US Democracy Braces for a Decade Under Minority Rule

We have to all act like Southerners now. (image source -David-Horsey)

The US Under Minority Rule

Wait -- we haven't been invaded.

There are "minorities," and then there are "minorities."

When it comes to minority governments, MeanMesa cannot mentally dispatch the lesson of Iraq.  After the invasion, that is, even after the ostensibly "sectarian slaughter" of the civil war had begun, the nation of Iraq still suffered continuing violence based almost solely on the fact that the Iraqi Sunni minority were convinced that they were, in fact, the Iraqi majority.

For years the Sadam Hussein regime had employed Baathist "ground troops" to provide the marching muscle needed to support the autocratic dictatorship.  Because these Baathists were recruited from the Sunni population, the worst part of the autocracy's brutal mayhem was, naturally, directed at the understandably rebellious Shi'a majority. 

The point here is that this arrangement placed the Sunni minority in a situation making the "majority" versus "minority" misperception one which could very conveniently be quite durably "re-interpreted."  With this carefully fabricated error firmly in place the Sunni predictably saw events unfolding in Iraq through a very twisted frame of reference -- one which obscured the political reality of the country, and one which caused plenty of bloody, violent trouble for the US invaders.

All this is included in this post because it has such a very disturbing similarity to contemporary US domestic politics.

In the United States voters are quite realistic about winning and losing elections.  They theoretically vote for candidates, parties and platforms they find attractive, and when candidates win those elections, these voters expect, roughly, at least, some semblance of the same issue to be present in the subsequent practices of governing.

Further, elections in the United States squarely embrace the "majority rule" idea in our Constitution.  A majority of votes should result in that elected majority in power after the election.  Our Founders obviously thought that this would be a clever way to keep citizens sufficiently satisfied to avoid frequent civil wars. Although every election's outcome will inevitably leave some voters frustrated, the idea was that their collective commitment to democracy and their "good natures" would see them through until the next election when they would, again, have a chance to steer things more toward their own way.

This theory for representational democracy depends on voters actually voting.  In 2010 the large majority of Americans had no appetite at all for the "tea bag philosophy" of hopeless austerity and mindless 1950's ideology, yet when the election results came in, the country had regressed socially by a half century. 

A "Tea Bag Revolution?"  Not Hardly.

However, right here we have to "drill down" to expose some of the deeply buried realities at play.  Passing by the essentially irrelevant, dusty hordes of illiterate tea baggers protesting with their misspelled signs amid the wheelchairs and summer flies, we need to consider the ambitions of the corporate oligarchs who have sponsored such a grotesque effort at political influence.  

The fabricated goals on the inflamed tea baggers' signs are NOT the goals of the plutocrats funding and organizing their "inflammation."

No, the "puppet masters" could not care less about 99% of the drivel presented by their staggering, yet useful, tea bag minions -- gays getting married, abortion clinics and doctors, immigration bills and so on.  However, these same "puppet masters" are brutally addicted to that last 1% of the tea bag messaging -- taxes.

In fact, long ago when the tea bag "movement" was just being launched by the corporate lawyers employed in the Freedom Works think tank, the term "tea" was initially presented as an acronym for "Taxed Enough Already."  The Freedom Works CEO, failed politician Dick Armey, soon realized that his largely illiterate, comically zealous, stumbling, mumbling "ground troops" found any question concerning the US tax code incomprehensibly complex and quite beyond their cognitive capacity.

Yet, when it came to the directing motivation for all this public relations imaging, the scheme of the oligarchs funding it remained hidden behind the media's command mission to create a maelstrom of tea bag fog and feathers.

The unseen "big picture" scheme of the money class defined their two precious goals:

1. The development of a large majority of American voters -- both right and left -- strongly dissatisfied with the government, and,

2. Employing that dissatisfaction politically to maintain and protect the advantages of the tormented US tax code they had invested so much to create.

