Posted on 02/14/2014 12:30:50 PM PST by neverdem
“There is no education in the second kick of a mule,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
With some such thought in mind, Speaker John Boehner strode to the floor of the House to offer a “clean” debt ceiling bill and relied on Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats to pass it. They did.
“Surrender” and “betrayal,” are among the epithets coming the Speaker’s way.
Yet Boehner was holding a losing hand. Had he added a GOP wish-list bill to the debt ceiling, Harry Reid’s Senate would have rejected it. President Obama would have denounced it as putting at risk the full faith and credit of the United States.
Big Media would have piled on. The markets would have been rattled. The Dow would have begun to swoon. Corporate America, cash cow of the Republican Party, would have begun to howl.
A clamor to pass a clean debt ceiling bill or risk a new recession would have arisen. And the House Republicans would have caved, as they finally had to cave on the budget bill last fall.
Rather than play Lord Raglan and lead his cavalry in another Charge of the Light Brigade, Boehner chose to withdraw to fight another day on another field.
Yet, the Tea Party has a right to feel cheated.
When does the Republican Party, put in power by the Tea Party, plan to honor its commitment to halt the growth of the Federal monolith and bring the budget back into balance? Is there is any hope things will be different, should the Tea Party help produce a GOP Senate in 2014?
If the Tea Party is in some despair, is it not understandable?
For while there are countless proposals and plans to cut back on federal spending, from Simpson-Bowles on, it is impossible today to see in either party the political will to do the surgery.
Consider what would be needed to roll back Big Government.
First, the major entitlement programs Medicare and Social Security would have to be peeled back. But any effort to raise the age of eligibility, or reduce the benefits, or trim cost-of-living adjustments, would meet with ferocious resistance, led by the AARP.
Indeed, many Tea Party members are themselves among those enjoying, or about to enjoy, the benefits of these programs. Would they back cuts in either one? Democrats say these programs must be expanded, and they will resist any cuts as fiercely as the Republicans would resist any increase in payroll or income taxes.
Social Security and Medicare recipients number in the scores of millions. Four million Baby Boomers reach eligibility every year now. That is more then 10,000 every day. Is any party, even a GOP that controls the White House and Congress, going to take on this army?
Consider that other entitlement, Medicaid.
Thanks to Obamacare, the number of beneficiaries of Medicaid is soaring. And even should the GOP capture the Senate in 2016, a Democratic minority would filibuster to death any bill to cut Medicaid.
As for interest on the debt, another major element in the budget, it has only one way to go, up. For the Fed freeze that has held interest rates near zero for five years must some day end.
Defense is the other big item in the budget. But while the wind-down of our trillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has made cuts possible here, most of these have already been made.
And this week the House voted 326-90 to repeal the small cut in the COLA in pensions for working-age military retirees under 62, which was part of the bipartisan budget deal last fall. Members of Congress panic at any suggestion they are shortchanging the troops.
Yet, since Y2K, the cost of military personnel has doubled, while the number of those on active duty has fallen by 10 percent.
Last December, Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray, in their budget deal, raised discretionary spending in 2014 from the $967 billion it would have been under the sequester to $1.012 trillion.
Invariably, bipartisan budget deals between Capitol Hill liberals and conservatives move the ball further toward the liberals’ goal line.
The farm bill just signed by President Obama contains a tiny cut in a food stamp budget that has exploded during his days in office. But nice new subsidies are in there for peanut and corn growers and producers of maple syrup. Embarrassed at what the House went along with, not one Republican Congressman showed up at the signing ceremony.
Can it be that the Tea Party’s dream of a balanced budget, and of a government that ceases to eat up ever more of the GDP, is simply an act of self-delusion?
Have the beneficiaries of Big Government become so powerful that any champion of the national interest who challenges them in fixed battle invites almost certain defeat?
For today, America appears to be maintaining speed, or even accelerating, toward that cliff that they all warn us is out there.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”
Yes. But that doesn’t mean stop fighting.
I’m surprised by Buchanan’s treatise to Surrender Monkeys.
Primary these turds until they get the message.
We have an election coming up and the proof is in the election. The Tea Party has to deliver again.
As Americans, WE are used to patiently, and silently waiting for solutions to problems to come from the top down.
This lazy attitude has been the basis for most Corporate and Political Management structures in America for most of OUR History.
WE now have the ultimate in lazy, top-down, political structure: a rouge dictator whom WE allow to be above OUR Constitutional Law.
WE will continue to have the current Obama Dictatorship as long as the Chief Impeachment Official, ( CIO ), the Speaker of the House, is allowed by US to permit Obama to continue as a OUR Dictator.
In all of Obama’s public statements, he has told the truth to US only twice:
1.) “We are only five days away from fundamentally changing the United States of America.”
and
2.) “I have a pen and a telephone, and I will use them to issue Executive Orders whenever Congress fails to act.”
Obama has thus defined himself to be OUR Dictator, and formally gave US fair warning of his intentions to do so.
For reasons that border on High Treason to the United States of America, Boehner as Speaker of the House, has failed his Constitutional Duty to begin Impeachment Proceedings on B. Hussein Obama.
The Members of the US House of Representatives have refused to force Boehner to resign; then to elect a Speaker with the required Sense of Honor to do his/her Constitutional Duty to begin Formal Impeachment Proceedings on B. Hussein Obama.
If WE, the taxpayers, do not force the Members of the US House of Representatives to replace Boehner as Speaker with a new Speaker that will issue the necessary Articles of Impeachment on B. Hussein Obama, then WE, the lazy, silent majority taxpayers, deserve to continue to have OUR Liberties crushed by Dictator Obama.
The future of OUR Republic is, as always, in OUR hands.
