As of Saturday morning, we have officially reached the point where the current government shutdown is the longest in American history, all for a manufactured crisis because Edward Babyhands wanted to have something tall and hard in his life for once.
I refer again to the tweetstorm by writer Matthew Chapman: https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1002502139367837702
“The one thing that you need to understand about Trump is that he is, at his core, a con man with no empathy. Therefore, he assumes that all other people are also con men with no empathy, and every exchange of goods and services that exists in the world is, on some level, a con. Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you’re not ripping someone off, you’re getting ripped off. … This is why Trump will never, ever, be able to negotiate with the rest of the world. He doesn’t believe in mutual benefit. The second anyone tells him ‘this is your end of the deal’ he’ll rip it up. He believes only one party can have an end of the deal, and it shouldn’t be him.”
Chapman said this in June 2018. He went on to say:
“This explains his behavior over DACA, spiking two bipartisan deals even though they were what he asked for. He assumed if Democrats were willing to talk, his deal wasn’t ripping them off, ergo it would rip him off. That implies if Democrats win Congress, we are going to enter an all-out legislative standstill like we’ve never before seen. Our system is entirely reliant on compromise and compromise isn’t compatible with Trump’s beliefs. We will struggle to pass even basic reauthorizations.”
Where is the lie, Trumpniks?
This is of course not the first time that one party (usually it’s the Republicans) has refused to approve a budget and forced a shutdown hoping to get their way. And when this happens, the shutdown is really more rhetorical than actual. In this case, about a quarter of the government and 800,000 workers are either furloughed outright or expected to work without pay.
Because various agencies (including Defense and Social Security) were already pre-funded by December, Congress, acting without foresight, has thus decided that not only are there non-essential functions that are no longer done and do not get paid, there are essential functions that do get paid, and then there are essential functions that do NOT get paid. Got it?
This makes sense, really. If you actually shut down the government, its truly essential functions would no longer be covered, and basic stuff like border security – which remember, is what this whole squabble is supposed to be about – would be suspended. So we’re still doing that stuff, right? Wrong.
Yet, rather than focusing on how this national security “emergency” is threatening national security in the here and now, the mainstream media is focusing on the hardship to employees of the TSA, the IRS and even the Border Patrol, because they’re among the “essential” agencies who are still not budgeted or getting paid. Since the entire raison d’etre of the TSA is security theater, the fact that TSA agents are having their paychecks held hostage to the newer, bigger and louder iteration of security theater is kinda ironic. If the Resistance is hoping to pull the tear ducts of the average American by asking them to sympathize with the average TSA employee or IRS agent… well, they’d better get used to six more years of this.
Because that’s what the Very Stable Genius said could happen when he hoped that this could go on for “months, even years.” And I kinda hope it does too. Well, not two whole years. Just 22 months. So that on November 2020, Trump can go to the cameras and ask the general electorate if they think his shutdown is still worth it. I think he will be truly amazed by the response.
What’s essential? Apparently the salaries of Congress. And the president who started this whole mess in the first place. So the people who are actually serving the public are not being paid while they do so, meanwhile the people who could stop this at any time but refuse to vote for a budget are being paid for not doing their jobs.
If y’all wonder why libertarians hate government, here you are.
The “solution” that Trump and his sycophants are waving around is the idea of using presidential powers to declare a national emergency and appropriating funds from elsewhere, such as the money that is supposed to go to disaster relief in California and Puerto Rico. As even Fox & Friends (the closest thing to a panel of trusted advisors that the president has) said, making a national emergency out of a partisan demand would set the stage for the next Democratic president to declare (say) climate change a national emergency and bypass opposition in Congress to reorder the government to his liking. Thereby giving the “liberal” Big Government movement more precedent and support than it could have achieved by its own efforts. Nevertheless, even though Trump seems to have backed off this idea for now, there are supposed to be just as many Republicans who would like Trump to do this, because by making the standoff a matter of executive action, Congress won’t have to deal with it anymore, the government can get back in session, and in the (not guaranteed) event that the courts strike the initiative down, the Republicans can go to their base and say “at least we tried.”
So we’re supposed to give the president emergency power (that he says he already has) because of an “emergency” that was not pressing enough to do something about through constitutional means when the Republicans held all branches and the opportunity existed. What this really amounts to is a desire by the executive to bypass the legislative process and by the Republican contingent of the legislature to dodge responsibility for its role in the government. If they allow this to occur, then they are asserting that the standard for what constitutes a “national emergency” is whatever gets a bug up the current president’s ass.
The party of small government, ladies and gentlemen. As Rachel Maddow would put it, a government just small enough to fit in your uterus. In this case, it’s so small it may not even reach the uterus.
As I’ve stated, while many of us want to believe in natural rights, as a practical matter, “rights” are only those things we can convince the government to support and enforce. In the same regard, government itself is not an a priori thing that exists outside politics. In part, this is just a matter of ontology. People on the Right are (broadly) individualists rather than collectivists because the individual is pre-existing and necessarily existing. The collective does not necessarily exist. Any collective is just an empty set without its constituent individuals. In that regard, government, as a collective, does not pre-exist the people of the nation. If we ceased to exist, the government would not exist. If the government did not exist, we would still continue to exist. We would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, yes, but we WOULD exist.
