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Tag: suspended actions
Haley Is Out, But Deep Wound In Republican Party Remains Unhealed

Haley Is Out, But Deep Wound In Republican Party Remains Unhealed

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley suspended her campaign on Wednesday, leaving Donald Trump as the last Republican presidential candidate standing. Again.

But as she announced the end of the campaign, Haley did not endorse Trump. “I have always been a conservative Republican and always supported the Republican nominee,” said Haley. Then she cited former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in saying, “Never just follow the crowd. Always make up your own mind.”

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him,” she continued. “And I hope he does that.”

While her departure may mean that Trump can coast through the remaining primaries, it certainly doesn’t mean that the open wound in the Republican Party is going to heal.

A better understanding of how the Haley campaign feels about Trump and Trump supporters might be gleaned from this exchange between Haley’s communications director, Nachama Soloveichik, and Trump supporter Kari Lake, the front-runner for the Republican nomination in Arizona’s Senate race.

Haley’s whole primary campaign was based on the knowledge of the subset of Republican voters who say they won’t vote for Trump in November. Even in Trump’s wins on Super Tuesday, Haley picked up 23 percent of Republican votes in North Carolina, 29 percent in Minnesota, and 35 percent in Virginia, with 95 percent or more of the total vote reported in each state. Those are all states that Trump desperately needs to keep in his win column.

Even in deep-red states like Tennessee and Arkansas, Trump is walking away with less than 80 percent of the vote. That doesn’t mean these states are likely to swing to President Joe Biden in November, but it is a good signal that a significant portion of the GOP is unwilling to hold their nose and go MAGA. It’s fair to read much of the vote Haley has received not as showing their love for the ex-governor, but as showing their distrust of the party’s authoritarian leader.

“I don’t know. I did not vote for Biden the last time,” said one former Republican who bolted from the party in the last year. “I don’t know that I could do it this time. But I don’t know if I could vote for Trump.”

The schism goes both ways. As Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld reported on Tuesday, Trump is engaged in a purge of the Republican Party. He has declared that moderate Republicans are no longer welcome and that Haley supporters are “permanently barred” from joining the MAGA elite.

With Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump set to empty the party’s remaining funds into Trump’s account, and Trump making it clear that there is no party outside of MAGA, those voters who have voted against Trump in the primaries may find there’s no home for them remaining in the Republican Party. Though they may have a home elsewhere.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may have managed a half-hearted endorsement, but former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney can’t bring himself to go even that far.

“I think we agree that we have looked at his behavior, and his behavior suggests that this is a person who will impose his will if he can, on the judicial system[,] on the legislative branch, and on the entire nation,” Romney said on “Meet the Press” in December.

Meanwhile, Trump says the Republican Party is getting rid of the Romneys. “We want to get Romneys and those out,” Trump told the crowd at a Virginia rally recently. Haley responded with a statement that “Trump is actively rejecting people from the Republican Party — a losing strategy in November and a recipe for extinction in the long run.”

We can only hope.

For at least two decades, the Republican Party has become increasingly hostile to anyone who didn’t hold to a very specific set of conservative beliefs. That requirement already cost Republicans the moderates and liberals who used to exist in their party.

The entry of Trump has upended the entire Republican platform, replacing it with the One Commandment: Obey Trump.

The party going to the polls in November is not McConnell’s party, or Romney’s party, or anything that would be recognized by any Republican candidate going back to Abraham Lincoln. It’s a classical authoritarian party, devoted to the rule of just one man—the one who says he’d beat Lincoln even if the 16th president teamed up with George Washington.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s cultish followers are enthusiastic to see their golden calf perched back on his altar, and Republican dissidents may wander home before November. But right now, the Republican Party appears to be split between those who want to see democracy only weakened and those who want to see it completely stripped away.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Social Security’s Misunderstood Suspense File

Q: I recently heard a news report that said Social Security has several billion dollars in something called a suspense file. It has something to do with the taxes collected on fraudulent Social Security numbers. The report said this money is just sitting there, not earning interest and not being used for any constructive purpose. If this is true, it’s no wonder our government has such financial problems when there are large pools of unaccounted-for cash like this just lying around. Can you shed any light on this?

A: Ah, yes, the infamous “suspense file.” When I was the deputy press officer for the Social Security Administration, I don’t think a day went by when I didn’t field a call from a reporter somewhere in the country asking me about this alleged pile of cash supposedly lying around in some Social Security safe or other government vault.

But there is no pile of cash. There are no unaccounted-for and mismanaged funds that, once found, would miraculously solve all of Social Security financial woes. Here’s the real story.

Every single day, thousands of wage reports from employers representing millions of workers around the country trickle in to the Social Security Administration. (I guess since we’re talking numbers like thousands and millions, “trickle” is the wrong word. How about “flood?”) The reports contain the names, Social Security numbers, and earnings of anyone working at a job covered by Social Security. And it’s important to note that these files are just the wage reports needed to maintain Social Security’s earnings records for all Social Security number holders. The actual money withheld in Social Security taxes takes a completely separate path and goes directly to the Treasury Department.

In almost all cases, the name and Social Security number on the employer’s earnings report sent to SSA match a name and Social Security number in the agency’s records. So the Social Security records for all those folks get updated immediately. But in a relatively small percentage of the cases (the last I heard, it’s about 5 percent), the information supplied by the employer doesn’t match the information in Social Security’s files.

Many times, this is merely a problem of a transposed digit in a Social Security number on the employer’s report. Other times, it’s a simple name issue. For example, the employer’s report might show an employee named T. Robert Margenau, but SSA’s records show the name as Thomas R. Margenau. SSA’s computer software programs have “tolerances” built into them that recognize these easily explained discrepancies and post the earnings to the proper record.

But if the problem cannot be simply identified and readily fixed, then we have what SSA calls an “earnings discrepancy” case. The actions necessary to assign the earnings in question to the proper Social Security number account are temporarily suspended. Thus the term “suspense file” for all the earnings reports that have not yet been assigned to the proper Social Security number.

Many of the cases that go into the suspense file don’t remain there for very long. SSA works with the employer who submitted the report and/or with the employee in question to resolve the problem.

But in some cases, the problem can never be resolved. Many times, this is because there was some fraudulent activity involving a fake Social Security number or maybe someone using a deceased person’s Social Security number. Lots of these earnings reports remain in that suspense file for years and years.

And even though the percentage of such unresolved cases is very small, over decades, the numbers just keep adding up. And that is why today, there are about $300 billion in unrecorded earnings reports in the suspense file.

But please bear in mind that does not mean that $300 billion in cash is just lying around because no one knows what to do with it. Once again, the money collected in taxes, including the taxes collected in these earnings discrepancy cases, went directly from the employer to the Treasury Department and was used to finance Social Security checks sent out to all of the program’s beneficiaries. The only records sitting in the infamous suspense file are paper reports of earnings still waiting to be assigned to a proper Social Security number.

If you ask me, one way to help resolve this problem is to issue everyone a Social Security card that’s a full-fledged identity card — something with a picture and maybe some form of biometric identification. But that’ll never happen because folks on both sides of the political spectrum dislike the idea. Conservatives hate it because it would be one more example of big-brother government intruding into their lives. And liberals dislike the idea because it would take away from our civil liberties.

And so the suspense file will just keep growing and growing.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has the answer. Contact him at thomas.margenau@comcast.net. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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