So the losers in Washington have kept the country from defaulting, as least for a while. What they should have done four months ago is to have passed the debt limit and everything else and then immediately gotten down to fixing that legislation so that it never again gets in the way of running the country.
Every House member who voted to pay the government workers for doing nothing while we were shut down should be impeached, immediately. I have nothing against government workers being paid. In fact no one in the government should have been laid off at all, but to pay them and then to keep them for working for that pay, is to steal that money from the American taxpayer.
This was clearly a move by the Tea Party congressmen to keep from looking like the true scum that they are. I haven’t gotten the figures from reliable sources yet but I have heard the number $54 billion that was lost by the shutdown. It was caused by a bunch of clowns that don’t want to raise taxes to pay for food for starving kids but don’t mind pissing it away so they can get their names in the papers. It’s the great anomaly that the far right wants to cut entitlements while they are throwing away tax dollars, paying government workers to sit on their butts and do nothing.
Boehner, Ryan, Sessions, Cruz and Cantor like to quote the wants of the American people. Right now the only thing the American people want is their heads, on the end of a pointed stick.
It’s really hard to tell what the real reason for this mess was. Most of us just put it up to incompetency and a desire of a few hard liners to have their way against a country that just doesn’t agree with them. If the Republicans really think that they have the backing of more than a tiny segment of the country’s population, all they have to do is look at the polls and the elections. Yes, they did win office, but they did it in small bigoted, backward, districts that had already been gerrymandered for their benefit.
The idea of having a House of Representatives to balance off the Senate was a good one. Both groups are flawed, as far as their true representation goes. The senate, which gives two votes to each state regardless of population is a denial of one man one vote because it obviously gives Rhode Island or North Dakota the same power as it does New York or California, the latter with populations, hundreds of times greater than the former.
The House breaks down its electoral districting into easily redesigned areas whose dimensions are constantly in flow according to the needs of the party in power and its ability and desire to rig the districts to its own benefit. Neither is a fair system.
The Senate was set up, as a placebo to the small states that were afraid that they would be overwhelmed by the larger states. The House was set up as a placebo to the larger states that pointed out the lack of fairness that the makeup of the Senate provided.
The best solution is probably to leave the Senate alone but to change the policy of electing House representatives. I have heard a suggestion that the House members be elected statewide rather than by districts, assigning a certain number of representatives to each state based on population as is now done but instead of electing representatives from individual districts, we should elect the total number of representatives by a statewide vote.
This would kill the practice of gerrymandering but I don’t think it would improve the system. For one thing it would take the idea of local representation out of the House and it would eliminate the possibility of reps who have a popular local following being elected against reps who have big city votes.
I think a fairer method of changing the House vote, and it definitely needs to be changed, is to elect them by already established counties, that cannot be changed, that already have local significance and an established government structure and that give a fairer view of what the local areas want and what it means to represent a specific geographic place rather than a specific group of voters, spread all over then place.
On another note, while everyone seems to think that the GOP lost in this battle, it must also be understood that Obama wasn’t able to get a position established that will endure for any significant time. If someone doesn’t get their head on straight and institute talks we are going to have to go through this whole mess again in three months. That’s insane.
If the GOP had just let the debt limit pass, and then tried to sit down and negotiate over the sequester, which no one wants, maybe they could have gotten something done. If they had ignored trying for the umpteenth time to get rid of the ACA, which they couldn’t, and just signed the debt limit and then tried, as any logical mind would, to fix the many problems with the ACA, maybe they could have gotten somewhere. Maybe they still can, despite their childish, bullying, undemocratic behavior, get somewhere, mainly because there is much in the ACA to fix, just as there is much in the sequester to do away with.
What they can’t do is waste more time and effort, trying to get rid of the ACA. That boat has sailed. It did so on a tidal wave of interested families that swamped the system, revealing its underfunded flaws and its technical shortcomings but proving what the American people really want, an affordable health care system.
Ted Cruz is a liar, a phony and a self promoting sleaze, but he got one thing right. If the far right didn’t stop the ACA at this point it never would and it never will.