Republicans erupted in loud and sustained protest when President Joe Biden claimed during his Feb. 7 State of the Union (SOTU) address that they planned to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits for the elderly.
“That means if Congress doesn’t vote to keep them, those programs will go away.”
In response, the chamber of the House of Representatives was rocked by Republican senators and congressmen shouting “No!” and “We never said that!”
Biden wants a “clean” debt ceiling hike that would allow the federal government to keep spending trillions of borrowed dollars that will have to be repaid someday and that, even now, cost hundreds of billions of dollars in annual interest payments.
Looming ever closer are the doomsday deadlines. The Medicare Hospital Trust Fund, from which most of the program’s benefits are paid, will become insolvent in five years (2028), and the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Benefit Insurance Trust Fund will reach that point in 11 years (2034) if nothing is changed.
Given the reactions among both Democrats and Republicans since Biden’s SOTU, the prospects for restoring Medicare and Social Security to fiscal health anytime soon are dim. Republicans remain angry at Biden, and Democrats seem determined as ever to keep the untouchable third rail intact.
Republican anger has been heightened since Biden’s address as he and Democratic leaders in Congress launched a drumbeat repetition of claims that the GOP plans to slash the two biggest federal entitlement programs.
But the fact sheet states that “congressional Republicans, however, have a different record.”
“For years, Republican Members of Congress have repeatedly tried to cut Medicare and Social Security, move toward privatizing one or both programs, and raise the Social Security retirement age and Medicare eligibility age,” it reads.
Veteran Democratic strategists told The Epoch Times that leaders of their party have little faith in Republican leaders’ promises.
“I understand what the speaker and [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell (R-Ky.) have said about taking Social Security and Medicare off the table, but no Democrat in their right mind should believe that McCarthy has any control over other members of his caucus that want to slash funding for those programs. Obviously, Senator McConnell is concerned about that as well,” veteran Capitol Hill and Democratic strategist Jim Manley told The Epoch Times.
Manley was communications director for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) before that. He was also a surrogate campaign speaker for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign.
The political reality, according to longtime New York Democratic political strategist David Carlucci, is that “Speaker McCarthy vowing to leave Social Security and Medicare untouched during the debt ceiling process does not mean Republicans won’t look for other opportunities to remove these benefits.”
“Since its inception, calling for the gutting or destruction of Social Security has been a main component of the Republican platform,” Carlucci said. “This will not change with the approval of a new speaker.”
For their part, Republicans’ anger toward Biden for the SOTU remarks continues unabated.
“The Republican response was a resounding ‘no’ because not only was he lying about the economy, jobs, etc. He was dividing America. Totally unacceptable.” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) told The Epoch Times a week after Biden’s address.
Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) described Biden’s comments as “fear-mongering tactics” for which the president “should be ashamed of himself.”
“Listen, Republicans don’t want to cut Social Security and Medicare, but the one person that did was Joe Biden in the 1990s,” he said.
“If Democrats were serious about strengthening and saving either Social Security or Medicare, they would engage in sober-minded reforms of the two programs before they go broke in the next 10 years,” Weber said. “But if they’re not, they can explain to those future seniors why they are stuck with 25 percent across-the-board cuts to their benefits. That is not a conversation that I would be looking forward to.”
In the same vein, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) warned that the United States is “headed for a fiscal reckoning if we don’t begin to curb wasteful federal spending and work toward balancing the budget.”“That is why this debt limit negotiation is so important,” he said.
Good told The Epoch Times: “Any negotiation around the debt limit will not include cuts to Social Security or Medicare for our seniors who depend on them. We can start by cutting ‘woke’ spending from the Biden agenda, rescinding the 87,000 IRS agents, and reverting to pre-COVID spending levels on domestic programs.”
As for McCarthy, the House speaker’s deputy spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, told The Epoch Times on Feb. 21: “The Biden administration has falsely claimed that the border is ‘secure,’ the Afghanistan withdrawal was an ‘extraordinary success,’ and inflation is ‘transitory.’ And now they’re flatly lying about Republicans’ position on Social Security benefits instead of focusing on ways we can lift the debt limit in a responsible way.”
Even if Republicans did succeed in removing the third-rail status of Social Security and Medicare, it would only be binding on the present Congress, a constitutional and political reality pointed out by Heritage Foundation legal analyst Paul Larkin.
“I have to add that because, not only as a matter of law but as a matter of politics, nothing that any Congress does can bind any future Congress,” said Larkin, who’s a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel.
“I think in the short run what the speaker said takes it off but it won’t keep anybody from saying, ‘Oh well, they really mean this; they have this secret goal and so forth.’”
