Why Joe Biden is slamming Rick Scott’s plan to sunset Social Security and Medicare

The 12-point plan of a member of the US Senate who is not particularly senior is usually the type that will hardly cause a ripple in the discourse. But Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott’s plan to “save America,” as he says, is not designed to disappear quietly – and during his short life, he has made a clear rebuke during the State of the Union, continuing to be criticized by the President. Joe Biden, and even insulted Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

A 10-second elevator pitch will tell you: Scott’s proposal would radically overhaul the way the federal government operates, forcing Congress to pass every federal law or lose it — a move that, according to Democrats, would be dangerous. what the government does, including favorite federal programs like Medicare and Social Security.

It’s a short proposal, with little detail to flesh it out. But on the face of it, the meaning is clear: Every five years, every federal law must be re-enacted to stay on the books.

Every federal law! During the Trump administration and the first two years of Biden’s presidency, Congress passed more than 1,000 pieces of legislation every two years, so you can imagine the scale of the task. But Biden’s criticism isn’t about random parts of the US Code that most people don’t know. He slammed Scott — without naming names — for trying to end Social Security and Medicare, two entitlement programs that benefit tens of millions of Americans and are hugely popular with the public.

“Instead of making the rich pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset,” Biden said in his State of the Union address. “It was proposed by an individual. I politely withheld names, but it was proposed by some of you.

It’s a new twist on a familiar trope: Republicans propose cutting government benefits, Democrats attack them.

As CNN reported, when Scott first introduced the idea a year ago, Biden seized it. The campaign reached a crescendo in the State of the Union speech, where Biden’s exchange with Republicans in the crowd was the most important moment for the president, leaving Democrats surprised that Scott and the GOP had “walked straight into” a clear political trap.

Last weekend, the leader of the Republican Senate Mitch McConnell (who had a controversial relationship with Scott after the Floridian tried to remove him from the leadership) himself tore apart Scott’s idea, making it clear that he did not consider the idea to be a Republican idea but only Rick Scott. idea. Scott has accused critics of misrepresenting his proposal, expressing support for both programs, and rushing to introduce legislation he says he would support.

It’s an open shift. Ten years ago – or 50 – this episode might have been very different. The ideological landscape has shifted after Donald Trump’s presidency, where he won the GOP primary while promising not to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Now the party is trying to figure out its identity in the (tentative) post-Trump era. Rick Scotts, who describes himself as a staunch fiscal conservative, wants to bring back the ideology of small government. But other Republicans aren’t as comfortable with the idea as they used to be.

Trump changed the party’s calculus, and it may never come back.

A brief history of proposals to cut Medicare and Social Security

Sunset provisions, which allow laws and programs to expire unless Congress votes to continue them, became popular in the 1970s as a good government proposal, a counterpart to “sunshine laws” intended to promote transparency. The Sunset Proposal was intended as a way to cut inefficient or ineffective government programs; throughout the 1970s, they were common. (Some twilight proposals at the time explicitly excluded Social Security and Medicare.) In 1975, Biden himself proposed limiting funding for existing government programs to no more than six years, an idea that the White House quickly rejected mid- in the middle of a dispute with Scott.

Though sunset proposals have occasionally surfaced in recent years — Congress held hearings on a sunset bill in 1998, and the libertarian Cato Institute called for a sunset government program in 2002 — the idea has been less active. However, in recent years, Republicans have targeted Social Security and Medicare specifically. President George W. Bush sought to privatize Social Security in his second term; in the early 2010s Rep. Paul Ryan made a dramatic overhaul to Social Security and Medicare part of his ambitious policy agenda.

In those days, Republicans often defended the idea as a necessary and responsible financial provision. They are supposed to be a small government party. But he also faced a dry and effective attack, incl during the 2012 presidential campaign, when Ryan was running for vice president Mitt Romney and Barack Obama called the Republican budget a plan to “end Medicare as we know it.”

Republicans have shifted in economic policy to defang the Democratic attacks, but some people want to move again

Let’s be clear: Republicans haven’t had some kind of come-to-Jesus moment that makes people love government programs and government spending. They are still proposing ideas like Medicaid work requirements that would eliminate public benefits. Even for Trump, the signature policy victory of his presidency has been massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, catnip for conservatives for decades.

But he tried to take a more measured tone on Social Security and Medicare specifically, two programs that are especially important to seniors in his base. It was a hard lesson learned from the 2012 presidential campaign, when Ryan’s budget was not popular with seniors, and the 2016 Republican primary, in which Trump ended up steamrolling other candidates with what he had more conventional conservative views.

The problem for Republicans has always been that voters don’t want Social Security and Medicare cut. A 2019 Pew Research poll found that 74 percent of all Americans, including 68 percent of those who identify as Republican or lean toward that party, say no cuts should be made to Social Security benefits.

This is a lesson that the party has finally internalized. As the debate over raising the debt ceiling approaches, the new House Republican majority has even said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are off the table.

This is a sharp reversal from previous demands when the House GOP threatened to take the economy over the cliff during the Obama years. Later, Republicans in Congress and the Obama White House negotiated a deal to reduce the deficit, in part with cuts to Medicare (but not Social Security), though Congress ultimately scaled back and delayed the cuts.

If you go back further than that, McConnell himself is responsible for whipping votes in favor of George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security in 2005, an episode through which he has written regrets for failing to pass such a bill.

But that is the past age in politics. Deficit reduction is back – also expected to be the focus of Biden’s proposed budget – but the right to cut is not considered a viable (political) option to achieve. Democrats certainly won’t go back to the ideas proposed by the Obama-era Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission. And many Republicans are not interested in an overhaul of fundamental rights.

All of that makes Rick Scott’s proposal a headache for Republicans and an opportunity for Democrats. That’s why, a year after he first proposed it, Scott’s critics are still talking about it.