As the calendar pages unfolded toward the 2010 mid-term election, the media had carefully groomed a deep, stoic malaise among most normal voters.  While the mouth foaming tea bags were infuriated under the continuous teasing of the likes of the Freedom Works think thank, the more rational voters had been fed a daily ration of hopeless inconsistency with faux "comparisons" between the new President's campaign and his Administration's actual performance amid the brazen "red meat" GOP saboteurs in the Congress.

The oligarchs' goal was a tactical increase in the Congress -- especially in the House of Representatives, and the plan was to make this possible by a frontal attack on the state legislatures begun even before the Bush autocracy had finally collapsed.  While the rest of the country sat at home bewildered by the relentless pain of an unceasing economic catastrophe -- and losing confidence in the President, the Super PAC cash trucks were rolling into state Republican campaign offices.

The freshly minted tea bag majorities in the state legislatures would have, as their first order of business, the task of further and even more drastically gerrymandering their state's Congressional districts.  They dutifully grabbed the census results along with the instructions from the craven owners of the Republican Party.

Under the provisions of our Constitution when a population minority is concentrating resources to "take command" of the government -- or even, as is the case now with the House, a crucial part of the government --  the conflict need not be decades long at all. If a maximum of the assets can be effectively applied for a period of a single year or less, that is, applied precisely when the census has been completed, and the Constitutional mandate for establishing Congressional election districts "comes due," a political equivalent of blitzkrieg can be inflicted upon the democracy in a way the Constitution's authors never imagined.

The GOP's "Miracle" of 2010

State Legislatures Pre-2010 -( Source)

By the time the 2010 mid-term arrived half the states in the country had been redistricted into snake-like swarms of screaming tea bag voters surrounded by vast, innocuous districts filled with more sensible -- and more despondent -- citizens.  Before the coup state legislatures across the country looked like the map on the left.

This partisan picture generally reflected the state of the nation's politics.   In blog 2008 blog posts David Burns recapped the statistical model presented by the New York Times with what he calls a "bubble map."

The 2008 "Bubble Map" (image source)

"It’s good to see the overlap of these bubbles because it shows that red and blue co-exist in the same places. It’s a finer distinction than the red state/blue state point of view." [Read the article here.]

The Burns article continues with a chart showing the "shift map" which indicates the change in votes with respect to Parties.

The 2008 "Shift Map" (image source}

"Another striking map is the Voting Shift map which shows where each party received more votes in 2008 than they did in 2004. There’s a very identifiable red streak from Texas to West Virginia that’s interesting because it’s so well defined, localized and contained." [Read the article here.]

These models of American voting proclivities paint a fairly coherent picture of the country's political "mind set" for the period.  In the anticipated political "flow of things" this political environment would have continued to produce Democratic majorities in the Congress for some time, at least, for several subsequent elections.

So, what happened?  What political manipulation led to the current state of affairs?

Sadly, the answer has very little to do with political manipulation.  Instead, it has everything to do with election manipulation.  For a clearer view of the scheme which ultimately produced the current madness of John Boehner's admitted ballot minority delivering control of the House of Representatives we can look directly down "the dragon's throat."

How the Minority Saw 2010

Here is an excerpt from a November, 2010, post by Citizen Link, a self-identified Public Policy Partner of Focus on the Family. [Visit the site here.]

According to the National Conference on State Legislatures (NCSL), voters handed over to the Republican Party 19 state chambers previously dominated by Democrats.  This translates into a pickup of six Senate chambers and 13 House chambers (see NCSL map below).

To put this in perspective, Democrats lost 20 chambers to Republicans in 1994, and gained none. Conversely, Republicans lost 21 chambers to Democrats and gained one chamber following Watergate.

The conference also reported that the GOP received an overall net gain of at least 675 state-level seats – the most since 1928 – allowing it to gain control of chambers even in traditionally liberal states.

Karl Kurtz with NCSL said the GOP not only took control of chambers, but also beefed up its presence.  Twenty-four seats were added in the Texas House, 16 in the Missouri House, 15 in the Kansas House, 14 in the North Dakota House, nine in the Wyoming House and eight in the Oklahoma House.

