Politics should stop being politics

Obama: Congress should stop bickering

The President thinks that the Republicans and Democrats should stop fighting and arguing over how the federal government spends its money. They should stop “manufacturing” crises and stop being “out of touch” with the American people.

TIME OUT!

Mr. President, what world are you living on, because it sure ain’t the same one the rest of America lives on.

Sorry, but the Republicans and the Democrats pretty much are doing what they are supposed to do: Represent the interests of the people who sent them there. Now that does not mean everybody in their district or state, but the people who voted and supported them. That, Mr. President, is how a representative democracy works. You don’t like that, then move to a different universe.

I know that I am a voice in the wilderness here, but, people, we have to understand that the US does not speak with one voice. It never has and it never will. Currently there are more that 310 million of us, each with our own mind and our own view of how things ought to be. Neither of the major political parties represents the view of the majority of Americans – especially on every issue. That is what makes politics politics.

Mr. President, you want Congress to pass a budget? Then call Harry Reid over in the Senate and tell him to pass the next budget bill that comes over from the House as is. Don’t play around with it, just pass it. And then you sign it. But, you and I know that isn’t going to happen.

And it hasn’t happened since the Republicans became the majority in the House. Every year, since 2009, the House dutifully passes the various and sundry authorizations and appropriations bills (like some 26 of them each year) and every year during that time the Senate has piddled and diddle and not one thing has it resolved. Why? Because the Democrats won’t accept what the Republicans have passed.

Every year, the Congress ends up passing a “continuing resolution” that, I guess, now extends all the way back to 2009 (it actually doesn’t but that is a different story). As Pappy used to say: That is one heck (he WAS a gentleman after all) of a way to run a railroad.

All continuing resolutions do is kick the can down the road to be dealt with again whenever it runs out.

So, the problem has not been in the House. It has been doing its job all along. And the problem is not with the Senate Republicans; they are just standing by what their House brethren have sent over. No, the problem lies on the other side of the aisle.

Now, I will guarantee you that you will not see it reported that way because it does not fit the establishment narrative of the problem.

I saw this back in 1994 when the GOP first took the House after being the minority party for more than 40 years. The establishment media was in a quandary. Over 40 years the reporters and pundits had established where they could go to get information and where the levers of power were. In an election, all that was washed away and it upset them. No longer could they go to the “usual suspects” and get the low-down on what was going on the backrooms and the cloakrooms of Capitol Hill. For a reporter who has spent years developing news source relationships, that is a very disconcerting feeling.

The new folks in power on the Hill, a bit chary of those who had developed such deep relations with their opponents, were less than welcoming to the established reporter and pundit class. So the feeling became mutual and the media bias grew to a deeper chasm.

Now, Mr. President, I know that neither you, nor any of your staff, or anyone else of note or power will read my ramblings (well, maybe someone at the NSA who is bored to death might), but please quit blaming others for your own lack of leadership.

The budgetary train wreck, the health care train wreck, the foreign policy train wreck, they are all your responsibility. Don’t slough them off on your minions. Don’t ask your co-equals in government (the ones who are to set the polices and priorities that you are to execute with the resources they give you) to do things that you apparently are unwilling to do.

Compromise is a two-way street and Congress is a co-equal with the Presidency (as is the Supreme Court). That is how the American republic was designed and how it is supposed to work. (Not by executive order and writ, as you just demonstrated with the setting up of new panels, etc., to sidestep the role of the uncooperative Congress – AND that is yet another rambling I will not digress into)

Nuff Said. Have a nice day. 

Who is blocking the solution to shutdown, debt limit?

Senate Democrats block progress on debt limit, shutdown

Reid nixes bipartisan compromise in Senate

The folks over the Huffington Post are all happy because the people they like in the Senate are all over throwing various compromise solutions back in the faces of the Republicans if they offer any.

 

NO SURRENDER! NO RETREAT!

 

I think the American people deserve a little bit better than this, but I understand the sentiment and it is a two-way street. However, having said that, it seems egregious to me that the Majority Leader in the Senate, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, rejected a compromise proposal by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, that had the support of at least six Democrats. Not enough to invoke cloture (should someone decide to filibuster it), but enough to pass the bill if all the Republicans bought into the measure.

So, the narrative remains that it all the Republicans’ fault. I am sorry, but that meme doesn’t fly anymore. This has become a situation where the progressives/liberals are saying “We won the White House. We still control the Senate. It don’t matter what the House says, especially since it is controlled by the opposition. What we want goes, period. End of sentence. End of story. And if you don’t like that you are a hostage-taking, kidnapping, baby-killing, ransom-demanding, terrorist bomber.”

If it were left to me, and I was the only one whose vote mattered, I would start with serious clearing out of the halls of Congress in November 2014 (if not sooner in those states where recall elections are permitted) and I would start with the liberals and progressives, and probably would continue on down to all the elected folks, and then start on the career staff that man all the policy-affecting offices in the congress members’ offices. Now, that is not going to happen, but it is what I would do.

