Republicans purportedly abhor regulations. Such regulations would include reasonable guidance for Wall Street/financial, health care, small business, educational and most particularly, any regulation that has to do with the environment and guns.
The typical Republican would much rather see children die of asthma and assorted respiratory diseases, cancer or any other pollutants that corporate factories introduce into innocent kid’s systems via the atmosphere. The GOP doesn’t care about kids. That was irrefutably proven in the right-wing reaction or lack thereof to the 20 deaths of 6 and 7-year-olds at Sandy Hook Elementary. And if the wanton killing of 6 and 7-year-old children doesn’t shake loose at least a few firearms, you’re a moral zombie and that pretty well describes the current crop of Republicans.
Being totally cuckoo for 30 capacity mags, these zombies will heartily endorse gun legislation that was recently advanced in the South Carolina State Senate that would pre-empt federal gun laws and allow concealed carry in restaurants. “Will that be a table for 2 and a high chair for your .223 Bushmaster?”
So rapacious are these zombies to gun-up America that in the wake of Sandy Hook, one gun dealer after another quickly sold out of their heavy weaponry and ammo and had back-orders a mile long. That’s how much deaths of precious children mean to zombie right-wingers.
Much has been written that some kind of meaningful gun regulations will come out of the 113th Congress. ROTFLMAO!!! There will be tissue-paper thin background check regs mirroring what already exists that will pass as a response to Sandy Hook and other obscene minute-by-minute murders and suicides that mark our gun culture. The Feinstein “exceptions” bill is pure snake oil and any hope for anything meaningful was dashed the day the President read off his gun reform Executive Orders to the mass guffaws and criticisms of Congressional Republicans, the NRA and gun manufacturers.
However, you must recognize a truism that has gone fundamentally unreported in today’s media. Republicans do believe in regulation. It’s the degree of regulation that separates them from the Democrats. Take the environment. Republicans vote all the time for environmental regulations. And in every case they vote on the side of the special interests. They’ll vote “yea” on environmental regulations for instance if they’re severely watered-down versions of tougher Democratic bills. They’ll just not vote for regulations that save lives. Same for the gun culture. Death, no matter the age or circumstance is not part of the equation. Only the guns and wealthy corporate polluters matter.
We’ve all heard of the Norquist tax pledge; how about the “No Climate Tax Pledge?” It’s sponsored by the Koch Brothers Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and the far-right climate deniers and tobacco industry puppets, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and National Taxpayers Union (NTU) headed by the former Executive Director of ALEC. The pledge: “I pledge to the taxpayers of my state, and to the American people, that I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.” Legislators will be cognisant that no regulations violate this sacred clever pledge. One that would guarantee that any efforts to address climate change would lack funding.
Under the constituent-friendly pretext of defending the population against the greenhouse gases corporate crowd, former prosecutor and my Congressional Representative Trey Gowdy makes grand pronouncements like “Aggressive prosecution of environmental crime is one of the best ways to show good stewardship of what we have been given.”
This gratuitous politicizing, backed by no action, was mouthed while voting yes on House Amendment 88 tacked onto the H.R. 1 spending bill. The amendment blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from funding enforcement to lower mercury emissions from U.S. cement plants that kill an estimated 8,100 people a year according to EPA estimates. Gowdy also supported industry friendly H.R. 2681, the Cement Sector Regulatory Relief Act of 2011. The cement folks drop $8,500 (about a buck for each annual death) on Gowdy’s campaign for the privilege of his votes. In spite of Gowdy, meaningful regulations remain in place, though they are at least 2 years or more away from enforcement.
There’s one slice of American life where Republicans really embrace regulations. The regulating of the most personal human interaction of all – marriage. In fact regulation of marriage is rampant in America. Republican homophobes introduced and codified most of these regulations in the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, state legislation, ballot initiatives or by way of state Constitutional Amendments. Of our 50 states, 42 of them “regulate” marriage to the point that a gay couple’s marriage would either not be recognized as legal or out-and-out denied. That’s 42 states effecting the most stringent regulation of all.
Women’s reproductive rights? Right-wingers are extraordinarily vigilant in regulating any and all such rights. Wisconsin is in the process of forcing transvaginal ultrasounds on newly-pregnant women. Virginia’s baby-faced and baby-brained Governor, Bob McDonnell, tried the same thing early last year before caving in to public pressures from thinking human beings. Draconian anti-abortion Republican regulations abound in a number of states; including Virginia and its Neanderthal peers in North Dakota, Mississippi and Michigan to mention but a few and the roster expands with every new session of red state legislatures. Regulations? They’re crawling out of state legislatures like stirred up fire ant mounds.
Parenthetically contraception also falls under the Republican ‘regulatory’ category. There’s an entire body of secular regulations (at least for Catholics) based on events from a couple of thousand years ago. Talk about your sophisticated lawmaking. A young guy named Onan, on papa Judah’s orders, laid his dead brother Er’s widow, Tamar, but pulled out early, thereby spilling his potentially impregnating seed. Media reports at the time (most likely from Wolf Blitzer of the Christ News Network) said Onan repeated the act on several occasions. “Spilling” your seed was a no no for which the Lord “slew” the second brother. Er had also ticked off the Lord resulting in an identical fate. Thus followed a “slew” of contraception regulations.
So there. Like daily fiber Republicans do, indeed, regulate; often with the same result.
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