“Republicans gained seats in virtually every state,” Kurtz wrote. “The change was unidirectional. The only state in which Democrats appear to have made a net gain in both chambers is Delaware, where they netted one seat.”

LEGISLATURES THAT FLIPPED

• Alabama: House and Senate (First time GOP has controlled both chambers since Reconstruction)
• Colorado: House
• Indiana: House
• Iowa: House
• Maine: House and Senate
• Michigan: House
• Minnesota: House and Senate (Senate in GOP hands for first time in history)
• Montana: House
• New Hampshire: House and Senate (Over 100 seats in the House went to GOP)
• North Carolina: House and Senate (First time GOP Senate since 1870)
• Ohio: House
• Pennsylvania: House
• Wisconsin: Assembly and Senate

This is especially important for the 2012 presidential elections, as states like Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio are testing grounds for presidential candidates.

Republicans now have control of 55 legislative chambers, Democrats control 38 and two chambers – Alaska and Oregon – are split.  Three chambers are still undecided – Oregon, New York and Washington. This is a tidal wave reversal. Prior to the election, Democrats controlled 60 chambers, while the GOP held 36 and two chambers were split.

A few chamber switches caught even the most politically savvy off guard. The Maine House, Minnesota Senate and Oregon House were not considered “in play” this cycle; however, voters knew otherwise.

LEGISLATURES CONTROLLED BY CONSERVATIVES

Republicans control both chambers in the following states:

• Alabama
• Arizona
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Maine
• Michigan
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Pennsylvania
• South Carolina
• South Dakota
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

All told, this conservative sweep through the states is significant, in terms of offering up and/or defending state marriage amendments, pro-life initiatives, fiscal discipline measures, and defending constitutional freedoms.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Review the NCSL’s 2010 Legislative and State Election Results.
Review the Census’ “Political Party Control of State Legislatures by Party: 1985 to 2009.”
Review the Census’ “Composition of State Legislatures by Political Party Affiliation: 2008 to 2009.” 

The "Rectangle" Amendment to the Constitution

Making Congressional Districts into Boxes

MeanMesa has proposed Constitutional Amendments in the past -- notably one concerning the legislative division of the Supreme Court into a group of six, equally "supreme," courts selected by lottery to hear cases.  You can read this post here:

The 28th Amendment - Death By Legacy

That April, 2012, commentary was the prompted by the Citizens United decision, but since then, the Roberts Court has aggressively provided a subsequent series of decisions specifically targeting the country's Constitutional imperatives concerning elections and voter enfranchisement.  By the November, 2012, Presidential election approximately 4.5 Mn voters had either been directly  denied the rights guaranteed by the original Constitutional enfranchisement or had been confronted with labyrinthine new registration and identification requirements.

A 29th Amendment to the US Constitution would legally settle enfranchisement issues in all states and establish Federal Election Courts, but MeanMesa thinks it should also stabilize rules for setting boundaries of Congressional districts, affirming a durable and permanent remedy to the treasonous, cynical anti-democracy gerrymandering, the tactic frantically developed by the desperate remnants of the GOP as they confronted their continuing inability to win elections otherwise.

MeanMesa has also previously posted about the current democratic sabotage being inflicted by gerrymandering Congressional Districts.  You can read this post here:

A Mathematician Redistricts Congress

Let's do some thinking.  

The problem we face issues from a variety of origins, but one of them is extremely obvious.  The Constitution, interpreted in a sly way to appease the Southerners still stinging from the Civil War, set out the process of establishing Congressional election district boundaries under state governments.  Since then, there has been no end to the mischief -- delivered opportunistically with resurrected waves of "alternating villains," that is, delivered at the hands of both Republicans and Democrats.

When democracy is being undercut by what is "present or absent" in the Constitution [or in its interpretation], it represents a Constitutional crisis and a threat to the democracy.  This isn't the only case of this kind of threat "knocking at the door" these days, but this is about specifically fixing this one.

Rather than simply continuing to "gore one ox after another," depending on whom is holding the sword at the moment, such an amendment could stabilize -- if not policy -- at least politics.  And, THAT would be a start.

