Sen. Joni Ernst helps GOP find its authentic voice: 'We all are going to die.' | Opinion
It might sound a bit goth, but she ain’t wrong. And it seems, in the face of brutal cuts to virtually everything that helps people who aren’t rich, like as good an excuse as any.
Republicans nationwide should applaud Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa for giving the public one simple, honest sentence that authentically defines the Republican Party and all it is trying to achieve: “We all are going to die.”
Spot on, Sen. Ernst! Whether it's robbing low-income Americans of food and health care or pulling funding from U.S. foreign-aid programs that literally keep impoverished people around the world alive, the GOP under President Donald Trump has seemed dead set on … well … death.
But Republicans couldn’t quite seem to give voice to their suffering-first agenda.
Sen. Joni Ernst reminds constituents they're all going to die anyway
Ernst herself, during a May 30 town hall, was asked about the fact that the giant Republican tax-cuts-for-rich-people bill now in the hands of U.S. senators will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, slash $723 billion from Medicaid over the next 10 years and leave nearly 8 million Americans uninsured.
And the U.S. senator stumbled around a bit, saying: “We know the House has their provisions for Medicaid, and I actually agree with most of their provisions. Everyone says that Medicaid is being cut, people are going to see their benefits cut. That’s not true.”
At one point, someone during the town hall accurately shouted, “People are going to die!
Republican Party should embrace new slogan: 'We all are going to die'
And THAT was the moment it all seemed to come together for Ernst and, by association, the Republican Party as a whole. That was when the senator summoned the courage to flatly say: “Well, we all are going to die.”
It might sound a bit goth, but she ain’t wrong. And it seems, in the face of brutal cuts to virtually everything in the U.S. government that helps people who aren’t rich, like as good an excuse as any.
“We all are going to die” is punchy. It’s deflating, in a way that will surely tickle spirits as GOP leaders try to get Americans to sit back and tolerate the cruel and draconian cuts Republican lawmakers and self-appointed government-spending slicer Elon Musk have championed.
GOP bill includes 'policies that would harm the health of children'
It’s a swift and simple response to people like Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who said in a statement that the GOP tax-cut bill that was recently passed in the U.S. House “includes sweeping policies that would harm the health of children and families.”
Kressly said: “Cuts to lifeline programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would be devastating to the children and families who rely on them for access to health care and the food they need.”
Thanks to Ernst, any Republican confronted by worry-wart pediatricians who “care” about the “health” of “children” could respond with a snappy: “Hey, doc. We all are going to die. What are ya gonna do?”
USAID cuts have likely led to tens of thousands of deaths
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reported May 30 on the Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, writing, "The administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year.”
The GOP’s response to such unconscionable news, thanks to Ernst’s ingenuity, can now be a casual, “Whelp, we all are going to die.”
I encourage everyone, and particularly conservatives, to embrace the Republican Party’s forthright, optimistic-if-you're-into-nihilism new slogan for America: “WE ALL ARE GOING TO DIE.”
Dark? Yes. Increasingly accurate thanks to the Trump administration? Definitely.
Follow Paste BN columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk