Sometimes it's worth the time to read legislation, before it's passed and after it's passed. Cut, Cap and Balance gave me a belly laugh, but only because I thought 234 clones of The Three Stooges had taken over the House of Representatives.
I quickly realized that was unfair to the obvious intelligence of the Stooges compared with the subversive extremists who now tyrannize the House of Representatives. Even the Stooges would have difficulty lampooning Kantor's Idiots given what they do themselves and to us.
If the requirements could be taken seriously, there isn't time to get the legislation passed and avoid default because it isn't one step debt limit solution. And if you want to take national suicide seriously, you should at least think it over before you pull the trigger. Laugh or cry about this legislative waste of time, more below the fold.
Imagine Good King Canute. "Sea," cried Canute, in Eric Cantor's favorite tale of inspiration. "I command you to come no further! Waves, stop your rolling!. Surf, stop your pounding! Do not dare touch my feet!"
The problem is Cantor's version apparently has the sea backing up and running in terror from his offensive speech. I've never read that one. The heroic Paul Ryan, served as a floor manager of the bill that is the punchline to his tedious humor regurgitated from his years in exile when everyone ignored his ideological roadmaps.
That's Cut Cap and Trade. I'm not just making fun of it. It is nonsensical. It does provide "$1,019,402,000,000 in new budget authority and $1,224,568,000,000 in outlays. It exempts Social Security and other political dynamite. It has a tiny bit of boilerplate on how and a sliding scale down of GDP percentages. The punctuation in this bill carry more power than all the words and the paper it's printed on have more heft and consequences.
Good intentions? Hardly, they would still have to authorize and appropriate every dollar. Medicare would be killed elsewhere. No substance exists so it looks like marker legislation written by a new House page. Constitutional? There has to be a serious question about that Professor Turley.
The final section, ostensibly raising the debt limit, is where you find the real comedy because that is the part they claim that requires a balanced budget and would increase the debt limit. You just have to absolutely, positively grant our three wishes or else we'll tell everyone what a bully you are and screw the country.
The Republican stooges graciously grant $16,700,000,000,000 in total debt authority. All President Obama has to do with his Democratic colleagues is to end constitutional government in the United States and surrender to a House coup.
WTF?
There is no requirement for a balanced budget in that section. Instead there is a requirement that both houses of Congress, one of them with a Democratic Majority, pass (by a required two-thirds majority) a constitutional amendment to submit to the states that effectively destroys congressional power. Congress would require a two-thirds vote to levy or increase any tax. Income would have to equal outgo and spending-taxes would be capped at a fixed percentage of GDP lower than is realistic with these strictures.War.
Whatever, there's no flexibility. President Obama would have to sign the legislation, which doesn't seem likely. If they don't get their constitutional amendment out of Congress, there's no change in the debt limit.
There isn't time to accomplish this before default. The Republican leaders in both Houses know that. It's a big joke. It's a political statement that speakings to the irrelevance of the House, despite its huge Republican Majority and its rabid Tea-Bagger fanatics.
That's why everyone is looking to Obama and the Senate -- virtually everywhere else. The House is all a stage age, not serious, pandering to a bunch of extremists who are rabid and short of thinking intelligence. There is the raw hunger for power in the face of Eric Cantor and in the forlorn hangdog look of John Boehner as he walks with Cantor's shiv in his back. Neither Boehner nor Cantor can be serious players because they can't be trusted. Boehner because Cantor keeps his knife in his back and Cantor because he is a vain, obnoxious fool who is power hungry. Boehner will act when he must, when his side finally puts something on the table and with Nancy Pelosi's assurance of enough votes for passage.
Cantor's knife has weakened the play and made the House majority irrelevant. The closer to the deadline, the more the Democrats must deal with a likely revolt if Medicare or Social Security benefits are touched and the poor and middle class savaged. It makes the entire Cap, Cut and Laugh charade even stranger as the right bows in the direction of the Cantors and Ryans who have undercut what began a a strong bargaining position. It is not a game that can or should be played for laughs.
Why choose this Ass-backwards approach Cap, Cut and Balance. Well, first you'd have to to assume someone was serious because neither the House nor the Senate has put any of the Balanced Budget Amendments offered - and there are many- to a vote. One was reported out of committee in the House, but it has no better chance than the one in the Senate. They don't have the votes in either the House or the Senate for the necessary two-thirds that the Constitutional wisely requires to avoid the passion of the moment dictating the nation's future.
So what House Republicans, if they're serious, are attempting is an end around of the Constitution by threatening to bankrupt the United States unless both house and the President agree to their extortion demands. It's preposterous and funny, but in a way it's also serious because it's the way they think. It's such an absurd idea that if it were serious, I would have to agree that default would be the lesser of evils. Evil is the right word for what House Republicans are doing.
Some fine Constitutionalists these criminals are, demanding that the Constitution be amended to satisfy their demands for not bankrupting the United States. What next? The legislation is silly, but I do listen to intent.