In the historical picture of things, the Republican Party could very well be on its death bed at the time of this posting.  This means that another "Party" will quite possibly be rising up like a Phoenix to step into its vacated place.

There is simply too much "inertia" to consider adopting some form of government radically different than the famous "two party system."  In this event the importance of fair, Constitutional elections would be very great.  With one established Party [the Democrats] and a newly formed party [say, the Greens], continuing inequities in the election mechanism would not lead anywhere good.

Number 29 could be called the "Rectangle Amendment." [Read the post linked above.]

Just don't quit voting.

Raising Taxes: Why It's Unthinkable

The "Artificial Image" of Higher Tax Revenue

American voters have not heard proposals to increase taxes for years.  Instead, they have heard a continuous stream of Stalinist horror stories vomited forth from right wing think tanks and public opinion "image managers."  Because of this, any sort of normal political discussion of the idea has been inundated long ago in a grisly soup of "job creators," "job killers," "global markets" and so forth.

Even the briefest dalliance with any consideration whatsoever dealing with increasing tax rates and revenue is dispatched as irrelevant folly thanks to this massive shield of talking points and propaganda.  There are no "water fountain" conversations meandering through policy question on this subject -- the equivalent of an "Emmy Award" for so thoroughly and successfully discharging even such a possibility from the minds of American tax voters.

Oh sure, it wasn't easy, but with billions of dollars and an intimidated, obedient net work media the propaganda onslaught has worked fairly well -- so far.

 The Strange History of Low Taxes on High Incomes

Ironically, around the same time that President Ronald Reagan was raising middle class taxes in the country nine times, the Republican Party somehow surgically implanted the idea that taxes must never be raised under any possible conditions, and by "never" this surgically implanted artificial policy "appliance" meant "not ever."  This, at least conceptually, left tax increase policy to the Democrats.

This began an era.  Reagan's Cadillac driving "welfare queens" and the already road weary Party maxim of "tax and spend Democrats" became the new metric for the obedient voters on the GOP side.  And, in fact, especially after LBJ's largess, some of the criticism had a certain kind of temporary traction.

But, MeanMesa emphasizes the term: "temporary."  

However, while this new "party line" left tax increase policy to the Democrats, it did not leave "debt increase" policy to the Democrats.  The following string of Republican administrations, after modifying the old Reagan phrase from "tax and spend" to "borrow and spend," went right to work exploding deficits and, consequently,  the accumulating the current atmospheric National Debt.

For visitors who have been to this site before, MeanMesa always looks for opportunities to present the following graph again.

[Data from Dept. of Treasury, office of National Debt]

If you have ever wondered just how the United States wound up with a $16 Tn National Debt, simply add up the red bars and blue bars and look at the total.  The chart's data ends in 2006, but the deficit totals, of course, continued to increase right through until today.  We haven't been paying back any of the borrowed money, and we have done absolutely nothing to mitigate the necessity to borrow even more.

However, there is "borrowing" and then there is "borrowing."  When the annual  "borrowing" is in $100's of billions, problems arise.  The first problem is that such "borrowing" is evidence of either drastic misfortune or infamously horrible governance. Because nothing particularly drastic kept occurring year after year during the administrations of Republican Presidents, that is, a country threatening drastic event such as a giant volcano, a sudden invasion across every border, a thermonuclear attack, a nationwide plague or so on, our national debt problem rests squarely amid the cash crazed clouds of the "infamously horrible governance" side of things.

Rich in a river of debt. (image)

After all, part of governing is collecting the money you are spending, and if not that, at least having something spectacular to show for all the borrowing and debt it took to get it.  There was nothing spectacular about the Bush W. tax cuts -- then or now.  They created nothing beyond the current huge federal debt and a new crop of nasty right wing billionaires.

If nothing spectacular has been purchased, the spending causing all that government debt can be, perhaps over-generously, characterized as simply day to day spending to pay the routine expenses of keeping the country running.  We know now that pretty much the only "spectacular thing" we purchased with the proceeds of all that "borrowing" is a "spectacular crop" of even fatter billionaires with equally fattened appetites for -- wait for it -- even more tax cuts.

