Keeping America Safe

Republicans are not in favor of it:

People laughed at Jeb Bush for his ludicrous comment in a September debate that his brother “kept us safe” while president. Most snickered that Jeb was ignoring thousands of dead from the September 11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hurricane Katrina. But George W. Bush’s policies of neglect affected far more than that. How many died between 2001 and 2009 from lacking access to medical treatment; from exposure to harmful chemicals or pollution in the atmosphere; from unregulated corporate harm; from persistent, grinding poverty?

This disconnect raises a fundamental issue for Republicans. They profess to believe that the primary responsibility of the president is to keep Americans safe. But they aren’t actually interested in safety. They misalign the risks to Americans and put their energies toward the most remote threats, while ignoring the real threats people face. And Marco Rubio offered the perfect example of this on Monday.

A reporter in Coralville, Iowa, asked the senator to comment on Democratic calls for Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, to resign over his handling of the water crisis in Flint, which has poisoned tens of thousands of Americans. Rubio replied, “I didn’t watch the debate so I have no idea what they said.” The reporter asked him to comment more generally on Flint, where President Obama has declared a state of emergency. “That’s not an issue that right now we’ve been focused on,” Rubio said, sprinkling in some boilerplate about the federal government’s role. “I’d love to give you a better answer on it, it’s just not an issue we’ve been quite frankly fully briefed or apprised of.”

This is a man whose presidential campaign is largely predicated on threats to the homeland from outside. Rubio told Face the Nation that he bought a gun to protect his family from Islamic State militants. But he couldn’t be bothered to bone up on a direct threat to an entire American city from within—the deliberate poisoning of Flint’s water supply.

Let me give Senator Rubio a refresher course. Michigan officials, who commandeered control of Flint’s local government through a disenfranchising emergency-manager process that suspiciously lines up with the main concentrations of African-Americans in the state, decided to temporarily use water from the Flint River for residential consumption while awaiting a new pipeline to Lake Huron. This was done to save money—to balance Flint’s budget, much like the persistent calls from Rubio and his Republican allies with respect to the federal budget.

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