That being the case, everything government does is not truly “essential”, except in terms of descending priorities. A government needs to be able to collect revenue to do anything else, including enforce laws. To enforce tax collection, it needs to have various levels of law enforcement (for all the laws deemed necessary, including taxation). And to have a territory in which to enforce laws, it needs to be able to enforce borders and standards of citizenship. Even the Right should be able to agree that taxes are necessary on that level, and even the Left should be able to agree that borders and standards are necessary. But to confirm even these minimal standards, there has to be a political consensus. In a republic or representative system, we elect people to serve a party agenda that is stated in advance. But if Republicans elect people for the sake of law enforcement and border security (and Democrats do the same, just not so self-consciously), and they end up thwarting both law enforcement and border security for the sake of one man’s emotional pique, then even the most minarchist right-wing conception of government is rendered non-essential, because fripperies like border security, law enforcement and taxation have been rendered into negotiables.
We have not needed to consider this because up until now it was considered a given that all the things approved by government were always going to be funded (whether the money was there or not). Now that’s no longer the case. Conversely, even during the New Deal, it was not automatically assumed that government would be involved in all endeavors of life. Now most people (other than libertarians) can’t imagine government NOT being involved in all endeavors of life. But now they’ll have to, not necessarily by choice. Now the question is not the hypothetical “how much government do we need” versus “how much government do we want?” Now it’s the practical question, “how are you going to get along without the level of government that we’ve had?”
When even the funding of the IRS is just a matter of priorities, this only makes it clear that the only difference between “essential” and non-essential services is the ability to reach a political consensus. This can be demonstrated by the simple fact that some “essential” services did get funding resolutions in 2018 while others did not. If Social Security had not been funded for next year before Ann Coulter took Donnie to the woodshed, then that Trump would be dancing on that “third rail” hard enough for us to know how much of his scalp is still naturally covered. Liberals might think it is “essential” for government to provide a national health care system, or to have a comprehensive plan to deal with climate change. But not only do we not have either now, we have never had either. And that’s because of the political environment. While the Constitution puts a limit on what government is allowed to do, most of what it does reflects the political consensus more than the limits of the law.
So while a libertarian might question how much of this government is actually necessary, the fact of the matter is that we have as much government as we do because a lot of people did consider it necessary, and a lot of voters elected politicians to create a certain level of government. The Republican sellout to the Trumpnik cult of personality has short-circuited that connection between public demand and the political system. And since even libertarians don’t want to live on the level of wolves and cavemen (most of us, anyway) we need to find some way around that.
There are points for debate that we need to have now, not just in terms of the current shutdown but in future cases where the president isn’t acting like the paid agent of a foreign power yet where politicians are on a pre-Trump standard of discourse and are still not able to reconcile. 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. They might ask, “Wait – wouldn’t this also mean there’s no incentive to reduce the size of government?” Yes. But that would force them to acknowledge that the Republican Party has never cared about this. However much they may hack at the base of tax revenue and pretend that even steeper hacks to the safety net will make up the difference, the overall size of government never goes down. And that’s partially because for all the cuts they make to infrastructure, regulations and social services, Republicans throw in a few more wasteful, intrusive pet projects like the TSA and the YFW (Your Fucking Wall). Like all good redistributionists, they are less about taking money for the common good (if that exists) and more about shunting it to preserve their political machine and benefit their favored demographics, in this case the people who pay for their campaigns. The problem, as the budget standoff will soon make clear, is that however much money Republicans get from the donor class, their actual votes are outnumbered by the number of voters living paycheck to paycheck, which is that much harder when the government wants to not issue paychecks because the day of the week has a Y in it.
One of the reasons that intelligent Republicans continue to goosestep in line is that, however apostate Trump is with regard to the free market, he still ends up giving the donor class what they want: tax cuts for the upper percentile (at the expense of everyone else) and cuts to regulations on business. That’s much more Paul Ryan’s vision than Trump’s, but Ryan needed a Republican president to get what he wanted. Thing is, though, this is not out of line for right-wing economic philosophy, which holds that a hands-off approach to business is better than a high-tax approach that might pay for a comprehensive safety net but could also depress the economy and thus the revenues that are needed to pay for that safety net. Various liberals like Paul Krugman attack this policy because of its effects on the deficit and government’s ability to pay for existing projects. Conservatives claim that the low-tax policy will pay for itself because the resulting economic growth will be just that high. Well, Krugman is right at least in the respect that the US budget deficit grew 17% in 2018. That is largely because of the change in tax policy. In 2017, just after Trump took office, corporate taxes paid for 9 percent of government revenue and individual income taxes paid for 48. Last year (2018) corporations paid 7 percent and individual returns paid for 49 percent. And yet, economic indicators are good. You wouldn’t know from the government website, bea.gov, since “Due to a lapse in Congressional Appropriations for fiscal year 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is closed. This website is not being updated until further notice.” But indicators seem to be improving. Yearly inflation continues to average under 3 percent. In Fall 2018, the unemployment rate reached a historic low of 3.7 percent. US GDP per capita has gone up from $53,399.4 in 2016 to $54,225.45 in 2018, with average wage going up from $22.34 at the beginning of 2018 to $23.05 by December 2018. Economic indicators for 2018 were going that much better, before somebody decided to start a tariff war with the Chinese.
It would seem that, whatever the long-term fiscal costs, the right-wing approach to the economy is working. Why then is it that so many people think this country is on the wrong track?
Perhaps because the party which claims to have the trademark on “small government” is currently run by a squalling man-baby and wannabe authoritarian whose only concept of public service is that the public serves him while he loots the Treasury, assisted by an entire Cabinet of private sector rent-seekers with similar attitudes.
Likewise, if people are discovering that they don’t actually need all the government that they’re paying for, that doesn’t mean they have to like the way that knowledge came about.