We even know their names.

We also know that this "spectacular crop" of billionaires just keeps getting richer and richer every year because they don't pay taxes -- at least, they don't pay taxes at an actual rate anything similar to the rest of us.  With this conclusion, we will be almost immediately confronted by the wing nut talking point about tax rates.

"US tax rates are already some of the highest in the world -- that's what is keeping the economy on its knees even after we finished with the looting."

Well, at around 35%, the theoretical top US tax rate would in fact, be one of the highest -- if billionaires actually paid taxes at that rate.  They don't.  The IRS tax code contains that 35% figure for the "top marginal rate," but when you have 8,766 pages of deductions, tax expenditures, off shore profits, subsidies and other tax code gizmos on your tax return, the actual rate is much closer to zero.

Last year one of the most profitable corporations on the planet, EXXON/Mobile, actually got money back instead of paying taxes.  The corporation's tax rate wasn't just zero, it was negative. ["For all corporations, about two-thirds, or about 1.2 million, paid no federal income taxes in 2005. But many of those firms are quite small -- an owner and a couple of employees. For large U.S.-controlled corporations, those with at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts, one out of four paid no taxes, as Sanders said. The total revenues for those large companies was about $1.08 trillion." source article]

The protestation is that "it simply isn't this simple."  MeanMesa agrees.  For every dime of taxes paid and also every dime of deductions deducted these boys can produce a platoon of salivating tax attorneys, more than enough to guarantee that, after a few days of 12 hour testimony,  nothing will be simple at all -- especially not the amicus brief filed with the Federal Court case.

Still, all Republican deficits in the that "National Debt" chart [above] came from somewhere.  With the dilapidated US infrastructure sitting with a $2.75 Tn repair bill, we certainly haven't been "over spending" on roads, bridges and schools. ["A report this week from the American Society of Civil Engineers shows just how bad the state of infrastructure in the United States is and how much spending is needed in the next decade to get it back up to par. According to the report, $2.75 trillion needs to be invested in America's infrastructure by 2020. The ASCE believes that the spending shortfall in this period will come to $1.1 trillion, and will have dire consequences: some $3.1 trillion in lost gross domestic product; about $3,100 annually lost in disposable income per household; some $1.1 trillion lost in total trade; about $2.4 trillion lost in consumer spending; and, worst of all, a loss of about 3.5 million jobs." marketwatch article here ]

We haven't been doing the US economy much good by this penny pinching, either.  The ASCE was addressing the failing infrastructure, but when MeanMesa adds some serious climate change mitigation expenses to that $2.75 Tn total, the "load" could easily grow from their $2-3 Tn to triple digits. [MeanMesa's post: Managing Global Warming Solutions has climate change mitigation cost estimates in the range  of $100's of Trillions -- moving Manhattan 100 miles inland isn't cheap...]

That leaves us with the immediate problems of both a country literally falling apart before our eyes and the worse, far larger, longer range problem of a planet doing essentially the same thing.  As a nation it is clear that we don't have anything close to the money required to solve the second part of that -- probably not even for ourselves.

All we have to work with is all this debt and all these billionaires we created.

Illegitimate Majority House Republicans
Gird for Battle to Defend the Castle

Republican House Speaker Boehner is an excellent example of gradually exposed loyalty to the oligarch's electoral "highest priority."  In 2010 Mr. Boehner could not so much as clear his throat without mouthing something about jobs, "Jobs, jobs, jobs."

However, the man's miraculous "transformation" into an austerity promoting talk-a-thon -- no doubt under direct orders from above -- changed the topic of his daily ranting to "Debt, debt, debt."

The big spending, big borrowing John Boehner of the Bush W. years was raising his hand for every piece of the autocrat's gigantic deficits.  The maudlin "totally concerned with high unemployment" John Boehner was fixated on a Democratic President's inability to suddenly replace the millions of US jobs lost as the house of cards collapsed in 2008.