Of course, there is little I could or would do with the blatant partisanship among the various news gathering and news disseminating organizations, other than call them on the fact that they are not fair and balanced, especially the ones in the broadcasting field but also including those in the traditional print media.

Sorry, but label what passes for journalism now as what it is: in the traditional sense of it, we are living again in the heyday of new era of Yellow Journalism.

Wikipedia's defines "Yellow Journalism"

Now, if you don’t know about Yellow Journalism, you need to go back a little more than a century or so, and look at the way the news was covered by the “majors” … not a pretty sight.

The “objective journalism” standard never really has been the norm, but for a brief shining period there in the 1950s and 1960s (and maybe into the 1970s and early 1980s) it was something that mainstream journalists professed as their goal. Not that they even came close, but it was the dream of a lot journalists that trained in that era.

So, I think it is time for us to let go of that illusion and realize that is not the case. Time to realize that everyone has a point of view and to them, it is fair and balanced and everyone else’s is prejudiced.

However, I would like to disabuse those who say that the House has no right to defund programs it doesn’t like. Sorry, but that dog don’t hunt. You may not like it, but the same thing was tried when the Iraq War went south. Remember the people who voted for the war before they voted against it? If you don’t remember that issue, then you need to have your memory checked because it wasn’t that long ago.

And just because some law has passed Congress, and has been upheld by the Supreme Court, does not mean that law is engraved in stone … and unless it is an amendment to the Constitution, it is not necessarily the supreme law of the land. Federal statutes do take precedence over state law, but that does not equal constitutional status.

If it were the case, then little things like the Fugitive Slave Act and the Volstead Act would still be the law of the land. Or Plessey v. Ferguson would still be in effect. Nope, laws can be changed. Courts can change their opinion on what is constitutional and what is not.

Even if it is a law, Congress (especially in the case of the House) has the prerogative to vote against providing any funds to enforce or put any law into effect. Heck, it has been underfunding immigration enforcement for years.

I really would hope, however, that more people would look at the situation unfolding in Washington, D.C., and recognize that despite the repetition of the canard that it all is the fault of the party that controls the House of Representatives, the fault for this mess does indeed lie elsewhere.

To me, the answer is obvious beyond debate.

Nuff said.

New Narrative: GOP moves goal posts

CNN: GOP changes demands to resolve impasse

I love politics … because it is so predictable … at least in the US.

Ok, to be out front – the way I see it – the shutdown could be ended today if the SENATE would pass the funding resolutions in its current hopper.

That won’t happen because the SENATE is holding out for one big omnibus continuing resolution to fund ALL government operations. It is either the omnibus spending bill or no bill – the so-called “clean CR” – according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and President Barack Obama.

However, I am seeing others starting to pick up on the point of view that what the House of Representatives is doing is IN FACT just what those silly dead white men 225 years ago wanted it to do in cases like this when they wrote the U.S. Constitution. This is exactly what those evil “framers” or “founders” of our government expected and wanted the House to do. It is performing its role as a check on the Senate and the Executive Branch (the president) by exercising its power over the purse.

Now, there are those, mainly progressives, who see this as a bad thing (although they were busy trying to defund military operations in Iraq just a few years ago), but it really is what people like James Madison and the others who sweated the summer of 1787 out in Philadelphia to contrive a more perfect union meant to happen.

What those less than three-score of gentlemen did really is quite remarkable, when  you look at the diversity (yes, Virginia, they were a diverse cultural lot) of the group and the interests that they represented.

It indeed was a grand compromise, that no one went home 100 percent satisfied with the result (the biggest rift was over the institution of slavery), but it still put in place a formula for governance that pretty well stood the test of time … until we all got complacent about it and for reasons discussed very well by the guru at Strafor (George Friedman) we have let ideologues grab the wheels of power.

(The roots of how we got here)

Still and yet, the government is functioning pretty much within normal designed operating parameters – despite the rather bizarre rhetoric and talking points being distributed by the leadership of the Democrat Party and its supporters.

As I told one person today, it ain’t time to man the barricades just yet.  Her concerns are well grounded, I told her, and not all people are quite as tolerant and generous as she might be but while we may be in the latter stages of the infamous “Cycle of Democracy”, there always is hope. Hope does spring eternal, despite what we might think in moments of despair as we watch/hear/read the news each day from various sources competing to get us to accept their view of world affairs.

That most of them – at least all those people who talk at us via the TV and Internet these days as well as those who we have elected to lead the government - really are being disingenuous (being charitable here) is most distressing and, as Pappy used to say, you just want to knock some heads together to knock some sense in them.

Does it not seem strange that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can get a chunk of money (some $445 million) while the $100,000 that supposedly goes to the survivors of American service members killed in the line of duty (roughly two dozen since Oct. 1, including four killed in action in Afghanistan) has been suspended because the government can’t afford it?

Or how about a rally on the National Mall by supporters of amnesty for people who have entered the United States without the proper documentation or have overstayed the visits they said they were going to have when groups of aged veterans from World War II are denied access to the open-air memorial on the same mall and threatened with arrest if they come back?