Anyone who thinks President Obama will sign vacuous drive-by bombings such as this lacks for intelligence. You don't have to be a supporter of Obama to know that. That is, unless you're stupid enough to think this is legislation that Republicans ought to prattle on about as they have, given that it on the significance scale it's something like those silly resolutions honoring someone's Aunt Minnie.
Listen to what the Republican members of the House and Senate are boasting about and bragging about. Apart from one aspect it's a joke. And the Republicans are saying that it's fine to blackmail both Houses of Congress and the President into betraying their own oaths to the Constitution so the Republicans can have their weigh and I suppose seize their permanent majority through a Legislative Coup. That would be a hat trick for them, given their recent history.
There's something inherently wrong and very silly about legislation that depends for its purpose on House and Senate Action not yet taken on legislation not yet on the calendar for a vote. One thing the Constitution did not anticipate was a House majority acting in union improperly and at the same time, making themselves immune from expulsion for corrupt behavior as this is.
As a sop, one Republican offered to the Democrats that it would require approval by 38 states The Republicans are assuming, betting hard, that the states will save them by not passing such a stupid amendment, but if sufficient time is taken and enough money spent, Republicans could over enough years seize enough state legislatures to corruptly pass something insane.
Republicans pass this kind of silly legislation all the time, although in the end the result is not always frivolous. They do it for the talking points and because if they don't rubber stamp something like this, they'll find big money and a primary contest waiting on them. John Boehner is being promised one by some Tea-baggers despite his defense of Eric the Idiot. No matter what happens, the Republicans assume someone will come along to save them from themselves, Whether it is the Senate or President Obama -- or even in his day, help us all, George Bush, who was sometimes in a contest with the Republican Congress for the most irrational and extreme act of the day.
Do we have a sane government?
No sane government in the world would approve even the concept of this bill. Where is there a serious partner in the so-called negotiations that mostly seem, "our way or we'll destroy the United States or, if you't do that, watch us destroy the United States." But clearly there's something adrift we're trying to bring back on some sort of sane course.
We have a House Majority that swept into office on a campaign of a Jobs Now Program and now that has morphed into absurdist legislation, an attempted House and GOP coup, a war against unions, labor generally, the poor and middle class. The culture wars are in every piece of Republican legislation.
I don't think the votes would be there if this somehow passed the Senate and if Obama vetoed it. That would require a 2/3rds vote which is no more likely than a 2/3rds vote for this idiocy -- or even less likely for a silly amendment. But then, what purpose would Congress serve if I was wrong. Maybe that's the point of this joke.
Or maybe we're just not a serious country anymore. That's one thing the House Stooge majority says to me. Or Ryan with the current cult belief in Ayn Rand to justify Republican's most extreme views and to justify wiping out more than two centuries of development of one nation, its laws, its concerns and its view of itself. In a time of great distress for so many, to introduce frivolous legislation as part of a scheme to hoodwink a nation with nostrums proven not to work is deeply unserious.
That's a feeling that sometimes creeps up on me. I think of FDR, president when I was born, who began as a fiscal conservative but who was willing to experiment to move the country out of the Great Depression. The recession ended in the month FDR came to office, conveying the burst of confidence he brought. The pain of Depression continued. GDP returned to it pre-Depression levels in 1937. Employment was rising despite loss of more than a million farm jobs, not to a recession, but to dust bowl, a drought and automation. FDR thought it was time to balance the budget. The result was another sharp, deep recession that only reversed when FDR realized the economy was too fragile yet for going to the right. It may happen again. The Cut, Cap and Balance bill is typical of the attitude of right wing Republicans in the 30s.
Had they their way, we would not have developed new classes of Navy ships, before the war, expanded our army as war in Europe blossomed and never have acted as the Arsenal of Democracy. They tried to kill unions in every way possible. Today's Republicans forget the deep wrongness of their past and write silly, stupid legislation.
They know that the country is still far from recovered, but in every case Republicans have taken steps to worsen the pain and make it last longer. They attack the middle class, the poor, school teachers, firemen, police and other public servants, but they have no unkind words for the 1 percent of the Americans who hold most of the wealth - and sit on it. They've bought their officials or, as in the case of Paul Ryan, installed one of their own, a member of one of Wisconsin's wealthiest families, much of it from public contracts.
That's what the whispering is all about. Apart from yesterday's Teabaggers, Republicans with perhaps a whiff of seriousness are hoping their leadership will save the Lemming Party from having to dive over the cliff. Eric Cantor doesn't have the nerve to actually. He has the nerve to get Boehner to make a deal, then stab him in the back for his job.
There is a rumor about that Eric Cantor looks into a full length mirror every day and hefts an oversized gavel, saying to himself: "I know now why so many people see me as charismatic."
If you'd like to read the whole piece of legislation, it's quick and at , there is a GPO PDF.
In the next installment, Ryan Planned Ahead, or something like that if I find time, I'll look at the legislation that Paul Ryan crafted years ago to solve the "Debt Crisis," years before he knew he needed to help invent a "Debt Crisis" to justify extremist legislation in the name of job creation.