American Labour Representatives looking over battle-fields in France

Will the Republican manufactured debt ceiling fight be resolved? Almost certainly, the signs are all there that there is a deal to be had. As long as various dumbasses (I’m looking at you Gang of Six and all 85 of the House Republican freshmen) stop sticking their fingers in the gears, that is.

But what happens afterwards? This is not a pick up game of stick ball, where when the final out is called all the teams break up and are reformed in a different configuration for the next one. The policy fight is not the only thing going on here.

On the policy fight side we can say without fear of contradiction that the Republicans won. Unless the Reason and Sanity Fairy gets of his ass and sprinkles a ton of fairy dust over the capital the final deal will include at least a trillion in real dollar spending reductions, and no reinvestment of our “peace dividend” for getting out of Iraq at the end of this year and whenever the hell we get out of Afghanistan (Remember Afghanistan?).

No matter what the final contours of the deal are, it will be in the Republican frame of all cuts and no revenue. Even if you are always and totally a partisan Democrat (not that there is anything wrong with that, stronger partisan Dems would have made this a very different fight) you will not be able to spin this as a win. At best it will be like a John LeCarre novel where there are no winners just survivors.

But not everyone is going to be a survivor and that might be the silver lining in this very gray cloud of staggeringly stupid and boneheaded policy. Certainly John Boehner is in his one and only term as Speaker of the House. Only the Weeper from Reading could make the third most powerful position in the nation (maybe second if you figure that the VP is mostly waiting around to be powerful) look so weak.

Appearances matter in politics and for the last 200 days all appearances have looked as though the Speaker was holding on the ears of a tiger, in the form of the Tea Party Freshmen in Congress. While it might look vaguely possible to steer a tiger by tugging on her ears, the reality is all you do is piss off the tiger more.
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It's the Constitution, Stupid! Remember when they used to teach Civics? by Peter Vidrine, on Flickr

Our system of government seems to be broken, and there is a reason, basically the people who put in the base inputs, the voters who elect governing officials, don’t understand how their government works.

We live in a nation that has an increasingly dysfunctional government. We have seen it in the way that the Senate in the 111th Congress was completely broken by the unprecedented use of the filibuster and holds on legislation. More than 400 bills which passed the House never saw a vote in the Senate for this very reason.

It is even worse than that when you have a House of Representatives that votes on a bill that insists that if the Senate does not act on a bill it has already voted down, then the House bill will become and I quote “the law of the land”. The fact that this bill completely flew in the face of the tripartite system of government we have did not prevent it from being brought to a vote and garnering a majority of the House, all those voting for it being Republicans.

It is the kind of thing that activists and political junkies know but don’t really think about, that most Americans don’t have a working grasp of how things actually work in government but a new report out today show just how bad things really are.

There is a set of tests that are given in the 4th, 8th and 12th grades. As part of these tests there are questions about civics, the basic functions of the Federal government. Only one in 5 12th graders answered well enough to be considered to have a proficient or advanced understanding of the subject.
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I am having a problem with a word, it is one that we’re hearing a lot lately, seriousness. Now having been ‘round the block a few times I have come to the conclusion that when I hear Right Wing talkers like Robert Samuelson and Republicans using a word over and over then I tend to think they are in the process of redefining it.

Today’s little nugget of nothing from Samuelson is all about the false equivalence between the supposed lack of seriousness on both sides. Of course La Samuelson goes after the Dems first insisting that we look at cutting entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare and then conflating those two expensive and troubled programs with the much more solvent and non-deficit producing Social Security.

He does take a half hearted swipe at the Republicans and their abject failure to even consider increasing taxes at all to bring down our deficits. But Samuelson has a point that he wants to make in this “A pox on both your houses” column. Here, I’ll let him make it:

Our budget problem is conceptually simple. Government’s spending commitments, driven by more retirees and uncontrolled health costs, vastly exceed the existing tax base. There is an argument about how fast changes should be made to protect the economic recovery.

He is right as far as he goes. The problem is that Samuelson is not really, um, err, serious about this issue himself. Yes we do have a problem that we don’t have enough money for our commitments and yes health care costs are going up and that is squeezing the budget more as we keep our commitments to the poor and elderly to provide them with health care.

However, the solution is not finding a way to slash these programs so that they provide less care and do nothing to control costs. The solution is to fix the underlying problem, that our health care markets are fundamentally flawed.

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Burning Man 2009 by JahFae, on Flickr

There is an apocryphal quote from the Vietnam War “We had to destroy the village to save it”. I call it apocryphal because its attribution is murky and it has been distorted from the original quote over time. However it is still a powerful idea that leaders can get so close to their immediate goals that they lose sight of the bigger picture of what they are trying to achieve.

