Free Market Carnivore's Blog

How much more poisonous can the political climate in Washington get?

Opposing this administration’s policies has long been termed “racist” by the liberal left and the general media, regardless of whether the issue had anything to do with race, i.e. immigration, economic policy or any fundamental “reform” the president has embarked upon.  He’s also termed them extremists.  Apparently, that’s not producing satisfactory enough results in winning public and political opinion.

Wednesday, the president stepped up the rhetoric, calling Congressional Republicans extortionists for daring to oppose him in rubber stamping an increase in the debt ceiling.  What’s next in this war on those daring to oppose this administration?  The British term the party out of power the Loyal Opposition.  Churchill was the acknowledged master of wielding the (verbal) cudgel of Loyal Opposition.  Obama terms them  —  in his case — extortionists.  What’s next?  Calling them Terrorists?  Traitors?  This from the candidate who was going to be the Great Healer, as well as… well, you remember all the claims and predictions, including that shtick about the waves.  In fact, the manmade global warming boosters are heaping more scorn on “climate skeptics” now because a new report is due soon terming the manmade component mere background noise to global geology.  But we digress.

Just what did President Obama say to the Business Roundtable?

“You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt ceiling being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and had nothing to do with debt,” Obama said.

We’re not sure how the president can regard perhaps the largest spending project in our nation’s history irrelevant to budget and debt matters but economics and numbers were never his game.  To him, it just boils down to an attitude of this is what he wants.  Shut up and do what he wants.

What about Obama’s claim that never in history has anyone used the debt ceiling as leverage to get tit for tat?  Of course, historical accuracy is not the president’s game either.  Chris Stirewalt noted that Obama should know better on this one.  He and the Democrats used the debt ceiling debate to harass President George Bush over the Iraq war.  As for how we got into this mess, Stirewalt pointed out the United States has not had a budget since 2007.  We’ve been stumbling along with stopgap continuing resolutions ever since (Fox News, 09/18/13), including the years when the White House, the Senate and the House were Democrat-led.

Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck went further regarding “never in history:” “Every major deficit deal in the last 30 years has been tied to a debt-limit increase, and this time should be no different.”  He reiterated that Republicans do not want the U.S. to default on its debts.  The key words Buck uttered were “major deficit deal.”  Obama does not want his purse pinched.

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner announced that there will be a vote in the House on a budget bill that would fund the government but defund Obamacare.  If the House should pass such a bill, it would put pressure on the Senate to do something to fund the government.  As Karl Rove pointed out on Fox News Wednesday, when the government shutdown occurred in 1995, it wasn’t really a full shut-down.  Seven of the 13 appropriations bills had already been passed then.

This time it’s different.  Congress has passed no appropriations bills.  Some departments are on short strings already because of sequestration (an idea the president fathered but refuses to acknowledge).  So a shut-down could really shut down everything not essential if that’s what the Republicans were really trying to do.  But while that’s what the left has claimed, the Republican leadership has never said they wanted to shut down the whole government, just defund Obamacare, using what few weapons they have at hand.

The Washington Post analyzed the budget situation in terms policy non-wonks could understand.  Why are the real cast iron conservatives so adamant on pushing this budget deal to the edge over Obamacare?  For one, they view this as the last chance to stop or delay Obamacare, with implementation just weeks away.  For another, they are concerned about primary challenges and the “ire of conservative groups” who want to “shred Obamacare at all costs.  A “we-tried-once-so-now-let’s-back-away” posture won’t ease any of their political pressures, the Post story said, (Boehner Agonistes (again),” 09/18/13).

We agree that those pressures are part of the equation.  But further, the left views opposition to Obamacare as misguided and really dismisses the notion that there are very many voters out there so unenlightened as to not want it.  And Congressmen who pay attention to what their voters want anyway, are just short-sighted politicians trying to get reelected.  Because the left are really the political animals, they can’t understand the conservative right as being rooted in principle and behaving like that regardless of consequences.  That is why they view a person like Ted Cruz or Mike Lee  — willing to buck both their own and the opposition party’s leadership — as extremists people should be frightened of.

The Post story said something else interesting about the budget standoff.

