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As the intellectually impaired go about readying themselves to celebrate the pending debt ceiling debacle-in-the-making and the government shutdown underway, let's the rest of us take a look at what is being foisted upon us by a Tea Partying minority of the Republican party.
From a commentary on the pages of The New York Times.com, Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute: "The Constitution requires the president to spend what Congress has instructed him to spend, to raise only those taxes Congress has authorized him to impose and to borrow no more than Congress authorizes. ... Lawyers tend to play down policy considerations as a basis for interpreting law. In this case, the consequences are so overwhelmingly on one side that they cannot be ignored by the president and should not be ignored by the courts. If the debt ceiling is not increased, the president should disregard it, and honor spending and tax legislation....
If President Obama spends what the law orders him to spend and collects the taxes Congress has authorized him to collect, then he must borrow more than Congress has authorized him to borrow. If the debt ceiling is not raised, he will have to violate one of these constitutional imperatives."
Anyone but the deluded, clueless and/or marginally conscious can see the crisis is being created by the very congress that claims it's Mr. Obama's fault for not being willing to negotiate away a law passed by the congress, tested by the Supreme Court and ratified again by an election of the same president.
The minority I refer to is a part of a House of Representatives with a 90 percent re-incumbency and 10 percent approval rating. This discrepancy is due to that fact that thanks to gerrymandering, 90 percent of the Representatives are all but guaranteed re-election as long as they please the voters in their districts. But when their actions are assessed by their effects on the rest of us, they only earn a 10 percent approval rate.
And these are the people who are holding us hostage. The people who were sent to DC to govern and are seeking to destroy the organization they were sent to govern.
I'm reminded of my earlier years as a manufacturing executive being sent to settle the union management climate in a small southern town: A town of good, not stupid but ignorant people, who refused to acknowledge the negative effects of their illegal strikes. The thrill of sticking it to "the company" that employed them was sufficient to make them think they were impervious to the possible consequences of destroying the company that employed them.
I won't speculate why the thrill of doing whatever necessary to make this president look like a failure seems to be the hallmark of this House of Representatives. I'm certain racism is in the mix as well as an "otherness" that usually frightens the hell out of "real" Americans, whose own ancestors dripped in "otherness" at one time.
Well this time my trust is in the president, the seeming only adult inside the Beltway, to pay the bills even if he must invoke the 14th amendment and it's imperative to pay the bills that congress incurs. But for the future of what used to be this great country, sorry I'm done believing that anything that comes from Washington DC has anything to do with the good of the American people and only to do with the success of a political agenda.
Good bye American democracy. Hello American dystopia.
Robert De Filippis
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