But, of course, the miraculous "transformation" didn't end there.  With the unruly bigots of the gerrymandered tea party at his back, a reinvigorated John Boehner adopted the "blind hatchet job" of Republican austerity as his latest Holy Grail. 

Republican austerity's focus on cutting spending is only a cosmetic apparition.  At its heart, the austerity serves the oligarchs in charge as a means to further cut federal spending in order to protect the tax free billionaires now firmly in command of the US House of Representatives.  Given the $100's of millions it cost the oligarchs to take charge of the House, Boehner's orders from above fastidiously exclude any reference to the fact that his control of the House is founded on a minority of House votes in the 2010 election.

Okay, Where Do We Surrender?

Just wait by the tree where they tied up the noose.

Surrender might make sense if there were anyone to whom we could surrender.  There isn't, so we can't.

Those dismal prophecies above are painting a picture of a problem which won't be solved by a few "tweeks" to the US tax code, a tome already as large as a WWII battle wagon.   Yet, we have to face facts.  To "sustain" the incredibly low tax revenue as an on-going pattern for governance, we will need to drastically degrade the standard of living with which we have become accustomed here.

We will need a country which spends roughly what it takes in as revenue.  If the revenue is to remain in its current low level, the US will need to, well, adjust.  We are living in a country which is budgeting its expenditures based on a far greater tax revenue than it is currently able to collect.

"Able to collect?"

Yes, with the US tax code in its present condition, all the incredibly rich billionaires and corporations are not particularly breaking any laws when they dodge most or all of what their taxes might reasonably have been if they hadn't re-written the tax code.  They also have absolutely no interest in any "new form" of the tax code which might vary measurably from their very comfortable version.

The monied classes have patiently invested millions in the gradual development of this current code so suitable to their liking, but they have never quit complaining that even this dysfunctional, modern train wreck remains intolerably unfair to them.  These interests have never been frugal with their purchases of legislators to author additional travesties to the tax code year by year, but regardless of the latest authorship, they are still not quite satisfied.

After the impact of the 2009 Citizens United decision this flow of right wing dollars sky rocketed as the prospect of Republican "constituent loyalty" cratered.  The GOP Congressmen and Senators elected in this wave of corporate and billionaire money went to Washington with a single, highest priority: protect the tax law to keep it exactly as it is or worse.

The various media constructions since then have been a craven scheme to keep the uninformed masses angry enough to perpetuate the Republican base in the Party's very expensive, locally gerrymandered election districts.  Those district boundaries are considered to be "more or less stable" until the 2020 census possibly exposes them to more rational patterns.

This is not simply a "happy coincidence."  The right wing owners of the US tax code have paid plenty for this outcome.  The "return on their investment" has also been more than generous enough to entice them to continue at even higher  rates of cash for political interference.

Keep Your Dial Set At MeanMesa

Since "talking about" higher tax revenue is essentially a "forbidden zone," MeanMesa intends to rush right into the fray to post a series on this topic.  It's a long past due discussion.  We need to talk about national alternatives and national necessities -- what choices we have and what happens if we don't.

1/4 The GOP's Billionaires: Why They Ordered the Shut Down

The Reign of Morons? Maybe Not

"We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouth breathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them."

Charlie Pierce 

(Read Pierce's Esquire editorial here. MeanMesa enjoys listening to Charlie Pierce, a frequent guest on the Stephani Miller Show.)

While Pierce's understandable irritation with the visible side of events such as the shut down is enticing, it is also evidence of the carefully obscured fundamentals in the situation.  Those visible "morons" have been quite decisively purchased and placed in the easily criticised positions where we now find them.  They are little more than craftily deployed "ground troops," obedient and expendable, assigned the mission of sacrificing themselves for a far more sinister intention than the one we seem to see in their actions.

These four posts are about the billionaires behind the scene -- behind this scene.

Every time the US government "buckles" from a shut down, a debt ceiling tantrum or the like, interest rates go up from the "uncertainty" these episodes are designed to cause.  If you are a billionaire desiring to place your wealth in an investment somewhere, but as you look at the possible global choices, you currently see too much risk, you will naturally be drawn to US Treasury bonds.

