Seventeen years ago this Court faced a national crisis and — in a ruling it went out of its way to brand as non-precedential — made a tough and widely criticized call that, in effect, gave George W. Bush the Presidency and, as it happened, the opportunity to appoint two of us to this body.  Last year, the Senate made the unprecedented decision not to allow the President to fill a vacancy on this Court, on the grounds that the will of the people as expressed in 2008 and 2012 did not give him that authority — the Senate needed to see how the people leaned in 2016.  As we now know, the people — not the Electoral College, the people — leaned toward the Democratic candidate. 

“Today we face a new crisis.  In developments that have been building all year, it has become clear that the 2016 election results were interfered with by a massive Putin-directed thumb on the electoral scale — a thumb the existence of which the Trump team long denied knowledge of but of which we now know they were well aware.  In that context, we have been called upon to overturn the 2016 result as tainted, and to order a workable mechanism by which the country can move forward and regain its footing. 

“We hereby direct former presidents Obama and Bush, acting in concert, to recommend to this Court, in the shortest time possible, an interim president and vice president to serve out the remainder of this presidential term — or a shorter term if a majority of the House and Senate shall call for an earlier election.”

Or something like that.  And Barack and George, very different people but both sane patriots, would perhaps recommend to the Court Joe Biden and Mitt Romney; the Court would approve; and most of the nation — not having attained anything like great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost — nor remotely to have tired of “winning so much you’ll get tired of winning” — would breathe a huge sigh of relief.  As would the world.

Or they could just give it to Hillary, who did get more votes despite it all; but Putin/Trump have been so effective at getting people to misperceive her (she is wonderful and would have made a great president), it could fail to give the same sense of closure.

Just sayin’.

You absolutely don’t want to miss this TED talk.

You will learn why we age, and how you might extend your “health span.”

This is not hokum: this is Nobel-prize-winning science combined with wisdom and grace.

Your readership extends my telomeres.

Seriously: don’t miss this one.  It’s fascinating, wise, and free.

The tax bill, meanwhile — horrifying, unwise, and a trillion dollars shy of being free — passed the Senate before it could even be typed, let alone read.

Does Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski still think the Senate is “earning back its reputation as ‘the world’s greatest deliberative body’?”

Just because she got a provision added that opens the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling?

That gets her vote for this dreadfully wrong-headed tax bill?

These would be such great days to be alive (today: telomeres! tomorrow: Mars!) had Putin — who murders journalists and political opponents — not so successfully destabilized our democracy and ended our world leadership.

Thanks to him, we have an unhinged, unfit president praised by Nazis, who lies preposterously and perpetually.

Never more than when he says the tax bill will “cost me a fortune, believe me.”

Call your Republican Senator/s (202-224-3121) and/or Congressperson (202-225-3121).  We just need a few of them to put their constituents ahead of their donors.

The last thing we should be doing is increasing the National Debt to lower taxes on the rich while our infrastructure continues to decay.  How is that smart or responsible in any way?

And no, it will not create jobs — it could well move more of them overseas.

OK.  Made your voice heard?

Now watch Elizabeth Blackburn’s wonderful TED talk.

But first — if you’re coming to New York, add Come From Away to your wish list.  A friend took me.  I wasn’t expecting much.  But guess what?  It’s terrific.  Filled with humanity and humor and foot-stomping energy. (And no annoying intermission to interrupt the flow — what a concept!) You will leave the theater feeling great.

Meanwhile, if you happen to be gay (or have lots of gay friends), see Bright Colors and Bold Patterns.  Again, I wasn’t expecting much. The website “trailer” didn’t grab me.

But the director is a friend, and both the Times and the New Yorker called it “hilarious” — so I got tickets.

Well!

It’s quite the one-man show!

You’ll swear you see four characters on stage the whole time.

And how odd to juxtapose that recommendation with this one, because my friend Richard Viguerie — king of right-wing direct mail — is staunchly anti-equality.  And most other things I care about.

We were once on a panel, back when Charles was alive and gays were not included in America’s hate crimes law and could not serve openly in the military — let alone marry — and I finally boiled it down to this: “Look, Richard.  You know me, you know Charles.  I know you like us and wish us well, as we do you.  And you know we pay our taxes as you pay yours.  So just tell me: If it were up to you, which rights would you allow us and which would you not?  May we live together?  Hold hands?  Sleep together?  Serve in the military?  You’re in charge. Just tell us.”

Richard squirmed.  His faith told him he couldn’t start allowing us rights because that slippery slope would lead to marriage and who knows what else.*

He said he wanted time to think about it.  We agreed that I’d ask him again the following year, which — given the vagaries of panel scheduling — I did not get to do.

Anyway, I happened to come across this 2016 interview on YouTube yesterday.  If your job involves marketing or direct mail — or you’d just like to put a human face on “the enemy” (because no one has done more than Richard to move America to the right) — watch.  He brims with energy and — in his way — good will.  But, oh, the harm his team has caused.  Never  more than this year.

