Posted on 11/25/2013 5:51:38 AM PST by Shout Bits
Revolutions are breaks from the norm; like a hand grenade in a room, their results are unpredictable. The ordinary coup in a third world nation is not a revolution, but rather the norm in power transfers. In a coup, the base rules of thuggary are unchanged, whereas a revolution requires a rewrite of the rules, usually with unintended results. This week, the US Senate opened the door to revolution by suspending decades of tradition regarding Presidential Advise and Consent. While the immediate results are clear – left-wing courts and agencies – nobody who voted to abolish Cloture likely understands the full possibilities.
After blocking Pres. Bush's judicial and executive nominees for most of his second term, Democrats found turnabout unpalatable. After all, while the GOP does not see regulators as particularly useful, Dems and especially Obama see them as essential. Washington's bureaucrat army invents new laws to stymie capitalism and industry in ways Congress never could. Coronating radical leftists like the EPA's Lisa Jackson and the NLRB's Richard Cordray is as critical to the Dem agenda as any Congressional seat.
Perhaps this asymmetric value in Senate confirmations is why the GOP never lifted the 60 vote cloture rule and were shocked when the Dems did. In any event, at least for the next several months the flood gates of leftist Presidential appointments are open. Pres. Obama will start by stacking the DC Circuit with anti-capitalist ideologues, followed by seeding the lower courts with the next generation of progressives.
Maybe the Dems think they can transform and perfect the US quickly and permanently, but eventually they will not be in power. When that day comes, the GOP will have free reign to dismantle the Dem's power base of welfare, unions, and phony Hollywood environmentalists.
The best a modern GOP president has ever done is slow the pace of the US's transformation from a constitutional republic to a socialist democracy. The US is on a sort of ratchet wherein every new program, even if unpopular or unworkable, can never be repealed. Few regulations are abandoned either, so the nation's direction is only left, either fast or slow.
On reason the nation almost never turns toward individualism and free markets is the populace's dependence and acceptance of free money – boiling the frog slowly. Another is the Senate's former safeguard against rash action. Only once in a generation, as with FDR's Social Security, JBL's Medicare, and Obama's socialized medicine, do the leftist stars align for great change. Once passed, enough time lapses before a GOP ascendance so that the free money becomes baked into families' budgets and thereby sacred.
No more. Sen. Reid has torpedoed the cloture rule that impedes leftist progress, but opens the door for the GOP to eliminate the remaining rule that ratchets the nation ever further left – cloture on legislation. The GOP would be fools not to repeal the 60 vote cloture rule for new laws. Once gone, any manner of leftist milestones would become fair game.
The Davis Bacon act, which essentially funnels government contract money into unions and Dem coffers – gone. The NLRB, which has become a union organizing body – gone. Obamacare, which promises to empower tens of thousands of busybodies over individuals' lives – gone. The Clear Air act, which allows the EPA to regulate carbon – gone or severely modified. Every one of Obama's laws – gone. All of this is possible with a simple majority in the Senate. The Democrats have won the battle of turning the US into a European-style socialist democracy, but Reid's latest maneuver has opened their biggest flank ever. It is as if he thinks he is playing the end game without concern for a reversal in the war for the soul of the US.
Lovers of liberty and observers of Washington rightly worried over Reid's massive, generational power grab. However, his greed is sauce for his goose, and with Obamacare's ever developing failure, it may not be too long before decades of progressivism are on the chopping block. True, the same approach might enable Dems to pass more of their agenda, but they have already won; the only direction remaining is back to center. Reid and his cronies have engineered a revolution that is likely to escape their control.
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“...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness....”
The GOPe likes government programs. They just say they don’t.
Of course this assumes the Republicans have a President and congressional leadership that are willing to be as ruthless as Reid, Obama, et al.
I’m not holding my breath.
Very true, but the GOP does not like the same programs
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