“What’s more, in order for a budget strategy to really be tested, it must be drawn out to the last moment.  These negotiations have increasingly become blinking contests, and Defund Obamacare advocates aren’t going to be happy until Senate Democrats are faced with a choice between a government shutdown and defunding Obamacare.  Anything else will be seen as a token effort.”

In other words, it isn’t High Noon until it’s noon and the street is cleared except for the two gunfighters.  All the rest is nerve-wracking prologue only the rest of us notice.

But at least some folks have the guts to step into the street.  Unfortunately, too many of our Washington politicians are law-trained negotiators, only interested in brokering a deal, not defending bedrock principles and values important to our country and its citizens.

And while this drama is crucial to all of us, it means all the rest of the stuff important to specific sectors of the economy, like agriculture or trade or immigration, just doesn’t merit much attention.

By the way, other news today also smacked of extortion and blackmail but it wasn’t the Loyal Opposition that was responsible.  USA Today and Fox News reported that the IRS had flagged groups for “anti-Obama rhetoric” and emotional statements, searching press releases, articles, commentary and research reports.  What is extortion if it isn’t withholding tax exemption unless you keep your mouth shut about certain things?  Is this more Chicago-style coercion seeping into our government?

K.T. McFarland only this morning wondered if our intelligence community was gathering such a massive volume of information that it couldn’t find even the obvious things when it needed to.  Like whether a guy arrested on weapons charges, harassing neighbors and hearing voices coming out of the ceilings and walls  — they didn’t say how cheap a motel he’d been staying in, so we assume they’d clarified that the voices were directed at him and that what they were telling him to do bad things  —  is the kind of guy who should have a security clearance and the okay to buy weapons.  If Obama’s people are having to sort through all the “anti-Obama” rhetoric, it would seem they have set themselves a gargantuan task, even though the left-leaning general media scoff that any such discontent exists, except for a handful of “extremists.”

As Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice noted  — his group has represented conservative and Tea Party groups harassed by the IRS in the process of seeking a nonprofit status —  setting the government to combing through the media for anti-government statements is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned in the U.S. Constitution.  There is this little item in there about free speech.  King George III did not like being spoken ill of.  But he was a king.  We’re supposed to have a president and a government by and for the People.

Meanwhile, we have an active, pushy, bossy, overbearing bureaucracy.  We don’t have much legislative governing going on.  However, non-government by paralysis could be preferable to really bad government.

The U.S. Supreme Court has published its schedule for hearing cases in the next term.  As you may be aware, rather than the customary one-hour allowed for plaintiff and defense to present oral arguments before the Court, the cases regarding Obamacare have been allocated five-and-a-half hours of oral arguments.

 The most interesting and disturbing part of the arrangement is that the first day of argument – for one hour on March 26, 2012 — will be allocated to the question as to whether or not the Court can really examine this law.  There is an old 19^th century law that forbids the Court from striking down a tax law before the taxpayer has paid the tax and then demanded a refund (“Supreme Court to hear arguments in March on healthcare law,” Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2011).  However, its applicability would be contingent on whether the penalty a taxpayer without approved health insurance would be assessed in 2014 is a tax or not.  Appellate courts have held various opinions.

It has to be somewhat encouraging the Court agreed to hear the case, as it would have been much easier for them to reject hearing the case at all if they truly believed they had no authority to act until the law went into effect.  We’re guessing they are more interested in laying groundwork for establishing that they do have the authority to hear the case.  We are not lawyers but we’ve got to think the Justices can find in the law somewhere an excuse to consider a law the implementation of which would require billions of dollars, has already caused major upheavals in the health care industry, has huge budget implications for all states and goes to the core of individual’s rights and responsibilities in our society.

 Certainly a potent case can be made that the good of the country – both with respect to proper spending of public funds and to the basic rights of citizens to be free from government compulsion – can be made by a Court that in recent decades has sanctioned judicial involvement in nearly every aspect of an individual American’s life.  The fiscal implications alone have seldom been more monumental outside of time of world war.

 The second day of arguments would devote two hours to the mandate portion of the bill.  The third day would consider both what affect the striking of the mandate would have on the rest of the law and whether the federal government violated states rights in expanding Medicaid and require states to increase funding.