Speaking of which . . . here is a report of the speech in which the President lied massively, blatantly, and consequentially for all to see — saying that he and his wealthy friends would be paying much more under the Republican plan than the relatively little they pay now.  It’s not a gray area; it is a knowing, enormous, colossal lie.  That he is not universally condemned for it by Congressional Republicans is appalling.  And scary.  And ominous.

Have a great weekend.

*Polygamy!  Bestiality!  And Gomorrah stuff like that. Like go-Moore-ah 32-year-old man molesting a 14-year-old and then running for Senate.

The tax thing is horrifying (see below) and could get voted on — even passed — today.  If either or both your senators is Republican, call 202-224-3121 to register your dismay.

1. Rachel’s Russia list.  You don’t want to miss this. As she says, the evidence just mounts and mounts.

2. Her visual explanation of the Republican tax bill.  (People protesting, “Kill the bill, not us!”)

3. Bernie’s letter:

Andrew –

For the past 40 years, the financial and political elite of this country have rigged the tax code to redistribute wealth and income to some of the richest and most powerful people in this country. The result: we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society in which the top 1 percent is doing phenomenally well, the middle class continues to decline and 40 million Americans are living in poverty.

And it will probably not surprise you to learn that just as our tax code benefits the wealthiest people in this country, it also benefits some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world with a myriad of tax breaks, deductions, credits and other loopholes. As a result, one out of five large profitable corporations today pays nothing in federal taxes.

The current Republican “tax cut” bill, paid for by the Koch brothers and other billionaire campaign contributors, continues the push to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. It would raise taxes on middle class families making $75,000 a year or less and would throw 13 million Americans off of health insurance. And it would do all of these things to provide permanent tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and profitable corporations that ship American jobs to China while moving their American profits to the Cayman Islands.

But let’s be clear. This legislation goes well beyond taxes. Its ultimate goal is to radically transform American society and the role that government plays in the lives of the working families of our country. This legislation will increase the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion over ten years. Mark my words. If passed, the Republicans will then rediscover the “deficit crisis,” and push aggressively for massive cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education – higher education in particular – nutrition, affordable housing and more. They will seek to undo every major piece of legislation passed in the last 80 years designed to help working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.

This is the Republican plan. Huge tax breaks for the rich and powerful. Massive cuts to life and death programs for the middle class and working families of our country.

This is not moral. This is not what the American people want. This is not what our country and our pledge for “liberty and justice for all” is supposed to be about.

That is why I am going on the road this week to talk directly to working people in Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania about this disastrous piece of legislation. If we stand together – black, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, male and female, young and old, gay and straight – we can defeat this horrific bill. But I need you to make your voice heard as well. We need to stand together.

Please sign my petition calling on Congress to REJECT the Republican “tax cut” plan that would take from the working families in this country to give a massive tax break to people and corporations who already are doing extremely well. At a time of grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality, we must not make a bad situation even worse.

Today in America, more than 40 million Americans, including 20 percent of all children, live in poverty. Many in extreme poverty. Almost 28 million Americans have no health insurance. Millions of bright kids can’t afford to go to college without facing a lifetime of debt. Seniors and disabled veterans are struggling to stay alive on inadequate Social Security checks.

Despite all of that pain, the greed of the billionaire class in this country knows no limits. No. We will not allow them to take away from those in need in order to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the very rich.

Here’s a radical idea for my colleagues in the Republican Party: instead of just listening to the rich and powerful few in this country, maybe just maybe Congress should listen to the majority of the American people who want a fair tax system.

Maybe just maybe corporate tax reform should start by preventing profitable companies from sheltering profits in tax haven countries like the Cayman Islands.

Here is something you may not know:

A 2008 Government Accountability Office report found that 83 of the Fortune 100 companies use at least one offshore tax scheme to lower their taxes. A 2016 study found that one of every five large, profitable corporations paid no federal income taxes at all in 2012.

The practice of stashing profits in places like the Cayman Islands has become so absurd that one single, five-story office building there is now the official legal “home” to more than 18,000 corporations! Our tax code has essentially legalized tax dodging for large corporations.

We must stop this bill. We must stop the Republicans from moving this country into an oligarchy.

And that starts with all of us standing up, fighting back and making our voices heard. Three weeks ago progressives from coast to coast ran for office at the local and state level – and they won. We have to continue that progress and build on that momentum.

Please sign my petition calling on Congress to REJECT the Republican “tax cut” plan that would take from working families in this country all to give a massive tax break to people and corporations who already have it all.

Brothers and sisters. We must do exactly the opposite of what Trump is attempting to do. He wants to divide us up by the color of our skin, our gender, our religion, our sexual orientation or our country of origin. He wants us fighting with each other while Wall Street and the billionaire class laugh all the way to the bank.

Our job is to bring our people together around an agenda that creates an economy and government that works for all, not just the 1 percent. Defeating this terrible piece of legislation will be an important step forward.

This bill is a moral abomination. I hope you’ll add your name if you agree.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

Again: If either of your senators is a Republican, call 202-224-3121 — right now — to register your dismay.  If it’s the middle of the night, swell: you’ll get their voice mail.