That is the true despotism in this debate, a tyranny you're allowing to continue -- all while pathetically invoking the "Founders." Good grief. Washington is whirling in his grave like a lathe, Madison spinning like a top, over your ilk.
Even more appalling, you apply the handcuffs of "compromise" (there was none) to our side, but not to theirs. We must be satisfied with $38 bn in fictional "cuts" while they can be overjoyed by $1400 bn in actual spending in money we don't have (and $2600 bn more in spending from taxes, most of which is not justified, either morally or Constitutionally.)
The Founders explicitly and Constitutionally forbade an income tax, and all but a few of them were quite vocal about having, ZERO national debt. [Hamilton's was probably the only significant voice in favor of borrowing.] Beyond the 47% of discretionary spending on the military, most money allocated in this budget is implicitly forbidden by the Tenth Amendment; and ALL of the Entitlement Programs of the 1930's and beyond are forbidden by the Bill of Rights, by explicit Article I (Sections 7, 8 and 9) Constitutional strictures, pre-ratification Constitutional debate, and post-revolutionary tradition and precedent. Please don't pretend you know anything about US history or governance; you simply don't. Your position is untenable and completely at odds with the America that the Founders created.
Theirs' is the side that needs spending, not ours. We should have shut the government down and let 0bama continue to proclaim that he would veto stopgap funding that paid the military. 0 would have taken the blame for that, and would have caved quickly; and once the armed forces were taken care of, there was no reason for us to do anything but raise, not lower, the ante.
You have been hosed, my FRiend. Completely, thoroughly, and shamelessly. And now you're trying to sell your silly Republican talking points on FR. No sale. Boehner can swallow a crap sandwich and tell us how good it tastes with his mouth full, but informed conservatives aren't having any.
“We should have shut the government down and let 0bama continue to proclaim that he would veto stopgap funding that paid the military. 0 would have taken the blame for that, and would have caved quickly; and once the armed forces were taken care of, there was no reason for us to do anything but raise, not lower, the ante.”
And what your approach to this subject does is to thoroughly jeopardize our chances at victory next year in the Prez elections. What do you think would happen once you would have had the gov’t shut down? Every day the MSM, which in case you haven’t noticed, is not on our side, would have been out there blaming the Pubs for the shutdown, while we would have had little voice to get our point across to the majority of Americans who get their news in soundbites on the evening news. Your mistake is to think that everyone out there thinks just like you do, and they don’t.
There are tons out there that don’t like the gov’t going through constant meltdowns, and who just want the parties to compromise and come up with good solutions to our fiscal problems. Right after this most recent crisis where a compromise was reached and the gov’t didn’t shut down, a poll was taken (granted it was a CNN poll) that gave Obama and the Dems the credit for solving this fiscal crisis, not the Republicans. And it was by a 10 plus point majority.
And tell me, how many times, Mr. American Historian, did the threat of shutting down the gov’t occur, I might add, only in recent history? I’ll do the work for you, there have been 11 shutdowns since 1981, and with the exception of 1995, all have been for less than 3 days. In 1995 one lasted 5 days and the other lasted 21 days. Now, it’s obvious to me that our forefathers never expected a gov’t shutdown to be part of their plans for our form of governing as all the threats and actualities of a shutdown have happened since 1981. I don’t like the idea of a gov’t shutdown. I don’t like threats that can have huge consequences on how our gov’t operates day to day and how it affects our citizenry and/or our military service members. It stinks. It reminds me of the Dems in both Wisconsin and Indiana leaving their states legislatures in order to avoid having votes taken on issues they didn’t like. I see it as dereliction of duty.
If the constant threats coming out of the Pub Party right now to shut down the gov’t or not raise the debt ceiling haven’t already seriously damaged our Party’s image in the minds of the public, the actuality of it happening will end up being blamed on the Pub Party by the MSM and the point pounded in every day by the news media. And all of this chest pounding and threats by the Pubs to use shutdown as a lever to extract more from the Dems won’t work because we don’t have both Houses of Congress (we have 1/2 of one, luckily the majority half), no Senate, and no Presidency.
The Dems can hold out as they have no more to lose than we do because they have the MSM to do their propaganda for them every day of the week. Meanwhile more of the “common” folk would be getting aggravated because the MSM would be scaring them of the dire consequences coming their way, and symbolic moves would be made to make that aggravation all the more obvious. The President can control much of what would be shut down, and who would be affected fiscally, not the Pubs. In the case of not approving the debt increase, whole markets would be affected, it would cost a bundle, no one out there in the world would service our debt w/out charging a heap to do so, interest rates would rise (including on credit cards, which would affect huge swathes of people), and the odds are that we wouldn’t extract that much more from the Dems to justify any shutdown or financial disruption in the first place. I just think you live in LaLaLand as to what will really happen if all you chest thumpers managed to force a gov’t shut down or cause a failure to raise the debt ceiling.
People are financially scared right now, many living from paycheck to paycheck (including our military people), and the last thing they need to hear about is Armegeddon (whether it is true or not, that’s how it will be portrayed in the MSM) and constant threats of disruption to their daily lives. They are under a lot of stress without the additional burden of a dysfunctional gov’t.
My whole point is that we not take the chance of ruining our ability to win the Senate and the Presidency one year and three months from now, by falling on our sword at the present for only minor gains in savings while the Dems still control both the Senate, and the Presidency with its veto power. We are drawing our line in the sand at the wrong time politically because we are so gung ho with our new Tea Party strength that we can’t seem to keep our pants on for the sake of the big picture, which is to capture it all during the next election.
If we don’t capture it all, those Tea Partiers will get nowhere fast in the future in their fiscal responsibility attempts because we still will not have a majority in at least one house of Congress, and perhaps no Presidency. If that happens, I will be the very first to blame people such as yourself who insist on ultimatums now when we don’t have the votes to back them up. Fie on the Party destruction you stand to cause.