After shock comes anger. I don’t think I’ll move on to negotiating – anger seems about right, particularly with the news emanating from President-Elect Trump’s transition team. His closest adviser will be the spiritual leader of one of the alt-right’s most popular web sites, Breitbart, so you know this is going to be a volatile time from the standpoint of those issues Breitbart tends to report on. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, perhaps? That would certainly put black people’s minds at ease. I think Trump may be considering Cap’n Crunch for secretary of the Navy. Sounds like a good pick, though he’s rumored to have a crunchberry problem.
Okay, so what will Trump’s victory mean from a policy standpoint? Well, if he’s anything remotely true to his word, we are likely to see the most reactionary policies ever advance in our lifetimes passed through congress and signed into law. This is not just about Trump – this is about a extremist Republican party that becomes even more virulent every time it returns to power. We had the Reagan-Bush cycle, which was far to the right of anyplace we had gone politically since the Great Depression. Then there was the George W. Bush presidency, shot through with neocons and a decidedly more autocratic approach to governance, powered by the disaster of 9/11. Now: a Republican electoral trifecta – president, senate, and house, all in the hands of an even more reactionary strain of this very destructive party.
What will that look like? Well, we have a pretty good idea. Look at Wisconsin when Blind Scotty Walker took the reins. Look at North Carolina when Pat McCrory was elected (though he may have lost this year, we’ll see). Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Trump will do something very similar – put together a pre-baked raft of reactionary programs into a series of bills, pass them over any objections, and sign them into law in the first few weeks of the ass-clown in chief’s administration. They will also do everything they can to lock in their gains, passing voter i.d. restrictions, confirming ultraconservative justices at various levels, and attacking the remaining institutions of the liberal-left: public sector unions, Planned Parenthood, and so on. That’s what we’re looking at, and judging by Ryan’s various activities over the past year, they are likely to use budget reconciliation on a lot of this legislation. My guess, too, is that the filibuster will be disabled or destroyed quite early on, as well.
So hold tight, people. We are going to have to fight like hell to preserve what ground we can. Elections have consequences, as we will soon see.
bothered to follow the money back from ISIS to their funders in Saudi Arabia, a nation our own John McCain and others have praised to the rafters for funding the Syrian opposition. Once again, we are staring down the barrels of our own guns, scratching our heads in wonder.
What irks me, though, is the legitimization of truly extremist right-wing notions of governance (or lack of same) through what I’m sure NPR and other networks consider “balance coverage”. A brief example: yesterday there was a 
Then, of course, the Austerians came to power in 2011 and set us on the righteous path of Japan in the 1990s – the path we are crawling along today on our bloody hands and knees. Millions are still out of work, millions more under-employed with zero security, many more working their asses off and still needing SNAP benefits, still needing the support of food pantries. These millions of people are now the favored target of the Austerians. If people are in need, surely it’s their fault and not the fault of policymakers who will do anything rather than invest in economic growth. SNAP has grown to $80 billion a year! they exclaim. What’s their solution? Allocate money for, say, public works projects while interest rates are low so that we can repair and replace our aging infrastructure, invest in our future, and create jobs? God, no! Cut SNAP by $40 billion.
The fact is, the minority of House Republicans that make up the “tea party” caucus, led by their Senate mentor Ted Cruz, caused about $20-25 billion in losses to the U.S. economy. Much of this is irretrievable, as it represents lost contract fees, lost purchases by government employees (i.e. lunches, cups of coffee, etc.), and so on. And it was done pointlessly: nothing was accomplished, for good or ill. We could have had the final deal on the first day, but it was never brought to a vote.
size one year ago, the party who rules Washington – the tea party-fueled G.O.P. – has decided to drive us over the cliff once again, only this time it’s about ideological, not budgetary, complaints. We must kill Obamacare (and fulfill a long list of other reactionary desires), or the economy gets it.
IRS Targeting of Tea Party groups. Indefensible action on the part of the IRS. Though for all of those whose hair is on fire over this, it should be noted that all of the groups who applied, I believe, were ultimately given tax exempt status. Recall, too, that the IRS harassed anti war groups during W. Bush’s administration, but that wasn’t the end of it. There was domestic surveillance and infiltration of political organizations on the left. There were mass arrests and beatings. For chrissake, they even had the Defense Intelligence Agency spy on the Thomas Merton Center! Given the degree of governmental dysfunction that’s attributable to the tea party, it is a bit hard for me to get overly worked up. Wrong, yes … but on the scale of wrongs, this is kind of puny.
