The House and Senate leadership met Wednesday in Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R, WI) office, along with White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, to see if there’s any possibility of the Progressive-Democrats working with Republicans to get Federal spending under control. It seems not.
Both parties claim to want to increase our ability to defend ourselves and our friends and allies, and so both claim to want to increase defense spending. Only one of the two seems serious, however. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA):
In these talks, Leader Schumer and I will continue to insist on parity in the caps[.]
Parity in the spending caps, she meant. The icon of Progressive-Democracy in Congress is conflating parity with equal value.
There will be no domestic spending available if we can’t defend ourselves. We will have nothing with which to deal with the opioid epidemic, veterans, pensions, disaster relief, National Institutes of Health, Children’s Health Insurance Program and community health centers, or infrastructure rebuilding, or education, or Social Security, or Medicare, or Medicaid or anything else if we can’t defend ourselves.
Or if we merely go broke, whether by being forced to spend all of our money just to pay the vig on that debt or by defaulting outright.
Parity—this is not the same as equal value. It is, however, another example of the Progressive-Democrats’ constant demand for equal outcomes rather than true equality.
It may be time to kill the filibuster on matters involving the Federal budget and spending bills, at least for the current Congressional session. The alternative, if the Republicans stand tall on spending, along with getting their messaging skills up to snuff—finally—is to let the Progressive-Democrats shut down the Federal government over their demand to spend us into oblivion as their price for letting us spend enough on defense to rebuild our military.
To do any of that, though, Republicans also will have to understand that parity is not equality.