The quote comes from the story of Ben Tre , a provincial capital in the Mekong Delta. The United States Army made the decision to shell and bomb the town, even though there were large numbers of civilians in it, in order to break the Viet Cong hold on the town. They destroyed the town to deny it to the enemy. Not exactly a productive thing to do when you are fighting a counter insurgency.

It sees that this kind of thinking has infected the Congressional Republicans. Yesterday Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Dr. Evil –VA) said that he and his caucus, who control the House of Representatives, will not take up the issue of raising the debt ceiling until after it actually is hit. Right now the Treasury department estimates this will happen no later than May 15th.

Why is the House Majority Leader going to wait? Because he sees political advantage in playing with the nations credit rating. You see even when we a prevented by law from borrowing any more money there are ways that the Treasury department can shift dollars around for a few weeks to keep paying for things. They think they can get us through June and into July before those emergency measures run out.

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As a life long optimist (yes, I have been called a Polly Anna or Ann of Green Gables more than once) I tend to see the sunny side of things and focus on the positive. After all if there is going to be a bad outcome, why focus on it? Why not focus on how to avoid and go down fighting the good fight?

But today I see a lot of black clouds on the horizon. The way that the budget fight played out makes me very concerned for the next big issue, the debt ceiling. As important as not shutting down the government was and is, putting the United States in a position where we even look like there is a question of defaulting on our debt is incredibly dangerous.

We owe a lot of money in the form or Treasury bonds. Right now we pay a very, very low rate of interest on that debt. Part of the reason that we do so is that everyone in the world is confident that the U.S. is not going to default on that debt.

The reason that we must raise the debt ceiling is that we just passed a budget that will spend more than we take in this year. That combined with the maturing of previously sold bonds means that we must borrow more money in the form of bonds to meet these obligations. The problem is that the amount we can borrow is limited by law and would have to be raised by Congress.

If they do not raise that limit then someone, somewhere is not going to be paid the money they are owed by the United States. That brings up the question of how safe any of those bonds are. When that happens the amount of interest that bond buyers require to loan us money will go up and everything the government does becomes more expensive. That is before we get into the follow on problems for the global economy where the United States represents 40% of the total.

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FY2011 Budget by TalkMediaNews, on Flickr"

So, now that House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan has unveiled his steaming tightly coiled pile of a budget the argument in the media is starting. It is to be strongly hoped that the Traditional Media outlets will look at the facts of this budget.

You know the little problems like the draconian cuts are not going to actual deficit reduction because they are being used to pay for tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Just to raise your blood pressure a little this morning, let me give you and example. Under this budget a single person making $75,000 a year (a nice chunk of change) would pay the same tax rates as people who make multiple millions a year.

Another issue that has to be brought up again and again is that this budget would gut the newly minted financial regulations, would gut the EPA, would gut the Social Security Administration (setting up the argument that it is poorly run and needs to be ended all together) as well as ending Medicare and Medicaid as we know them within ten years.

As if all that shite were not enough, there is the fact that like all of the proposals that Rep. Ryan puts forward, the numbers don’t work. He assumes that if we pass his budget in 4 years, just 48 months, the unemployment rate will fall to 4%.

I’d love that to happen, but I have this mental defect, I can’t get behind something that has no basis in reality, or as in this case is actually counter factual. Over the last two years the only thing that has kept the economy afloat was major federal spending. Business is sitting on 1.4 trillion in cash and has shown no sign of wanting to use it to stimulate demand. Rep. Ryan wants to slash hundreds of billions from the budget every year for the next decade. Is there really anyone out there who thinks that the resultant loss of jobs is going to improve the growth rate or the unemployment numbers?
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It is a bit of a philosophical conundrum if one can actually do good through bad methods. Of course you have to define good and bad, which are always value judgments. Let’s make this a little more concrete; one of the Presidents unfulfilled promises is to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. It is a national shame that a prison was built specifically to try to avoid the legal system of the United States. There have been credible allegations of torture there, as well as statements by Bush era officials that the totality of treatment there also rises to the level of torture.

Over time the numbers of prisoners held there have been reduced from a high of over 800 to 174 today. The problem is that for those 174 they are basically in legal limbo. 50 of them are in the category of having no plans to charge nor will they be released. This is an obvious problem for our system of law. For the remaining 124 the plan has been to treat them like other criminals, charge them in federal court, present the evidence against them and see if we can convince a jury they should be imprisoned in one of our Super-Max prisons here the United States, just like any other criminal.

However the fear mongering by the Republicans and the acceptance of it by some of our more….oh hell I am just going to say it cowardly Democrats, has made this a political issue. In the recently passed Defense Authorization Bill, language was included that prevents the spending of military money for moving the prisoners from Guantanamo to the United States, even for trials and such. The language also limits but not completely prohibits the Executive branch from releasing the prisoners to a third country without a series of certifications and exemptions that, in practice, will make it all but impossible.

