Sam Karnick
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Life, Liberty, Property #32
IN THIS ISSUE:
GOP Fractures While Dems Hang Tough
Video of the Week: When Davos Controls the Farms | Davos Watch Ep. 2
Stubborn Insistence That Raising Taxes Increases Revenue
Getting Rid of Judicial BS
Cartoon
Podcast of the Week: Third Parties: The Silent Movers of American Politics (Guest: Dr. Merrill Mathews, Jr.)
Great Honor for Heartland
GOP Fractures While Dems Hang Tough
Conservatives are working hard to preserve mistakes and enable progressives to commit new ones.
A small contingent of House Republicans concerned about federal spending “are signaling they are ready to use tougher tactics to extract concessions” from President Joe Biden and the congressional Democrats as the legislative and executive branches stare once again at a potential government shutdown at the end of this month if the Congress and president cannot agree on a continuing resolution to keep the funding flowing.
Is this really a signal, or just noise?
The increasingly tense disputes between GOP hardliners and the mainstreamers aligned with Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggest the latter is the case.
Perhaps the most surprising news in the Wall Street Journal story quoted above is that there are fiscal conservatives in Congress. A good deal less surprising is that some Republicans are talking tough about getting some spending cuts in return for passing a spending bill to continue funding the federal government. They always talk the talk. The real surprise would be if the Republicans stuck to their guns and forced the Democrats to make the requested cuts or be responsible for shutting down the government.
McCarthy and the GOP caucus are clearly poised to agree with the Democrats to stick to business as usual and increase their fleecing of the taxpayers:
With just weeks until a possible shutdown, McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) have agreed that Congress will need to pass a short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution, by the end of September to buy time for a full-year agreement. The hard-liners worry that the continuing resolution is a precursor to passage of a large, omnibus spending bill that they will dislike, and many say they will only allow passage of the short-term bill if it contains concessions to conservatives.
“The continuing resolution is also expected to be the vehicle for several Biden administration priorities,” the Journal reports. Of course. That is how the Left does things. More power to them. Literally.
Some Republicans say that they are not going to concede to the Biden administration and the Democrat majority in the House, as the Journal story reports:
“Nothing happens in this town without force,” Rep. Eli Crane (R., Ariz.), another of the 20 conservatives, wrote in a social-media post. “In this spending fight, we can & absolutely must force: A secure border; An end to the weaponization of the DOJ & FBI; An eradication of woke policies from our military; And let’s not forget ripping up the blank check to Ukraine.”
The small contingent of GOP budget hardliners have facts and logic on their side in this dispute, and they are not shy about characterizing those in their party who intend to let avoidance of a shutdown squander another opportunity to rein in the nation’s appalling government spending splurge:
“If a temporary shutdown is more concerning to you than our $2 trillion deficit and $33 trillion national debt, I’d politely suggest you’re part of the problem,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R., S.C.), another of the dissidents, said in a post.
The divisions on the GOP side are intensifying. ZeroHedge reports:
“If you want to file the motion, file the f---king motion,” McCarthy told GOP colleagues Thursday, after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) criticized him earlier in the week—giving him a list of demands while threatening to bring a motion to vacate McCarthy's chair [emphasis in original]. …
“We don’t try to air our laundry but again, you know, to that point, if somebody wants to file a motion to vacate, then file the f—ing motion to vacate, and that’s it,” said Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL). “And stop holding up everybody’s work, stop holding it, you know, over people’s head like it’s, you know, like, it’s this noose that you’re going to try to get somebody to walk into.”
The GOP leadership is once again spending its self-limited supply of profanity and vitriol on its own party members while giving the Democrats a free ride to government-spending heaven.
I find that to be at least mildly frustrating, I must say. (I apologize for my temporary loss of composure.)
If the House Republicans (improbably) hang tough on appropriations, the Democrat majority in the U.S. Senate will do what Democrats do (and more power to them), while enjoying another generous helping of the sweet taste of cowardly complicity of Republican senators, the Journal reports:
Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, said that if the House passed a measure omitting Ukraine funding, the Senate would simply amend the bill to add in Ukraine funding and send that back to the House.
If the Ukraine funding were added, said [Rep. Byron] Donalds [(R-FL), who voted against McCarthy on a spending bill in July], “we should split it right back out” and send the bill back to the Senate without it.
