Today's Reading - We Would Label Them "Sociopaths"

Linda Greenhouse has some advice for the "Justices" who agreed to hear King v. Burwell, which aims to gut Obamacare's (the Affordable Care Act) subsidies and thus end affordable health insurance for tens of millions of Americans:

I have no doubt that the justices who cast the necessary votes to add King v. Burwell to the court’s docket were happy to help themselves to a second chance to do what they couldn’t quite pull off three years ago. To those justices, I offer the same advice I give my despairing friends: Read the briefs. If you do, and you proceed to destroy the Affordable Care Act nonetheless, you will have a great deal of explaining to do — not to me, but to history.

Greenhouse believes, rightly, that some on the Court have led it into a partisan, not legal, battle.  We know who they are: the five Republican "Justices" on the Supreme Court who call themselves Roman Catholic.  So far their "faith" hasn't impelled at least four of them to come down on the side of justice and mercy on any number of cases.  Maybe if they can't be bothered to read the briefs, maybe they could read  Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching, especially the "Option for the Poor and Vulnerable."

Both Harold Meyerson and E.J. Dionne, Jr., take on Republican "big ideas man" Rep. Paul "Lyin'" Ryan's (Koch-WI) labeling President Obama's budget as practicing "envy economics."  Here's a taste of Meyerson's snarky rejoinder:

“Envy economics” — that’s how Paul Ryan (Wis.), the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, characterized the budget that President Obama submitted to Congress on Monday. 

I suppose he has a point. 

Who among us, for instance, doesn’t envy the ability of our most profitable corporations, such as Apple, to cut their taxes by shifting profits to low-tax Ireland, even though, in Apple’s case, the company doesn’t really do much business in Ireland? Obama’s budget would exploit this envy by requiring U.S. corporations to pay a 14 percent tax on the money they’ve stashed overseas to avoid paying the taxes that U.S. workers — willing but unable to pretend they’re Irish — are compelled to pay.

Dionne, in turn, labels Ryan's approach (and that of the Republican/ New Confederate/Stupid Party):

Ryan’s label invites a comparable description of his own approach, which would slash taxes on the rich while cutting programs for the poor and many middle-income Americans. If Ryan wants to play the branding game, is it unfair to ask him why “greed economics” isn’t an appropriate tag for his own approach? 

While we're talking Catholic social teaching, perhaps Lyin' Ryan, who's already been called out by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for previous mean-spirited budgets, could profit from reading the Catholic Social Teachings as well.  There's great stuff in there about the dignity of work and the rights of workers.

Try to read all the articles -- their common denominator is showing what a hypocritical, selfish, greedy, spiteful, inhumane collection of sociopaths we have in the right wing of American politics.