Seal of the United States Congress.svg.
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"What Drove 9 Moderate House Democrats To Hold Up Their Party's Agenda?" Nathaniel Rakich asks at FiveThirtyEight. "[N]ine moderate Democrats threatened to vote no on moving forward with Democrats' $3.5 trillion budget resolution, unless the House first voted to pass the Senate's bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package."
Though the word "moderate" appears 14 times in the story's body (and three times in a graphic outlining "ideological measures and electoral statistics" for the nine Democrats in question), Rakich never explicitly defines the term other than implicitly as describing "centrist" politicians who sometimes cross party lines on contentious issues.
Webster's offers a clue as to what might constitute a real moderate: "[O]bserving reasonable limits; not excessive, extreme, violent, or rigorous; limited; restrained."
In other words, the exact opposite of Congress.
Congress is by definition -- for example, the powers it claims under the US Constitution, even if it bothered to abide by that document's limits, which it seldom does -- an extremist organization.
Congress claims the power to seize the fruits of your labor -- or, in the form of military conscription, that labor itself -- for whatever projects it happens to fantasize into existence, and the power to cage or murder you should you resist.
For example, take the budget resolution and infrastructure bill that these "moderates" quibbled with the order of voting on.
In 2020, the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, according to the World Bank, came to about $21 trillion. That's probably quite high given that government spending is treated as "production," but it's the best number I have.
If the World Bank is correct, the two bills in question alone -- excluding any and all other congressional spending, of which there will be plenty -- presume to dispose of 21.4% of the wealth you created by busting your hump at work last year.
On the bright side, the Senate version of the bill did away with $80 billion in proposed funding for the IRS to bulk up the aforementioned caging/murdering of people who don't fork over.
The nine supposed "moderates" Rakich analyzes have almost certainly voted during their terms in Congress to, by several orders of magnitude, steal more money than the Mafia and kill more people than al Qaeda.
The pretense that Congress is anything other than the most powerful combination of death cult and organized crime syndicate on the planet is even less convincing than that Bigfoot video your uncle brought back from his hunting trip in Idaho.
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