The White House and the President are still clear in their desire to close one of national shames, the Gitmo prison, but to do so they may have to resort to tactics used and abused by the criminal Bush administration, namely a signing statement.

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I was told by my more aggressively Lefty friends before the election that even if the Republicans won control or one or both houses of Congress it would not really be that different. I can even suppose that is true, from a 100,000 foot perspective. There will be legislation that we don’t approve of, there will be fights about funding unemployment for the growing number of Americans who are becoming 99ers and other issues. It is to be hoped and expected that the President will hold the line on issues like abortion or the Affordable Care Act, but there will be some horse trading that none of us will enjoy because even though the Republicans are in large part insane, the work of the government has to continue.

Where this breaks down is in the details, when you drop down to say tree-top level and look at exactly what the Republicans think “the work of the people” is. Let’s take the new chair of the incoming Chair of the House and Government Reform Committee, California Republican Darrel Issa.

Rep Issa is, well, not very freaking bright. Which is a real problem because he will control a very powerful committee and have subpoena power to call anyone he likes before his committee. Just yesterday he said “The Obama Administration is one of the most corrupt in history”. You might want to pick your jaw up off of the desk now. That’s right friends and neighbors Rep. Issa thinks that two years of President Obama is worse than 8 year of President Bush.

What is it that this Congressman of very little brain (with apologies to Winnie The Pooh) thinks is so corrupt? Well, let’s look at a quote from his interview on CNN yesterday:

, “In saying that this is one of the most corrupt administrations, which is what I meant to say there, when you hand out $1 trillion in TARP just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect.”

Unpacking that a little bit we can see that, A) this president did not hand out a trillion in TARP funds it was the previous president B) that money was spent and now is paid back it is not like it is sitting in a warehouse somewhere being bundled up and handed out, C) that the stimulus was not a trillion dollars, D) there has been very little corruption associated with the spending of that money, E) more than half of the stimulus was in the form of tax cuts so could not be corrupting in awarding that money, F) the ACA does expand health care, but tragically does it though the private market, so any corruption there is on the part of business, and finally G) no matter what Republican dogma states growing government does not always equal corruption.

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The abuse of the filibuster has been a story that every political junkie in the nation is aware of. It might be a little opaque to most folks but the fact is that right now a filibuster, which is just an insistence of continuing the debate and amendment process in the Senate, does nothing of the sort. When a motion for cloture (cutting off of debate and moving to voting) fails in the current Senate, that august body does not keep working on the issue at hand but moves on to other work.

This is where legislation basically dies or is pushed to the end of the year where Republicans can complain that it is “being rammed down the throats of the American people”. It also holds up nominations for things like Ambassadors and Federal Judgeships.

The unprecedented number of “filibusters” that the Republican minority has engaged in has fairly broken the ability of the Senate to work as a democratic body. Literally hundreds of bills were passed by the House and have never received a vote by the Senate. It does not matter that they have majority support, they are kept in limbo by the fiction that they are being debated. There is no debate going on about these bills, they are being blocked from any consideration by the Republicans.

While this might be a good tactic politically it is very bad for the actual job of the Congress which is running the nation. If you are a true believer in small government you might think that no action by Congress is a good thing, but the reality is that a nation of 308 million needs a working Congress to do things like, oh I don’t know, fund the government or approve judges and ambassadors.

To address this problem Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico is proposing some rule changes right at the start of the 112th Congress. Up to now it has been the tradition of the Senate to just maintain the rules of the previous session without changes. This makes the threshold for changes very high, except at the beginning of a new Congress where the Senate is allowed to form new rules by a simple majority, if it chooses to do so instead of continuing the old rules.

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There are times when anyone involved in politics should be more concerned with governance than crass political advantage. After all there is always the peoples work to for any Congress or other political body to be about. Still there are times when it is worthwhile to make sure that you opponents are in such disarray that they can’t function and thus can not hold on to power in the future. This seems like one of those times to me.

As fractious a the Democratic Party can be with its liberals, moderates, and FSM help us all, conservative members right now we are not the party with the most fissures in our coalition. The Republican Party has multiple clear divides within itself right now. There are the Establishment Republicans like Senate Minority Leader McConnell and soon to be Majority Leader Boehner (Hey John! Where are all those jobs?) then you have the Tea Party fueled whack jobs like Rep. Michele Bachman and Rand Paul. There are folks who even try to straddle the divide, purely for reasons of power, like Sen. DeMint.

This is just in Washington of course. Out in the wider nation there are some number (I think it might be Pi) of small Tea Party groups , and the old guard Religious Right are all out there thinking they are suddenly going get all the items on their wish list and a pony as well. The fact that some of their core goals are contradictory to each other has not quite penetrated and this is where we and crass political considerations come in.

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