How about people being denied access to their privately owned homes and businesses that happen to have ended up on property owned by the federal government in the creation of various national parks?

Or the National Institutes of Health enrolling a half-dozen or so sick children in special treatment programs even though they have been forbidden to do so by the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office Building next to the White House?

If that does not sound to you like misplaced priorities, then I would question whether you should reexamine those priorities. I definitely think there is some serious misrepresentation of issues going on here.

And no, the federal government is not going to default on its debt payments, unless someone in the executive branch really screws things up.

A) Under existing funding legislation (and that already passed by the House) funds are available to pay the interest on the national debt … hence, no need for a default because that is what is required. It is when you don’t make those payments that you default. It is a bit like paying your mortgage (even in the worst of times, if all you can do is pay the interest portion, the lender probably will not give you too much of a bad time).

B) The federal government does not need to raise the debt ceiling in order to make these payments, because it takes in enough money in taxes, tariffs, duties, etc., to cover the interest due along with a whole bunch of other things.

The debt ceiling debate is sort of like arguing over which credit cards you are going to try to pay this month, with one side let’s just raise the credit limit and the other side saying that it might be a good idea to start cut back on how much we are spending.

Unfortunately, what we are being treated to daily by those we have hired to run our government is a whole lot less than the truth and a whole lot of stuff to try to scare us into demanding that one political party’s viewpoint is the only acceptable one.

I don’t think so.

But that is enough of my random thoughts for this go around.

Nuff said.

Abdication of responsibility

Reid tells Obama not to wait for Congressional OK to raise debt

Did I miss something, or has the Senate been out to lunch for a few years now.

Ok, Congress is split between the Republicans holding the House and the Democrats controlling the Senate. It has been a recipe for gridlock (which really isn’t all bad) but it supposed to be a recipe for compromise. Unfortunately, it seems, under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, compromise with the House is beneath the Senate under his watch.

Note that the Senate has not passed an actual budget in more than three years, and now Reid is telling the president that he can raise the congressionally mandated debt ceiling by executive fiat and to ignore those idiots in the House who are demanding some cuts to federal expenditures as the price for raising the debt ceiling.

It matters not that the federal government already owes $15 trillion (yes, that is TRILLION as in 15,000,000,000,000 – yeah … with 12 zeros). It will run into a problem, because it is borrowing about 40 cents of every dollar it spends these days. Of course, it is all in the name of stimulating the economy.

However, it is Congress, not the Executive Branch, which controls the federal government’s purse strings according to that document nobody seems to want to remember these days called the Constitution. You know the basic law and charter that underpins who does what in the federal government and what the federal government can and cannot do. Yeah, that obscure document.

Well, it seems to me that Sen. Reid and his cohorts have pretty much punted and have abdicated their responsibility for the last three years. Now, it seems they want to give up even more responsibility to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

You know, just how modern American is that. Nobody seems to what to take responsibility for what they are supposed to do, society-wide, it seems. Okay, I am being a bit harsh on a goodly chunk of Americans, but it does seem that the mindset of let the other guy (i.e. government) take care of what needs to be done is carrying the day.

Washington Post political columnist George Will recently pointed how just how much the Democrats have basically given up on ever balancing the federal budget. Time for a balanced budget

It really is sad, when the people who are supposed to be representing the states can’t seem to do their jobs. But then again, I remind myself, this is what 52 percent or so of the country voted for back in November.

Just remember two things when the train wreck hits.

1. It is all the Republicans fault.

2. The federal government can spend all the money it wants because the “rich” will pay for it.

But that is the way it is in America … instead of a nation of industrious ants, we have become a nation of grasshoppers as per the ancient fable.

What was it the poet laureate of my generation used to say?

“What? Me worry?”   – Alfred E. Neuman.

How can there be a vote with nobody there?

Harry Reid: Filibuster Changes Will Take Place In January

“Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has been working with Reid on the proposed changes, which would effectively force any senators wanting to delay a vote to visibly take to the floor and talk. Once every senator had left the floor and could no longer debate, a cloture vote would be taken that would require only a simple majority rather than two-thirds of the chamber in order to pass muster”

-  Quote from Huffington Post story on reforming the Senate filibuster rules.

Ok, let me see if I understand how this is going to work:

There is only one person left on the floor to debate and then they take a vote to cut off debate. Who the heck is voting? That one person? That would be a majority of one.

I thought a Senator had to be on the floor to vote, but I guess they now have early voting (they don’t?) and absentee ballots (they don’t?) or some other magical method to cast a vote without being in the Senate Chamber (i.e. on the floor).

It would seem to me, that the moment another senator returned to the floor, the debate would, in effect, be rejoined.

However, under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, this is how Congress works folks with a huge hole in logic and understanding.

Then there is the little matter of having a quorum of Senators present in order to have a legal vote.

And people wonder why our faith in the federal government institutions is being sorely tested.