But DeSantis is new to the game: Republicans have been hard at work cancelling America for decades now.
When the Democrats put legislation together to rescue America in Biden's first year, every single Republican in both the House and the Senate used every procedural move they could to cancel it (including forcing a public reading of the bill) and, in the end, every single one of them voted to cancel it.
And now they're trying to cancel our memory of their opposition: Senator Roger Wicker was one of dozens of Republicans to tweet out a brag on how the Covid Rescue legislation will help his constituents"even though he trash-talked it and voted to cancel it.
But that's just the beginning.
Republicans have been trying to cancel the minimum wage ever since it was enacted in the 1930s; more recently they've successfully canceled every attempt to increase that wage for well over a decade.
Republicans have done their best to cancel American's health care, from multiple lawsuits going all the way to the Supreme Court to cancel Obamacare, to a dozen Red states, to this day, cancelling Medicaid for their lowest-paid working people.
Along those same lines, Republicans have fought to cancel unions ever since the 1920s. In the 1940s they passed the Taft Hartley Act over President Harry Truman's veto, which gave individual states the right to cancel unions; nearly every Red state in the union has now taken them up on this, crashing union membership in America from about a third of all workers in 1980 to fewer than 6% of the private workforce today.
Republicans have worked hard to cancel educational opportunity for Americans, from elementary school through college. While Republican President Dwight Eisenhower built brand-new schools all across the United States in the 1950s, everything changed when Reagan came into office in 1981.
He appointed Bill "You could abort every Black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down" Bennett as his Education Secretary and you can draw straight line from there to Betsy DeVos trying to cancel public schools all across America and replace them with for-profit private academies.
"Conservatives" have also succeeded, over the time from the 1890s when America first started having public schools to this day, in cancelling any semblance of honest Black history. And now that schools are starting to use the brilliant 1619 work first published by The New York Times, they're trying to cancel that, too.
Republicans have been working since 1980 to cancel a woman's right to choose an abortion, and have even fought, in hundreds of legislative and legal cases, to cancel a woman's right to use birth control.
Republican State Representative Bryan Slayton introduced into the Texas legislature a law laying the death penalty on any woman who gets an abortion; more are on the way in other states, now that 6 Republicans on the Supreme Court have thrown the issues to the states.
Slayton didn't specify whether women should be killed by firing squad, hanging, or lethal injection, but when I asked a Republican candidate at CPAC some years ago which technique should be used to execute women who get an abortion, he simply said, "That's up to the states."
Along those lines, Republicans have been trying to cancel the workplace, political, and social rights of women for a-year-short-of-a-century. The Equal Rights Amendment simply says: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
It was written by Alice Paul in 1923, and finally passed Congress on March 22, 1972, but still had to be ratified by 3/4 of the states. Republicans in state after state fought it for decade after decade until it finally passed that threshold in 2020; Republicans then successfully argued before a federal judge that he must cancel the ERA because, they said, too much time had passed and Congress needs to start all over again.
Republicans have been trying to cancel your right to clean air since the 1970s when the Environmental Protection Agency came into law after Congress ignored Richard Nixon's threatened 1970 veto. Every Republican administration since then has done everything they could to weaken it and six Republicans on the Supreme Court just cancelled their ability to regulate CO2.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