We know which party will win that battle, and the war. Democrats know how to conduct these fights—concentrate your fire on the other side, for starters—and they are not the slightest bit shy about demonizing anyone who disagrees with them on anything. That attitude was exemplified by comments by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as the battle commenced in earnest early this month. The Wall Street Journal reports:
In a “Dear Colleague” letter sent to Democratic senators on Friday [September 1], Schumer said the Senate’s top focus will be on funding the government, and he suggested the blame for any shutdown would lie with “House Republican extremists.”
“We cannot afford the brinkmanship or hostage-taking we saw from House Republicans earlier this year when they pushed our country to the brink of default to appease the most extreme members of their party,” he said.
Referring to one’s political opponents as terrorists (“hostage-taking”), appeasers, and reckless pushers of the country into economic disaster is standard procedure for Democrats. More power to them. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy hit back with … extortion against the budget hardliners in his own party, most of whom support various ongoing or planned congressional investigations into the rotten political and personal behavior that apparently characterize the current occupants of the White House and Executive Branch offices: “If we shut down, all the government shuts down, investigation and everything else,” McCarthy said.
Talk about “hostage-taking”! Mainstream Republicans foment terror against their own, not the opposing party.
While McCarthy and the GOP Surrender Caucus characterize the budget hardliners as recklessly threatening to shut down the government, the latter say that they do not want a shutdown. The Journalreports:
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (R., Pa.) said that while conservatives do want to advance their priorities, they aren’t aiming to shut down the government.
“That’s not the goal,” he said. “I would just encourage anybody—leadership and rank-and-file members—to plan on staying up all night to get it done. But the answer can’t be to surrender before the fight begins.”
This is hardly a dispute between a noble race of philosopher-kings and a cabal of anarcho-capitalist bomb-throwers who would gladly see the U.S. government come to a screeching halt and unleash an army of maniacs to cut the wages of working people, poison our air and water, and make Vladimir Putin U.S. president-for-life. It is a fight over whether to join in government spending that some people quite plausibly describe as reckless and others say cannot be avoided.
As G. K. Chesterton noted, the practice of conservatism is the preservation of progressive policies: “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition.”
The late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher aptly called this racket the “socialist ratchet.” It works perfectly in the United States because our conservatives are passionately dedicated to their self-assigned mission of “conserving” a corrupt and downright insane status quo by preventing mistakes from being corrected.
The small band of GOP budget hardliners is less willing to play that game, and that makes them mortal enemies of progressives and conservatives alike.
Progressive Democrats are fully dedicated to their commission of spectacular mistakes the conservatives will subsequently manage for them and fight to retain. The progressives have the courage of their convictions and will fight like rabid badgers for every element of their ongoing radical transformation of the United States into the world’s first woke-utopia. The state of California, for example, is getting positively ferocious in its campaign to force woke teaching into the state’s schools and stamp out any remaining pockets of resistance. The Blaze reports:
Governor Gavin Newsom and Democrats in Sacramento are rolling out new penalties for school districts that break state rules.
Among those penalties are a threatened $1.5 million fine if a school district refuses to back a state curriculum mentioning the late California gay rights leader Harvey Milk.
Officials will also be investigating board members, be creating new laws to fight banning books that are generally considered wildly inappropriate for children, and have issued a lawsuit against the school district that’s challenging a policy that requires schools to notify families when a child claims to identify as transgender.
More power to them.
The boldness of Democrats in pressing their agenda is impressive and well worth emulating. When progressives overspend, overregulate, shred the Constitution, censor, spy on the law-abiding, unleash criminals, imprison their political opponents, and abandon protection of the nation’s southern border, conservatives complain and take out campaign ads promising tax cuts for the rich. The Republicans then rescue the disastrous progressive programs with efficiency-oriented adjustments and push for tax increases with which to fund this Leviathan “responsibly.”
Conservatives will not save this nation from willful self-destruction. Only reformers can do that—if anyone can. The fact that we have only around 20 of them in the U.S. House of Representatives is disheartening. The fact that some of those 20 often act rather eccentrically, as one might well expect from a small gang of political outlaws, provides even less cause for optimism.
The nation careens past numerous “Bridge Out” signs, and nobody dares to put a hand to the brake.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal; The Wall Street Journal; ZeroHedge; The Blaze