DONT TREAD ON ME
If Pat feels this way, then his entire career was worthless. He always bucked the probable.
The few elderly Americans who remember the world before the New Deal won’t tell you about not being divided into Common Men and Economic Royalists. They won’t tell you how good it felt to start from nothing and become successful by dint of one’s own hard work. They will tell you about bread lines, soup lines, Hoovervilles, and being sent out on the road by parents who could no longer afford to feed them. They’ll tell you about “railroad bulls” who beat them senseless and police who prevented them from crossing a state line because the people on the other side of that line couldn’t take care of their own. They’ll tell you about the disappearance of money. In 1988, an elderly black lady, who remembered it all, defined the situation very simply: “Back then, you could buy a whole barrel of flour for twenty-five cents. But where were you going to find that quarter?!” There are few good memories from the survivors of the days before the New Deal.
Rush Limbaugh may deride them as “low information voters”, but these people are merely average Americans. They dislike politics and avoid it because they consider it a dirty business, which it is . They pay their taxes, go to work, raise their children and expect something in return from the government for those taxes. They elect Democrats to preserve and expand their entitlements, and when the Democrats bite off more than they can chew, they elect Republicans to fix the mess.
When they send people to Congress, they don’t care about ideology. They want the people they elect to be problem solvers, and if that means reaching across the aisle and compromising their principles, so be it. They don’t necessarily want smaller government, they want more effective government. Most importantly, they don’t want anything to get in the way of their government checks, particularly when the economy is in a state of depression.
In late 1995, Bill Clinton positioned Newt Gingrich to stand between the American people and their government checks in a highly publicized government shutdown. The result was the end of Gingrich’s revolution after barely one year, followed by Clinton’s cracking the whip over the “Militia” Republicans elected in 1994, turning them into good, reliable purveyors of pork.
The average American voter elected Tea Party candidates to Congress in 2010 to fix the problem, not shut down the government or default on the nation’s debt, which was the alternative when Obama positioned the Tea Party to stand between the people and their government checks. The potential default incident in the summer of 2011 and the government shutdown of late 2013 turned the people against the Tea Party, and the Tea Party’s polling numbers have never recovered. The charge against the Tea Party is that they want to “burn down the house”, when the people merely want the house patched.
The key to this is the New Deal paradigm. As long as it survives, the current state of affairs will not change. An intransigent ideologue of a president will stand firm and double down when challenged, forcing Congress to bend to his will to keep the game going.
The key to the New Deal paradigm is the fact that US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Until that ends, this nation can abuse that currency at will and force its malfeasance on the rest of the world. As Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, John Connally, said in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window to foreign payments, “They’re our deficits, but they’re your problem.” This is what permits Americans to live beyond their means and enjoy that exhilarating sense of instant gratification, a vice whose tentacles extend far beyond the world of money into the world of simple everyday morality.
As long as the New Deal paradigm reigns, the Democrats and Republicans will fight over who controls the federal faucet and how that faucet distributes largesse to their favored constituencies. It is not in the interest of either party to shut down the federal faucet. Because of this, it is only when the faucet dries up – because the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency – that there will be nothing more to fight over. When that day comes and the rest of the world converts to some kind of gold-backed international currency standard, it’s game over and lights out for the American fiat dollar and the New Deal.
On that fateful day, there will only be two paradigms left for America’s future: the Tea Party movement, based on the American Revolution; or the Occupy Wall Street movement, based on the French Revolution.
The Democratic and Republican parties, the great enablers and profiteers of the New Deal, will be consigned to the ash heap of history.
Live Free or Die.
It's not what he feels. As a simple analysis, it's not that hard. Do you want the debt downgraded?
Excellent analysis!
Boehner is to blame for not putting impeachment hearings in process.
No matter who else is at fault-and there are many... it is all on Boehner.
Spot on.
oh man, wow, we had the same thing with Obamacare.
First they said we were stopping government and blamed us, but in the end Obamacare became the albatros of liberals and liberals only.
What is it these idiots do not understand about gambit?
Strategy is long breathed, you have to face the wrath in the short term for the winning at the end.
Oh my.
Reagan perfectly understood indeed the importance of the independent minded voter, how to reach out to them, liberal or not, imstead of reaching out to the democratic party.
The. bush Rinos thought they were smarter and more civilized when compromising with a party instead of competing to reach voters.
More civilized my arse. This is total corruption and bowing to the Democrats as middle men to the people, like a man incapable to talk to his children without having to go through his wife.
Rinos are abused spouses of Democrats always coming back like puppy dogs for more.
obviously they are jealous of men, men like Reagan.
My mama is 93 and will be 94 in June.
In 1932, at the age of 12, she was an orphan working in the cotton mills in Macon, Georgia.
Oh, the stories that she has told...
A fair enough description of the past we all must agree with.
Until conservatives face the media’s profiting from deficit spending we’re never going to see a change.
The media won’t allow their profits to be cut.
Yeah, that’s crazy talk- the media doesn’t care how much money they make from government-paid-for consumer spending. The media is altruistic- just ask them...
It has been 14 years since Y2K, Pat. First, inflation by the CPI has been 40%. Second, military pay was behind what it should be, so they gave raises throughout to help military pay catch up with civilian counterparts.
Third, where's the data on how much R&D, procurement, operations, etc., have gone up. One normally provides the comparison when writing an honest article.
Fourth, either have the pay competitive or run a military without career members.
For Obama, no way. Clinton made that impossible when the rats failed to remove him in the Senate. Holder was doable before November 2012 for Fast and Furius. It should have been a campaign issue. Boehner failed big time!
I highly doubt the Tea Party Movement will prevail when, not if, this moment in time comes to pass.
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