They want budget cuts, but why?
It is hard for me to disagree with Lawrence O’Donnell, the MSNBC cablecaster, that Joe Biden got virtually a total victory over the Republicans in the budget debate even though I think O’Donnell is so fiercely Joe Biden and so biased and so tasteless as to go over the squalid side of Rudy Guiliani, including shots of his melting hair dye. That is outside the limits for “The West Wing” sense of high standards for civility in politics, some episodes of which were written by O’Donnell. But he is accurate on this matter even if the staff and the President himself in his Friday night Oval Office speech insisted the deal was a hard fought compromise in which both sides had to give some things up.
What had Biden given up? The overall spending will be about the same. The requirement of work for adult age welfare assistance is offset by increased numbers of veterans and other groups getting SNAP assistance. Permits allowing the building of a pipeline in West Virginia were done to satisfy Joe Manchin, not Republicans, and failures to raise defense spending, part of the balance that achieved the one percent overall budget increase, will be supported by Lindsey Graham and other Republicans in a new measure in the coming months. The ten billion cut from the money to enforce the IRS will be used for other purposes rather than saved, cutting the IRS just a way to protect rich people from getting audited. Yes, the Biden Administration got no new taxes from the rich, but that has for years now been the Republican bottom line, and the restart of repaying student loans depends on what the Supreme Court decides.
So Joe Biden’s experience in negotiation bore fruit, turning the threat of a default by the Republicans as to the Biden advantage, as O’Donnell said, because they didn’t want to do that and, I might add, they would be blamed for it. Biden was smart on the politics and had deployed his forces well, much in command of his government, even if some more falls such as at the Air Force graduation by him might think he no longer fit for office. Well, not yet, and the fallback is that even if he has been diminished he could preside over a formidable cabinet and White House staff to continue his liberal agenda as happened when Reagedn was a figurehead of his considerably able cabinet and staff.
Trump and De Santis are quibbling with one another about nothing like how long it will take to deal with their agendas, which is unclear for Trump and clearly aimed at “woke”, which can be defined as an awareness of gender and racial issues and includes trans people who make up one third of one percent of the population and aren’t troubling anyone other than needing the medical care they need to alleviate their psychological pain though which of those need treatment are those who declare themselves to be distressed, there no way to test who has dysphoria, which is a problem.
The supposedly rational and humane Republicans are concerned about budget deficits. Put aside that they are just awed at the number of zeros and that they have been saying that Social Security is going broke since I was a teenager and it never happens. Moreover, the economy is moving along nicely, creating additional jobs and enjoying low unemployment so that the amount of the deficit or the overall debt does not seem a crisis or much worth worrying about. The debt will be retired by inflation and minor raises in taxes on the wealthy will balance the budget and even lead to a more generous safety net and extended federal payments for education and other areas of government engagement. I don’t understand why the Fed would curb the economy if inflation is consistently going down, as is the case. Isn’t economic expansion a good thing?
The real reason the Republicans want to cut the budget is to curtail the government because government is by its nature an intrusion on individual liberty. The government taints whatever it touches. There was a recent exchange between Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the left wing populist from New York City, and Chip Roy, the arch Conservative Texas congressman, that made their opposing sides clear. AOC said that no one wanted to reduce their Social Security or medicare payments and Roy responded that he indeed was willing to cut back the government to its bare essentials, presumably without cutting defense spending, while I would add that Ron Paul, a Libertarian, goes further and is willing to cut defense.
The rationale for this view is that the Founding Fathers were very concerned about the dangers of a federal government. They insisted on adding the Bill of Rights to protect citizens from government intrusion and created checks and balances so as to limit one another’s powers and to slow down legislation that might be oppressive. Government was the evil to be avoided, more power to state governments even though they are much further from the pulse of the people than the federal government, and how can you say a state has a local sense of what people want when Houston is to be added up with rural Texas and upstate New York with New York City. Maybe the constituents in Wyoming and Vermont each have a common point of view but that does not apply even to Utah which has a liberal Salt Lake City in the midst of an otherwise red state.
