This week, America approaches summer as it celebrates Memorial Day. It is a day that we honor those who died to serve this country. It seems approprate that this year we use the occasion to honor the memory of a government run by functional adults, cause it looks like we won’t see it again in our lifetime.
Late Saturday the breaking news was that President Biden and Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy had reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a federal debt default.
“The deal, if enacted, would boost the nation’s borrowing limit for two years and take the volatile issue of America’s credit worthiness off the table until after the next presidential election, according to multiple reports.”
Yeah, IF enacted. There’s the rub. Kevin McCarthy was unable to become Speaker of the new Republican House majority until he’d caved to other Republicans on every conceivable demand, one of which was that any one member could call for the Speaker’s removal at any time. Meaning that approval assumes that the whole thing won’t be torpedoed by some conceited needledick bugfucker just because he can. Please keep in mind that “conceited needledick bugfucker” is just my polite euphemism for “Matt Gaetz.”
The only reason this is even a crisis is because the United States government has imposed an artificial debt ceiling on its budget that frankly doesn’t make any sense because every time we reach or exceed it, the two parties end up raising the debt ceiling again precisely because failure to do so would default the government. And yet it’s retained, mainly by Republicans, because otherwise the budget would just keep going up and up and up and there would be no way to pressure the other party into fiscal restraint.
Again, I’m not a liberal. I DO think this government taxes and spends too much, and we could stand to cut some of that spending. I can even point out a couple of specifics. One Internet friend of mine said one place to trim the budget would be eliminating the US Marine Corps, given that we already have an Army and it did most of our major amphibious landings (like D-Day) and therefore the Marines are redundant. But then, this guy was in Army Intelligence, and Army tends to think the USMC is useless. (Typical Army joke: ‘what has an IQ of 199 and runs screaming through the desert?’ ‘200 Marines.’)
Seriously, there’s supposed to be $56 billion unallocated from COVID relief and you’d think they’d be able to liquidate that to create some room in the budget. Cause according to all the authorities, there’s no longer a COVID emergency, right? And if we’re trying to scale down government COVID response because there’s no longer a COVID emergency, well, it’s been over 22 years since somebody hijacked an airplane, so why do we still need Homeland Security in the airports taking X-Rays to see which of us are circumcised?
But no, up to this point and probably still now, the Democrats and media (same thing, really) continue to hope that they can get a discharge petition to pass a “clean” bill without needing the Speaker to advance it to the floor. All it would need is “five Republicans with courage.” Which is the joke that Democrats and media always subject themselves to. There ARE no five Republicans with courage. This is a party whose most literate members have seen their institution get devoured by a mob (in all senses of the term) and they have neither the courage to admit that they sympathize with the mob nor the courage to stand up to it. Anybody who could qualify as such is dead, retired, independent or already defected to the Democrats. You’re not going to find five reasonable Republicans in Washington for the same reason Jesus Christ wasn’t born there: They couldn’t find three wise men or one virgin.
At the same time, it would still be more likely to find five Republicans willing to work with the Democrats than it would be for Kevin to pass this thing without losing at least five of his caucus.
I would object to the Republican position less if it were actually principled, but we’ve known since fucking Reagan that these guys talk a good game about “fiscal conservatism” and then balloon the deficits by increasing the spending in the areas they like while slashing taxes on the upper percentile. Not to mention how during the Trump Organization, the Republican Congress raised the debt ceiling three times with no preconditions. It’s hostage taking, and Gaetz himself said as much. “I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Gaetz told Semafor.
I had already said that : “One solution to the high likelihood of a budget standoff shutting down the government would be to simply pass a law saying that where a new budget cannot be passed, the government continues on with the previous budget or continuing budget agreement by default. An automatic resolution would at least serve budget hawks in that they could not hold the government hostage to their budget but could also make sure that the government did not grow any more.” As it turned out there was already some preventative measure in the system previously. According to Wikipedia, Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt imposed the “Gephardt Rule” in 1979 stating that the debt ceiling was automatically raised when a budget was passed. This resolved the contradiction in voting for appropriations but not voting to fund them. This was in fact the standard until Gephardt lost his majority in 1995 and Republicans repealed the rule. The strange thing is that Democrats have had the majority at least once since then and not re-established the rule. Which further confirms the two main points of the issue: Crisis around the debt is entirely manufactured by Republicans for their own political purposes, and if Democrats can be blamed for anything, it’s their blithe assumption that they don’t need to establish sound procedures when they are in charge.
I’m thinking we should consider the terms of forming America 2.0. Cause this shitty government isn’t going to last the way it’s going.
Not that I am one of those pessimists who thinks America is necessarily going to break apart or decline in comparison to other nations. We still have more capital and resources than the European Union (our main liberal-capitalist rivals) and a more efficient military-industrial complex than China or Russia (our two main authoritarian rivals). But it could happen, and defaulting on our debt would be a big reason why. The problems facing our nation are completely preventable and almost completely the result of our political dysfunction.
