begin quote from:
Sanders says GOP should be worried about 2018
Opinion: Brace yourself, Republicans -- a rough ride's coming
Bernie Sanders: GOP should 'worry very much about 2018'
Story highlights
- "What you are seeing is a referendum on Donald Trump," Sanders said
- Sanders said Trump campaigned on helping the working class, but in office was delivering for the wealthy
(CNN)Voters'
views of President Donald Trump's performance should spell trouble for
his party in the midterm elections, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie
Sanders said on CNN's "State of the Union."
"What
we're seeing in Alabama, what we're seeing in Virginia, New Jersey and
in states all across this country, are large voter turnouts, are people
standing up and fighting back and demanding that we have a government
that represents all of us, not just the 1%," Sanders told CNN's Jake
Tapper in an interview that aired Sunday.
He continued, "If I were the Republicans, I would worry very much about 2018."
Sanders
pointed to the recent special election in the heavily Republican state
of Alabama, where Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore. He
said Moore was "not a strong candidate," but contended the election was
evidence that more people were "catching on" that Trump lied about his
campaign promises.
"He ran for
president saying that he was going to defend the interests of the
working class and the middle class, and it turned out he lied," Sanders
said. "What you are seeing is a referendum on Donald Trump about a man
who said one thing during the campaign and his actions are very, very
different."
In
the wide-ranging interview, Sanders blasted the GOP's new tax reform
law as skewed in favor of the wealthy and large corporations and said he
continued to demand a permanent fix for the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals program, which Congress did not address before it adjourned for the holidays.
Sanders
said the tax cuts for the middle class are "very good," but asserted
that Congress should have made those tax breaks permanent instead of
leaving them up to a future Congress to extend.
"What
the Republicans did is made the tax breaks for corporations permanent,
the tax breaks for the middle class temporary," Sanders said.
To underscore his point, Sanders cited an analysis
from the Tax Policy Center that said the highest earners stood to gain
larger cuts, and said the corporate tax cut would not generally
translate to gains for workers, but instead to increased benefits for
executives.
"This situation makes a
bad situation worse," Sanders said. "Many large corporations are going
to use their tax breaks to make CEOs wealthier and do very little for
workers."
Sanders also bemoaned the
projected increase to the deficit from the tax reform package and said
the Republicans would use this deficit increase to argue for cuts to
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, referencing comments from House
Speaker Paul Ryan that the GOP in the coming year would look to reform
entitlement programs.
He also said
it was incumbent on Congress to focus on passing legislation to create a
pathway to citizenship for people brought to this country illegally as
children who were previously eligible for protection under DACA.
"As
a result of Trump's effort, or successful effort, to repeal DACA, their
legal status is now in doubt," Sanders said. "If we do not act, you're
going to have 800,000 people with no legal status who will be subject to
deportation, thrown out of the only country they have ever known. This
is a moral outrage."
The Trump administration in September said it believed
the Obama-era program was unconstitutional and gave Congress until
March to create a permanent fix. Congressional Democrats initially said
they would demand protection for the "Dreamers" during negotiations to
fund the government past mid-December, but as the deadline approached,
Democratic leadership agreed to fund the government without the fix.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last Wednesday the Senate would hold a vote on immigration legislation in January if lawmakers could reach a deal in time.
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