Not sure whether or not the government will have been shut down by cartoon pirates by the time you read this, but there’s a fair chance of it. It never ceases to amaze me how deeply insane our national legislature can become when there are no effective checks placed upon it. And trust me, there are no effective checks. We have a bicameral legislature in a federal system that divides power into three branches. With respect to initially passing legislation, really only two of those branches are relevant; the Democrats control the executive branch and the upper house of the legislative branch, the Republicans the lower house of the legislature. So who calls the shots? The Republicans, of course, by default.
Boehner started negotiations on the current fiscal year budget with a demand for $30 billion or so in cuts. The Democrats have acceded to that and then some. So now, naturally, Boehner’s caucus wants $60 
billion in cuts, plus the passage of a bunch of extreme right riders that defund the EPA, banish Planned Parenthood from any federal support whatsoever, and so on. This is what you get when you give them what they want. Like any good blackmailer, they always want more. Democrats should have bitten the bullet during the lame duck and passed a reasonable spending resolution before the log went into the spokes. But there was a lack of spine then, and it’s still lacking now.
Does anyone in America remember the 2010 election? Is it just my imagination, or did these tea-party and mainstream Republicans ride around the country promising that they were going to focus like a laser beam on fiscal issues and on the mutually-exclusive values of job creation and deficit elimination? Bad as that was, I believe people expected to get that. What they didn’t expect, for example, was an all-out vendetta against Planned Parenthood, which provides vital health services – most notably cervical cancer screenings, breast exams, etc. – to women in poor communities all across the country. None of the federal funds sent to Planned Parenthood cover abortion. (That’s the product of a far earlier Democratic cave, frankly.) To reprise Keith Olbermann – Mr. Boehner, where are the jobs?
As with Scott Walker, John Kasich, and other new G.O.P. governors, Boehner and company’s legislative agenda – contrary to what they claim – has little to do with balancing budgets and everything to do with scoring political points with their deluded, misogynistic, crypto-racist electoral base – essentially, the five psychos you see planted outside the local PP clinic every freaking day. There’s no point in trying to please them.
luv u,
jp
One wishes that were the full extent of the madness – just the Keystone Cop-like clumsiness – but it goes much deeper than that. The corporations that poured money into this last campaign will be getting just what they paid for: a legislature devoted to ensuring full federal compliance with their legislative and regulatory priorities. They got some love from the 111th Congress, to be sure, particularly in light of what has happened to the economy and the environment over the past two years, but this is a prize of an entirely different order of magnitude. This is a paid-for House, pure and simple.
Of course, that spending package worked by all measures… but only so well, as tax cuts have always been a pretty poor method for stimulating the economy. The G.O.P. then tag the dems with the “failed stimulus”, even though its lack of broader effectiveness was largely due to their stonewalling. Now the voters, in their understandable anger at this failure, have put the Dems out and, by extension, House Republicans back in charge, so any correction of this is extremely unlikely. So… it looks like we’re headed for Japan in the 1990s – a zombie economy, staggering along for the next decade, suffering from our unwillingness to take bold action. The deficit hawks have gained the upper hand for the nonce, and that is not good news for the rest of us.
It would be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I have voted for (and even volunteered for) Michael Arcuri (D-NY) in the past. That is not because of any deep or enduring loyalty towards the candidate; again, I vote strategically. His election means one less vote for Boehner and the crew. (Remember: When you stay home, you ride with Boehner). But I have to say, his ads are as childish as those of his opponent. In fact, some of them seem calculated to alienate the most hard-core of Democratic party constituencies – those traditional left anti-war folks who hold their noses every two years to vote for the lesser of two evils. Arcuri’s got an ad out accusing his opponent of supporting a group that will “cut defense spending in half”. Like that would be a bad thing.
excuse, too – the bad economy. And yet the boss seems to be doing really well. Buys him/herself a new car, lives the good life, seems well-fed enough. Built into this dynamic is the knowledge that jobs are scarce, and that you can be replaced any day. It’s a businessman’s paradise, I tell you. Bosses’ nirvana.
The triumph of Joe Arpaio. So now if you’re driving while dark in Arizona (or wearing the wrong limos), expect to be carded in a very serious way. Like… show me your birth certificate. (Note to Obama – don’t go there. Something tells me they won’t accept yours as valid.)
principle behind this choice – for example, the fact that the bill is flawed, that it gives too much to the insurance companies, that it doesn’t have a strong public option, that it is not a single payer plan, etc. But his reasoning appears to be based solely on political calculus. He’s reading the polling, and it’s showing a large majority of his district turning against the bill. Now, this isn’t too surprising, since the airwaves have been flooded with attack ads over the past month in particular, many sponsored by the national Chamber of Commerce (the folks who helped bring you our lack of a national health insurance plan in the first place). And, of course, they’ve stripped out some of the most popular aspects of the original plan in an attempt to please people who would never vote for the legislation in any form.
Mike’s take on this as that it should be done incrementally. Note to Congressman Arcuri: this is doing it incrementally. It would be a mistake to think of this bill as the last word on national health care. It is merely a stake in the ground, establishing the principle of a national system. Yeah, I think it’s a mess, and I’ve said so. It excludes far too many people. It preserves the profits of large sectors of our money-obsessed health care delivery system. It lacks the virtue of a public option for people who simply cannot get a decent plan in the private market. But the alternative is the wild west system (or lack of same) we have now. That is clearly unsustainable. Voting against an admittedly imperfect solution simply to please people like Don Jeror and other “tea party” basket cases is farcical, at best.