Try Not to Laugh, But Republicans Are Calling Themselves Pro-Worker
It sounds farcical, but GOP politicians like Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney are casting themselves as pro-worker. And corporate Democrats are making the fraud more believable by advancing their own weak-tea program.
Senator Marco Rubio and other Republicans want to marry cruel attacks on reproductive rights with modest expansions of the welfare state. (Eva Marie Uzcategui / AFP via Getty Images)
A group of conservative intellectuals and a few sympathetic Republicans in Congress are pushing the GOP to abandon “Reaganomics,” the New York Times reported last week. This cohort, which includes senators Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, Josh Hawley, and J. D. Vance, wants to expand welfare payments to families as “a pragmatic way to prop up conservative values alongside new restrictions on abortion.”
In other words, these conservatives — who have made a habit the past couple years of posturing as “pro-worker” — want to marry cruel attacks on reproductive rights with modest expansions of the welfare state.
There are serious moral objections to this political tack, of course, that anyone even vaguely on the Left should share. As I wrote last July when Rubio first announced his new package of “pro-family” policies:
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