Eliot Collins, an AFP reader from Raritan Borough, N.J., sent an email in response to our story on our MAGA congressman, Ben Cline, voting for deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that got me fired up.
Here was Collins on the topic:
“Ben Cline didn’t get elected because millionaires and billionaires voted for him. There aren’t that many in the Sixth District. He got elected because people like those who work at Target and Walmart voted for him and Trump. If these MAGA voters lose their Medicaid, then it serves them right.”
ICYMI
Yeah, I’m going to be a hard disagree there.
One: yes, indeed, Cline won here by a landslide, with 63.1 percent of the vote in the election that we just held six months ago, and Donald Trump won our Sixth District with 61.1 percent of the vote.
Right there, that suggests that between 36.9 percent and 38.9 percent have basic common sense and the ability to discern between right and wrong.
We’re talking 250,000 people in that group who don’t deserve what we’re getting now – the $1.2 trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, $300 billion more in cuts to SNAP, in addition to the stunning lack of respect for the rule of law demonstrated by the pardons of the J6ers, the corrupt Culpeper County sheriff, the reality-TV frauds that Trump just set free today.
A quarter-million of us out here in the boondocks didn’t vote for the Banana Republicans, so, that’s number one.
Number two: a big number from that 500,000 of us who supported this nonsense six months ago are about to have the FO phase of the FAFO conundrum hit them square upside the head.
Sixty percent of Americans are one $500 car-repair bill or $1,000 medical bill away from going broke, and I would suspect the percentages are higher than 60 percent in the Sixth District, just because our median household income out here is 20 percent under the state average.
A lot of the MAGA voters that I know here vote MAGA not because they want to give millionaires and billionaires bigger tax breaks and want the federal government to take away their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the rest, but because they’ve let themselves be convinced that the Second Amendment, DEI, trans kids in the wrong school bathroom and whatever they take “woke” to mean are the bigger issues.
Not excusing them for not knowing any better at all here, but I can’t buy into the, well, you wanted other people to get hurt, just because you didn’t realize it was going to get you, too, too bad for you, you reap what you sow.
I’ve been battling Democratic Party leaders in Richmond and DC for two decades to get them to try to see past their natural tendency to look down their noses at us out here, to crickets.
We have to work harder to provide a viable alternative out my way.
I get it – Augusta County is red, the Shenandoah Valley, up and down the I-81 corridor, red.
People out here deserve better than to be told, well, the Republicans that you folks always vote for don’t care about you, serves you right.
We need to fight!
Three, anybody who thinks, the poor dumb hicks voted themselves into oblivion, no skin off my nose, you don’t get how interconnected everything is.
For me, living in a decent-sized small-metro area (the population of Augusta County-Staunton-Waynesboro is roughly 130,000), we’ll probably be OK with our local hospital when the Medicare and Medicaid money slows to a trickle.
But our neighbors down the I-81 corridor between here and Roanoke, and then between Roanoke and Bristol, I worry about them.
The folks over on the 29 corridor in between the Northern Virginia exurbs, Charlottesville, Lynchburg and Danville, worry about them.
Southside Virginia, down below Richmond, edging Hampton Roads.
People in those areas aren’t going to suddenly stop getting sick when their hospitals close.
This penny-foolish and pound-infinitely-more foolish policy push from the MAGAs is going to end up costing us all more in the end.
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Chris Graham
