Why Haven’t Republicans Done Anything to Help Working People in Over 40 Years?

Because when you look at what’s been stopped, delayed, or killed, a clear pattern emerges…

Gallup just found that only 10% of Americans approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, with 86% actively disapproving of the GOP’s behavior.

Turns out, there’s a reason.

Yesterday on my nationally syndicated radio/TV/SiriusXM/YouTube program a fellow called to ask how long I’d been running my contest. It started more than 20 years ago, around the time I helped start Air America Radio. Here’s the question:

“Name one piece of major legislation that was created by Republicans since Reagan’s presidency, passed the House and Senate with majority Republican votes, and signed into law by a Republican president, whose major beneficiary is the average working person.”

To this day, nobody’s identified a single piece of major legislation and thus won the autographed book that’s the prize.

Meanwhile, since 1981 Democrats have passed the Family and Medical Leave Act; Earned Income Tax Credit expansions; Children’s Health Insurance Program; Affordable Care Act; Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; Every Student Succeeds Act; American Rescue Plan Act; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; Inflation Reduction Act; PACT Act, and dozens of others.

Which raises the question: Why have Republicans avoided doing anything at all to help average working people for over 40 years?

As I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the genesis of the situation goes back to 1974, when William F. Buckley’s millionaire brother and Senator James Buckley joined a lawsuit with former Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA, passed in the wake of the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals) limiting campaign contributions to $1000 from an individual and $50,000 for a candidate self-financing their campaign (as Buckley had done).

Buckley’s suit claimed the money he might want to put into a future campaign was his own and he should be able to use it however he wanted.

Just two years earlier, Nixon had put Lewis Powell (author of the infamous 1971 Powell Memo, which was that era’s Project 2025) on the Supreme Court, and Powell got to working on his colleagues, resulting in the 1976 Buckley v Valeo decision. It echoed Powell’s Memo, saying that money spent on politics was the same thing as “free speech” and thus protected by the First Amendment, blowing up those nasty donation limits.

Two years later, Powell himself authored the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision that doubled-down on the “money is free speech” argument and extended it from humans to corporations as well.

The result was that the 1980 Reagan campaign was suddenly awash in oil industry money, because he’d promised to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s Solar Bank program that would have had America producing 20% of our electricity from solar by the year 2000.

When Clarence Thomas — then himself on the take from rightwing billionaires — became the Court’s deciding vote in Citizens United in 2010, the doors to functionally unlimited campaign and dark money contributions from both billionaires and corporations were blown open.

Which explains the answers to other questions that often come up on my program:

Q. Why do Republicans fight free college and ending student debt when our experience with the GI Bill after WWII found that for every $1 we invest in educating people our nation got $7 in return, as well as making America the science leader of the late 20th century?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the banking industry, which makes billions in profits from student loans that are almost entirely risk-free because — thanks to legislation signed by George W. Bush — they can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.

Q. Why do Republicans fight every effort to have a national healthcare system like every other democracy in the world has, even though it would save tens of thousands of lives a year, lengthen the average American lifespan, and cost us around half of what we pay for healthcare today?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the health insurance industry, which makes billions in profits from denying coverage to people, even though 78 million Americans have inadequate or no insurance and a national system would save the country an estimated half-billion dollars a year. As Wendell Potter notes, “In 2024, seven big insurers posted $71.3 billion in profits and paid their [seven] CEOs more than $146 million.”

Q. Why do Republicans sabotage green programs designed to get America off our dependence on fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are destroying our atmosphere, our children’s future, and cause tens of thousands of cancers and millions of cases of asthma and other disease cases every year?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the fossil fuel industry, which makes billions in profits every year and recycles some of that back to the Party. In 2024 the world’s largest, most polluting companies recording an estimated $583 billion in profits, marking a 68% increase since 2019 in part because of their investment in buying American Republican politicians.

Q. Why do Republicans fight breaking up monopolies, even though the average American family pays around $5000 a year more for goods and services than do the citizens of most other democracies that don’t allow monopolies and oligopolies?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant, monopolistic companies, as I lay out in horrifying detail in The Hidden History of American Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream (foreword by Ralph Nader). Every time a Democratic president tries to take on the monopolies — as Biden most recently did by hiring Lina Kahn to run the FTC — Republicans support lawsuits that postpone the breakups until a Republican president can fire the FTC head, install a corporate toady, and drop the case.

