Tag Archives: political parties

Republican Silliness

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This time it includes more than just a few members of the Republican Chaos Caucus. The Senate passed its version of a reconciliation bill that includes a suitable start on tax rate reductions, and the House Republican caucus agrees with that—those reductions are consistent with the earlier House-passed reconciliation bill. However, the Senate’s bill doesn’t include enough spending cuts to suit the House Republicans, and the House Republicans are right on that.

This is where the silliness comes in. A few Republicans, including some from outside the Chaos Caucus, have announced enough “No” votes before the Senate bill comes to the House floor to kill the bill outright. That’s silly.

Instead of just killing the bill, or refusing to take it up at all, the House Republicans and those one or two Progressive-Democrat Representatives capable of reasoned argument should debate the Senate’s reconciliation bill—they’d be the big boys in the room, since the Senate Republicans ducked away from the House’s bill altogether—and then pass the Senate bill amended to include spending cuts acceptable to the House. That would create a House-Senate disagreement in the same bill, which would send the modified bill to the normal House-Senate Conference, wherein the tax rate cuts would be preserved, and badly needed much larger spending cuts could—should—be inserted into a Conference-approved bill for up-or-down majority votes in each house. Likely the much larger spending cuts still would be less than the House so correctly wants, but they’d likely be much larger than the Senate’s going-in proposal.

And, as is the case with budget framework reconciliation bills, it would set the terms of debate for those spending cuts in each appropriation bill. The difference this time, though, would be those much larger spending cuts in the framework would set a much higher floor than heretofore for spending cuts in those dozen appropriation bills.

Say they Did

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James Freeman, who does the Best of the Web column for The Wall Street Journal, has waxed optimistic about the Progressive-Democratic Party’s future, given a New York Times editorial he ran across over the past weekend.

It was a most pleasant surprise to see a weekend editorial in the New York Times of all places suggesting a step back from the progressive ledge. The Times is now urging Democrats to reconsider a number of the destructive ideas that party leaders embraced after reading about them in the New York Times. Let’s be optimistic and call this a great start if the newspaper wants to embark on an era of reform.

Per the Times, as Freeman quoted it:

First, they should admit that their party mishandled Mr Biden’s age. Leading Democrats insisted that he had mental acuity for a second term when most Americans believed otherwise. Party leaders even attempted to shout down anybody who raised concerns, before reversing course and pushing Mr Biden out of the race. …
Second, Democrats should recognize that the party moved too far left on social issues after Barack Obama left office in 2017. The old video clips of Ms Harris that the Trump campaign gleefully replayed last year—on decriminalizing the border and government-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners—highlighted the problem…. [Elision in the original]
Even today, the party remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences—by race, gender, sexuality and religion—rather than our shared values.

Say Progressive-Democratic Party leadership and members do change how they talk about the issues us average Americans care about—which would include, for starters, actually talking about those issues. On what basis would we believe those persons have changed what they’d do were they restored to political power? The same persons who Freeman thinks should admit that their party mishandled Mr Biden’s age, and who he thinks should recognize that the party moved too far left, and who he says remain[] too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences would still be in place.

Why would any rational American believe these Wonders have suddenly shorn themselves of their most tenaciously held ideology?

Alternatively, consider these persons actually changing their core ideology. If they toss so readily and quickly that long-held central tenet in favor of a new central tenet, how could any rational American trust them not to toss equally readily and quickly their new central tenet in favor of yet another central tenet—or revert to that original, wholly divisive and otherwise dishonest centrality?

What’s really needed to restore us to a viable two-party political system is a wholly new and separate political party created out of whole cloth, difficult as that is to achieve—the last successful effort being the Republican Party in 1854. The Progressive-Democratic Party incumbents already have amply demonstrated their lack of trustworthiness.

That Includes You, Mr Newsom

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California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom claims to be worried that Party is too judgmental and toxic and that We talk down to people. We talk past people.

Then he said this:

I mean, this idea that we can’t even have a conversation with the other side…or the notion we just have to continue to talk to ourselves or win the same damn echo chamber, these guys are crushing us[.]

These guys are crushing us. Not, “We need to converse/debate/argue/talk with folks about ideas that we think help all Americans.” It’s “We need to do better at beating the other side so we can win.”

Party will remain toxic to the American idea as long as its goal is wholly independent of working toward the national weal and wholly focused instead on doing down the other side.

A Cost of the Left’s Obstructionism

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This one is our national debt and the interest due on it.

• the average interest rate on debt will exceed the economic growth rate by 2045, sparking the beginning of a debt spiral
• Federal debt held by the public will rise from 100% of GDP in FY2025 to 156% of GDP by 2055
• annual deficits will grow from 6.2% of GDP in 2025 to 7.3% of GDP by 2055

The obstructionism of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party isn’t even centered on principle, only on anti-Trumpism and anti-Republicanism and anti-Conservatism.

Potentiating the economic disaster that our debt and associated interest payments portend, those things would accumulate into the loss of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. That, in turn, would feed back negatively into our economy, forcing it onto the vagaries of foreign currencies and currency exchange rates.

This is why the DOGE-led spending cuts must be enacted into law by Congress. This is what the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s obstructionism will cost us.

Money Saved or Wasted?

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Amanda Bennett, ex-previous head of USAGM, is upset with Kari Lake’s (the new head of the US Agency for Global Media) characterization of the $150 million the agency is expected to spend over the next several years on its lease of a new (relative to USAGM’s prior digs) office building.

The prior building that USAGM occupied for a very pretty penny was rundown and rapidly failing further, so Bennet negotiated a good deal for the new office building, and she’s justifiably proud of the deal she got. As far as that deal goes.

The government didn’t lose money [as Lake claimed], it saved—a lot. We estimated that savings over the 15-year lease—including the free rent and millions in cash incentives—would total more than $150 million.

But the USAGM has long been a Leftist propaganda arm, thoroughly deviated from its ROC of passing along factual information, objectively, to other nations, especially those whose governments seek to prevent such data from getting to their subjects.

My question for Bennett, then, is this: how much money would the Federal government save if those $150 million weren’t spent at all and USAGM eliminated from the government’s books?

As the kids like to say, Madam, get real.