The Stupid Party Gets Smart on Spending
Lyndon Johnson feared conservatives as “The Great Beast” in American politics.
The Great Beast flexed its muscles on Wednesday.
The continuing resolution failed because establishment Republicans for once feared upsetting conservative members of their own majority party more than displeasing big-government Democrats in the minority.
The $100 billion for disaster relief exacerbated the greatest disaster currently facing the American people: a $36 trillion debt. Where can taxpayers receive relief for that debt disaster?
The bill contained $31 billion for farmers, a likely pay raise for congressmen, and funding for an anti-First Amendment abomination called the Global Engagement Center. The contents of the 1,500 pages of legislation sprung on legislators at the last minute seemed yet another Trojan Horse containing all sorts of goodies.
Speaker Mike Johnson negotiated this monstrosity despite such teachable moments as the 2024 presidential election and the ouster of his predecessor Kevin McCarthy for habitually caving to Democrats. Remarkably, Johnson required mid-week outrage from fellow Republicans before understanding the 77,275,579 Nov. 5 “re: leviathan” memos.
Senator Rand Paul called Johnson “a weak, weak man.” His fellow Kentuckian, Representative Tom Massie, pledged to vote for someone else to be the speaker when the new Congress convenes.
Elon Musk tweeted, “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!”
Presumably, Musk meant not just plebe congressmen but the speaker, too.
Establishment Republicans, even ones wearing MAGA clothing, understand threats to their jobs better than they do existential threats to the United States.
The national debt now exceeds the annual gross domestic product. It amounts to more than 80 times Elon Musk’s net worth (and some greater number larger than the net worths of Massie and Paul). The reason for this crushing, Fat Albert weight of debt seems obvious even to Dumb Donald. The trillion-dollar deficits of the Obama Administration returned in 2020 — and never left. COVID spending levels became the new normal.
The shortfall in the most recent fiscal year reached $1.8 trillion. Despite revenues rising by 11 percent in fiscal year 2024 from 2023, the deficit increased by 8 percent ($138 billion). The House, where spending bills originate, controlled the lower body during that period.
Within that bloated budgetary pie graph, sits a massive, revolting slice. Thirteen percent of FY2024’s federal budget constituted interest payments servicing the debt. That’s the third biggest piece of the pie. It grows with both the debt and the rising interest rates that so often go along with incontinent borrowing. So, too, likely will inflation.
Some Republicans get this. The ones who do not need to get primaried.
Back in quaint times when the country owed merely $32 trillion, Speaker Kevin McCarthy boasted of a debt-ceiling deal with President Joe Biden: “I think we did pretty dang good for the American public.” Nineteen months later, the national credit card bill amounts to almost $4 trillion more than it did then. A few Republicans, reviled as malcontents by members of their own caucus, pointed out then that McCarthy had hosed conservatives. More, as events of this past week show, have caught on to this perennial scam.
Thursday’s dam-breaking disgust happily recalled 2005, when George W. Bush attempted to foist Harriet Miers upon the U.S. Supreme Court. After Republican presidents had placed Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and other left-wing jurists on the court, conservative voters maxed out their tolerance with the happy consequence of Samuel Alito and a string of sensible judges since.
The Republican Party is not on spending where it was on judges in 2005. It approaches that I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-gonna-take-it-anymore breaking point.
John Stuart Mill called Conservatives “the stupid party,” a sobriquet that the late Sam Francis and others applied to the Republican Party. The events of the last week do not graduate the Stupid Party to an advanced placement class. But the Stupid Party looks smarter at the end of the week than it did at the beginning.
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