Q. Why do Republicans fight letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, even though every other developed nation does it and Americans typically pay two to ten times more for the same medicines?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the pharmaceutical industry, which has poured hundreds of millions into the party for decades. Big Pharma’s obscene profits depend on Americans paying the highest drug prices in the world, so Republicans consistently oppose any reforms that would let Medicare use its buying power to bring costs down.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose expanding Social Security benefits and protecting the program by lifting the payroll tax cap on billionaires, even though millions of seniors rely on it as their primary income and lifting the cap would make the program solvent for the next 75 years?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from Wall Street, which has long dreamed of privatizing Social Security so giant investment firms can skim management fees from the trillions in the Social Security Trust Fund. Every dollar kept in the public Social Security system is a dollar the financial industry can’t turn into profit.

Q. Why do Republicans battle against universal paid family leave and paid sick leave, even though every other advanced democracy guarantees workers time to care for a newborn, a sick spouse, or themselves and paid sick leave helps prevent the spread of disease?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from low-pay corporate employers who want labor as cheap and disposable as possible. Paid leave shifts a tiny share of corporate wealth back to workers, so the Chamber of Commerce and big business and its political allies pour millions into Republican coffers and campaigns to block it.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage, even though productivity has soared for decades while wages have stagnated and the corporate owners are richer than at any time in world history?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant retail chains, fast-food corporations, and other low-wage employers whose profits depend on paying people less than a living wage. Keeping wages low forces us taxpayers to subsidize their workers through food stamps, Medicaid, and housing aid while their morbidly rich executives pocket the difference.

Q. Why do Republicans fight food assistance programs like SNAP and universal free school lunches, even though childhood hunger damages learning, health, and lifetime earning potential and research proves these programs are among the most efficient anti-poverty investments any government can make?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from billionaires and low-wage corporations that depend on keeping wages so low workers still need public help to feed their families. SNAP and school lunch programs expose the truth that millions of Americans are working full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Rather than force employers to raise wages, Republicans would rather let children go hungry and blame the poor for being poor.

Q. Why do Republicans fight stronger gun safety laws supported by large majorities of Americans, even including things as anodyne as universal background checks and red-flag laws?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA, which make fortunes every time a new round of Republican-pushed fear drives firearm sales. Dead children in classrooms are the tragic collateral damage to this business model built on lies about the Second Amendment and political bribery.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose cracking down on tax havens and making billionaires pay what they owe, even though it would reduce deficits, pay down our national debt, and fund schools, roads, and healthcare?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the billionaires, hedge funds, and multinational corporations that bankroll their campaigns. If you add up the tax cuts for the rich by Reagan, Bush, and Trump they equal more than our entire national debt of $38 trillion, meaning all that money — that we pay a trillion dollars a year in interest on that could instead fund a national healthcare system, free college, and an end to homelessness — was borrowed in our name by the GOP to give to the Zuckerbergs, Musks, and Bezos’ of the world.

Q. Why do Republicans so frequently use hate and fear — from Willy Horton to Trump’s anti-trans ads to hysteria about bathrooms — to win political campaigns, and why do billionaires and corporations fund such advertising?

A. Because such type of campaigning has such a powerful emotional load it causes people to forget how the GOP has been screwing them for the past half-century.

Thus, we discover that the mystery of modern Republican politics isn’t really a mystery at all.

When a party consistently blocks cheaper medicine, better wages, paid leave, affordable college, clean energy, antitrust enforcement, and healthcare that works, it’s not because those ideas are unpopular or unworkable: it’s because they threaten the obscene profits of the industries and the billionaires writing the checks.

Until we overturn these obscene, corrupt SCOTUS rulings, get big money out of politics, and make Congress answerable to citizens instead of donors, the GOP will remain what it has become since the Reagan Revolution: not a political party with ideas to improve America and working people, but a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporations and billionaires while Americans die young and remain uneducated, underfed, and unhoused.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Don’t Hear You!”

Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:

How the Hate-Industrial Complex Keeps Marching On

None of this possible without the complicity of the 4th Estate. America resembles Orban’s Hungary more than we realize. Indeed the media is the enemy of the people, most def the enemy of democracy, it enabled Trump and he would not be president had it not been for the media and billions of free advertisement, especially now. He dominates the headlines, he dominates the conversation and he is having an orgasm.

~ William Farrar

American capitalism is rigged, repressive, and ruthless. If one does not take the time to learn how it is rigged and actively avoid its many traps, capitalism will indenture you for life, limit your social mobility, and trap you in misery. Capitalism promotes the notion that the more wealth and power you acquire, the happier you will be in life.

~ Tomonthebeach

Read the article | See all comments

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.