Liberals hated Ronald Reagan for saying “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But I’m sure they would have to agree with him now: Government is the problem, if only because the former Party of Reagan has MADE IT the problem. But then again, those Republicans, as reactionary as some of them may have been, were not completely off the deep end like they are now, nor was the Democratic Party exactly like what it is now. Republicans who think they’re clever point out that it was actually Democrat states that held slaves and the former Party of Lincoln who freed them. Which of course is blanking out how much things have changed since. “The problem” with government used to be the Democratic Party, but it just switched tents. The common element is the people who think all that stuff about “all men are created equal” only applies to them and their demographic. This was why they had endorsed slavery and as-good-as-slavery laws for blacks after the Civil War, not only to keep black people under control but to effectively outsource labor in their own country and undercut the value of white labor, so that they would also be under control, but would still support the system cause at least they weren’t black.
The reason Democrats of today aren’t blamed for all the slavery and Jim Crow laws is because they realized there are more votes to be had in the rest of the country. At least in theory. So they quit appealing to the people who liked segregation and theocracy and left them to the Republicans. The problem with the theory is that the Republicans found that their new coalition were Southern Christians, military people, people who’d been burned by liberal policies and the Carter Administration, people who were going to be highly motivated to vote if they had someone to vote for, and Reagan picked them up. But that actually was a “big tent.” Over the years Republicans ran out of ideas and could only survive on the “culture war” issues they’d been flogging since the ’70s. Such success as they’ve had after GW Bush is because they appeal to that Christianist core that will come out to vote no matter what, because while they may not agree with the conservative love of capitalism, they would never vote for a party that supported abortion rights. Or trans rights. Or gay rights. Or voting rights. Well, rights.
It’s not impossible for such a party to appeal to women and non-whites – look at Trump’s performance with women in 2016 and his performance with Hispanics in 2020 – but the more they lean into this strategy of alienating anybody who isn’t a fanatic, the more self-defeating it is in the long run, especially as previously unmotivated young people and middle class women realize that Republican policies are deliberately targeting them. Republicans know this on some level, which is why they have to keep the advantages they still have to block any sort of reform, or indeed anything the other party does at all, since they know they wouldn’t get any credit for the results if they let the Democrats win anything.
This partisan warfare is the reason no one can cooperate and why one party in particular deliberately selects its politicians for their most negative and belligerent traits.
I had said that slavery, which we treat as the Original Sin of the republic, was something that could be and technically was corrected in the Constitution. But the real Original Sin of our foundation was that the Founders, looking at the partisan politics of the mother country Britain, never accounted for the natural tendency of people to group into camps and therefore left the process to occur by default. And since it was not accounted for in the Constitution, the ad hoc rules and traditions that Washington (and the states) developed to adapt to it ended up becoming more important to the day-to-day process than the actual Constitution. One result of this is something I had already mentioned: Article I of the Constitution specifically mentions that a Speaker of the House is to be chosen by the entire chamber. The Senate has no such rule, partially because it’s a smaller body and partially because the original Constitution had Senators appointed to represent their State legislatures, not elected by popular vote. Which is another area where partisan politics crept in to the process. So Speaker is a constitutional position. Senate Majority Leader is a position created for the convenience of the duopoly, so there’s apparently nothing in the Constitution that says the Majority Leader can’t, say, exercise effective veto power over a President’s Supreme Court nominees by preventing a vote from even getting to the floor.
This is something that requires more in-depth thinking than I have time for right now. But it’s clear that from both the day-to-day operations of Washington (and many state legislatures that are not just stymied by Republicans but rigidly controlled by them) and the process of screening candidates in the primary round that the “two” party system is at the heart of what’s wrong with this country. Because while the polarization of the two factions means that the Republicans have purged themselves of their non-fanatics (meaning the Democrats are pretty much the coalition for the rest of the country) this also means that Republican power is concentrated so in those areas where they already have historical or cultural dominance, their policies are that much more authoritarian. In short, they’re a danger to the survival of the United States. And the real punch line is that no one wants to admit this, because then the Democrats would be completely in charge. And no one wants that. Including, I suspect, the Democrats.
But if the dysfunction in America’s politics is channeled and incentivized by the party nomination process, incentives can be used to course correct where we’re going. This is already happening in some places. California has changed its election system to have bipartisan monitoring of elections and changed from “winner take all” to a “top-two” system such that the primary round of voting advances the top two finishing candidates regardless of party so that the November general election is effectively a runoff. In Nevada, Question 3, which would change Nevada’s primary round to a ranked-choice voting system, passed by 52.9 to 47.1 percent. (However ballot questions have to survive a second vote in state elections, so this would not be confirmed until 2024, if it passes again.) The goal of such measures is not to ban political parties, given that even if we did, you can’t stop people from associating in groups. The goal is to disincentivize group think, such that only party loyalists come out to vote in the primary round and thus skew the vote in the general election for the rest of the public who might want another choice but wouldn’t get it because they can’t vote in closed-ticket primaries for the candidate they might want.
Of course the real problem with the Republican Party is not so much that they hate abortion and taxes, however much Democrats might object. The real problem is that they are catering to the biggest fucking hammerheads in the country, and again, if the rest of the population knows better but the Party caters to the crazies, moving away from closed primaries dilutes that.
The real problem there is that we need to federalize this approach rather than wait for it to happen state by state, especially since the states that are most likely to pass reforms are the ones like California that are already least likely to support Republican national politics. And for obvious reasons, Republicans are not going to support that either. But we might be able to use their existing set of priorities against them.
I mean, as long as we’re going to bring back institutional racism, we should also bring back literacy tests at the voting booth. Just as long as they apply to voters AND candidates.