Okay, so it’s over but that doesn’t mean that there’s no ugly residue. Sure the GOP wasted someplace between $24 billion and $54 billion, depending who you listen to, hard earned American taxpayer dollars for no good reason but that’s not all the damage they did. These Banana Republicans made us look like fools
to the rest of the world. Just because they can’t add, read properly or understand basic concepts of government doesn’t mean that they have to show off their deficiencies to the whole planet.
This is the United States and this hunch of barely lucid radicals tried to make the whole country bow to their backward, bigoted desires. For years, comics have been making jokes about inbred redneck morons and here they were trying to take over the government of the United States. And they almost pulled it off. Maybe it’s a good thing we had a crooked Chicago politician (that’s what they like to call him, isn’t it) around to back them down.
Sure, they wasted a ton of money on their childish, petty ploy but even more important is that they wasted time, almost a year, in which the job they were getting paid to do didn’t get done. These dumb slugs are supposed to be running our government. Even to the slowest among us, it is obvious that nothing has been accomplished in the last year due to the ignorant, bratty behavior of a small coterie of backward legislators who simply don’t understand the big picture of why they were sent to Washington in the first place.
Even before the enormous groundswell of information seekers that flooded the exchanges on opening day, it was apparent to all but the most seriously brain dead that the ACA was something that the country wanted. Even if they hadn’t figured it out for themselves that viscous little pack of far right wing nuts should have gotten a clue from the ratings they were getting, even from their own constituents. Nine percent? Rabid raccoons have a higher favorability rating.
But it’s finally over and maybe now, those Republican’s who have always known how to walk and chew gum but have been too cowardly to put these nasty little varmints in a kennel where they belong, will step forward and reclaim the leadership of a party that is desperate for someone who knows how to point the way.
Of course the GOP reveres Ronald Reagan, they haven’t had a functional candidate since he left office. And it keeps getting worse. George HW Bush was a little at sea. His son was a major disaster and what has run since, is either a sight gag or just a sick joke. The seven dwarfs who ran against each other the last time around was a new low in intellectual underachievement. Yeah, Romney wasn’t any fool and Huntsman was actually smart but Huntsman was never even in play and Romney cut his own throat by playing to the lowest common denominator in his party. As soon as he got enough of them to vote in the primary he had already convinced the rest of America that he wasn’t presidential material.
There is a picture that’s floating around of a bunch of Tea Party nuts all gussied up in colonial garb in front of a big Tea Party sign claiming to want to restore Liberty. That’s only one of the problems with the Tea Party. They think we are living in the late 1700’s. Another is that they don’t understand that we have never lost our liberty, a least not the kind to which they refer. They are still free to be bigots. They can still get in the way of a woman dealing with her own body and they have done a hell of a job of interfering with good education. Oh yeah, most any one of them,
regardless of skill level or mental capacity, can still carry a gun.
No matter how you view what is going on in Washington, one fact stands. Congress was elected to govern and you can’t govern if you have shut down the government. This means that the basic reason for congress to exist didn’t, for almost three weeks. So the 60% that has said that we should throw all the bums out; should be 100%.
Every one of these clowns, when questioned, said that we can’t let the government stay closed and that we can’t let the debt ceiling pass unresolved but none of them could come up with any constructive answer to either of these problems.
There is a solution and everyone who can think logically knows what it is. The debt ceiling law is a result of the financial dealings of this country getting to complicated and moving too fast for each transaction to be reviewed by the entirety of congress each time a decision on spending had to be made. This happened in 1917 when congress gave the executive office power over spending but withheld the ultimate spending power of the total budget for themselves. This was a functioning system, because the spending of the country was then dependent on the budget, so congress only had to look at the budget and decide whether or not to pass it. Since then we seem to have gotten ahead of ourselves by passing appropriations bills and other spending before they are voted on so that when we get to a debt crisis as we have a few times recently we find that the money has already been spent or at least contracted for and we have no alternative but to pass the bill or default on what is already contracted for.
The solution which is fair and relatively simple but will meet with great pushback because it will take power out of the hands of a House minority like the one we have now, is to make the passing of a budget the ultimate act by which money can be contracted for or spent. But, you may say, we haven’t passed a budget for years. Sure but that’s only because congress is too lazy and too cowardly to get it done. The only efficient way to run the financial end of our government is to pass a law that states that neither the Senate nor the House can shut down for the year, either fiscal or calendar, until the budget has been passed and signed by the president. You will be shocked to see how fast we get bi-partisan support for reasonable legislation as soon as we keep these lazy clowns from going home for the holidays.
I have never been a big fan of Susan Collins, but she conceived a pretty good piece of legislation that seems to approach the important stuff in the latest deficit argument and has a couple of add-ons that seemed functional but that were rejected out of hand by majority leader Harry Reed. Maybe it was necessary at that point to show the far right that their little war was over, but this is not normally what we need. There is a growing group of women in both houses of congress that seem to be the only ones who can function on any kind of bi-partisan basis. We need them, need to encourage them and more than that, we need to listen to them. We didn’t like the right or Ted Cruz trying to blackmail the Whitehouse on the ACA and we don’t like cranky Harry doing it when he thinks he has the upper hand. So maybe we should turn more power over to these women who seem to understand the word compromise. Who knows, maybe they acquired this skill from years of having to deal with men.