According to data compiled by Quorum Research, Republicans in Congress have mentioned inflation in 8,158 times in their official tweets, Facebook posts, press releases, in floor speeches, and in email newsletters since January 1st. Which is totally cool since it makes for a potent line of attack. After all, who wants to pay more for the same shit than they did last year?
But when the Reverend Jefferson Davis Goebbels of the Stormfront Baptist Church in Antebellum County, Mississippi says “Send me to Washington to represent you and I’ll take on inflation like I took on that colored boy who looked at me funny at the gas station and got the murder charges dropped by my cousin District Attorney Bobby James Davis Goebbels last July” what is he actually proposing to do for his voters? It’s not like a GOP House majority with a Speaker Kevin McCarthy can unilaterally order gas and food prices to go down – and even if they could it’s not very conservative to implement price controls. It’s more like a Venezuela or Zimbabwe thing.
Yeah, there’s some vague assurance that a GOP House will block future Biden Administration initiatives that would theoretically increase inflation, however isn’t the damage kind of already done? Gas prices ebb and flow, but other consumer goods are probably more or less stuck where they are, owing to corporate greed using “inflation” as cover for increased net profits. There’s nothing wrong with them using so, it’s perfectly natural for voters to want to hold the party in charge responsible for things going badly and for Republican candidates to capitalize on it. Dems did the same in 2008 after the Wall Street clusterfuck and in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic that Trump utterly failed to take seriously. Even if they can’t actually really specifically explain how Biden and Democrats caused inflation to spiral, it would be political malpractice to just let it slide and not use it to amp up their voters to want to make a change.
They’re just not explaining what that change is supposed to look like. Democrats made their pitch in 2018 based on preventing Republicans from gutting Obamacare and holding the Trump Administration accountable for its rampant corruption. They succeeded wildly on the first and did pretty damn good on the second, impeaching the fat bastard in December 2019 which helped seal his fate in November 2020. Can Republicans say the same about inflation? What are they going to do to stop it should they take the House and/or Senate? What does a GOP vote do to arrest or reverse price increases being felt by millions of Americans? Is the answer in Hunter Biden’s laptop?