Moreover, look at the Constitution, which offers a very strong federal government and supersedes in many ways the powers of the states. A president was established who was very much like a king in that he was commander in chief and that his cabinet was appointed by him even though subject to legislative approval, as already established in English law, and expenditures subject to what had been appropriated by the legislature, also already according to English law. The states were hemmed in by the interstate commerce clause which means by now virtually any enterprise of momdent given that internet proceedings are included and by the freed traffic of citizens to venture to other states, and so I as a New Yorker could travel to Alabama to protest segregation. The states are reduced to regulating motor vehicle registration, the highways themselves subject to uniformities even about signage ever since the Interstate highways were created in the Fifties and because of commissions to advance uniform state statutes on any number of topics. Any major issue has to be settled in the federal arena as was the case with slavery and presently where the question is over abortion, The Stephen Douglas position that slavery was a state issue could not stand and neither will the Dobbs decision which decided that abortion was to be left to the states will not stand because abortion cuts so deeply into basic values that you cannot change a belief about it because you cross the Mississippi from Missouri to Illinois. There has to be a national definition for when personhood begins, which is difficult given that the two sides of the abortion debate go past one another rather than engage with one another.
Values are the real item at issue and those go deeper than the Constitution itself. As Hume and Montesquieu, two of the Enlightenment philosophers of which the Founding Fathers were well versed, the basis of government was the sentiments of the people. If they felt they could unseat either a monarchy or a republic whatever checks and balances had been put in place that were meant to keep both the people and the government in check. In that sense, a democratic republic is always a great experiment that is reestablished every time in the next election when people decide not to go with the undemocratic forces. The Republicans turned back Joe McCarthy and Biden turned back Trump who instigated an insurrection just by claiming without evidence or a right wing think tank white paper to support the idea that the election of 2020 was rigged.
The question to ask of the election deniers is why they prefer their dubious claims as to a rigged election to the belief that it was on the up and up. What is the resentment or the history that makes it seem to them that the government is so rotten to the core that it should be overthrown or at least slapped in the face just to get it to pay attention. The specter of Waco and the FBI invasion of the Branch Davidians is hardly sufficient. A better guess is the cultural changes with regard to race and sex that have taken place since the Fifties, there being a backlash against these still newfangled groups. But many have absorbed that and there are hardly enough trans people to exist to make people endangered rather than treated as a small exotic cult following, like circus performers that include midgets, where drag queens can be thought amusing rather than disgusting, and so not worthy of overthrowing the government. Maybe this sentiment is not borne of anger and frustration, or depressed economic conditions or declining social status, the usual explanations for right wing activism, but is instead a cultural development whereby people come to think that being cynical, that most people in power are a bunch of crooks, is the sensible and wise pose, especially if they are not grounded in an education that requires them to sift evidence rather than answer to rumor and smugness.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, a remainder and reminder of the old days which were not so great because there were arch segregationists among their Senatorial midst, continues to further the high road, saying as well in public that this isn’t our grandfather’s GOP. He harkens for regular order and negotiations across the aisle done in frank and good faith efforts as if it was Everett Dirkson saying when he supported civil rights legislation that sometimes it is time to change. And Joe Biden, somehow, with a bare majority or even with a minority in the House, gets just about everything he wants during the two and a half years of his Presidency though not attaining the wish list for cradle to grave measures for child and community college education and support for the declining elderly that I also thought to be good ideas. Yes, it was accomplished through an omnibus bill rather than through the enactment of separate bills but that is likely to be the case until there is single party government in both houses and in the executive whether or not it is tied to whether we endanger falling off the cliff by not raising the debt ceiling. Biden can be praised along with Lyndon Johnson as being the master of the legislative branch while being President and Johnson had much bigger legislative majorities behind him. The question is whether taking the high road was a reminder of the past or whether it remains the reliable way ro do governmental business putting aside sex scandals and ad hominem arguments and dealing with real issues. The next election will tell.