If you can manipulate politics in a way which perturbs this market, sending bond interest rates higher, your bonds will make even more money.  Those higher rates will be paid for -- quite silently -- by the entire US economy.  Every price in a transaction conducted in US currency will be "inflated" just a tiny bit to compensate for the money's slightly reduced buying power, a reduction necessary to pay the increased interest on the Treasury bonds which give the dollars their value.

As a billionaire, the scheme you have just implemented amounts to a synthetic kind of universal inflation, one conveniently over looked by official statistics. What could possibly be better than that?  You get to set the interest rate on your own savings account.

It is, by the way, far too late to think of a US federal budget that can function without borrowing money. The moneyed class simply won't have it.

A "balanced budget" is absolutely the last thing that the "interest rich"  GOP billionaires might possibly want. If you still think the "big boys" went after Bill Clinton because of Monica, get over it.  The federal budget surpluses of 1998 and 2000 amounted to an ice pick in the temple for the plutocratic holders of mountains of Treasury bonds.

 A US Federal Budget: The Abandoned Child

If you are a Republican Congressman with an invisible GOP billionaire or Super PAC as your sponsor and benefactor, you have a constituency of one.  You will still be allowed to name Post Offices and answer requests or complaints -- so long as they're not too expensive -- from your district voters, but when it comes to your part in the construction of a Federal Budget, you will never need to so much a "break a sweat."

That little sliver won't be enough. (image source)

While this may seem somewhat mysterious, a quick trip to the archives should clear up everything right away.

In the "old days" this country actually had annual federal budgets, and we can locate copies of those budgets amid the written records of the US government.  A close look at one of these historical examples will go a long way toward explaining our Congressman's abhorrence with so much as "dirtying his hands" preparing one now.

Those old budgets did a few things which our modern oligarchs really don't like.

When one of those federal budgets had been thoroughly negotiated between the Parties, had endured "conference committees," and had finally been signed into law by the seated President, that final document spelled out all sorts of things.  Those "things" were chiefly focused on tax law to generate revenue, and mandatory spending to implement the partisan political agendas hammered out in the Congressional debate.

This sensible outcome would be the equivalent a room temperature Martini, a migraine headache and a crushing case of gout for the typical GOP billionaire.  Naturally, as the plutocratic orders dribbled down from the palaces, through the Super PACs and into the dismal political reality of a clutch of dutifully obedient, totally sold out Republican Congressmen and Senators, the word was simple: "No Budget.  Whatever crazy, half baked thing you might be thinking of doing, block any effort to create a budget as if your life depended on it."

The GOP's billionaires have quite a different concept about "how things should be run," and that "concept" has everything to do with taxes and spending.  In fact, we can spot evidence of this in a noticeable "faltering" in the extortion scheme unfolding in the House.

When the heat went on, the billionaires began "selecting" certain government expenditures which they would grudgingly allow -- opening the the Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall, for example.  The price was right, and the press was all over it.

For the plutocrat the mere mention of mandatory spending causes hives.  Every expenditure must be debated, under cut, exploited and, ironically, utterly uncertain until the very last minute if our little billionaire was to be satisfied with it.  On the "revenue side" Reagan's onslaught of middle class tax increases, the tax payer bailout of Wall Street banks and the perpetual -- perhaps eternal -- protection of the Bush W. tax cuts were the right idea; spending on infrastructure, jobs programs, education and the like were the wrong idea.

Further, in the billionaires' eyes -- and consequently also deeply embedded in the faux ideological "souls" of the obedient Congressional puppets -- once these wrong ideas were actually in writing, they would become even more odiously wrong.

The Prospects of a Not So Happy Ending

MeanMesa is convinced that the 2014 election will very likely flood the House of Representatives into a slender Democratic majority control.  However, in terms of dealing with the GOP's billionaires and their tea bag ground troops, this may not be any sort of politically genteel "changing of the guard."

Instead, the fulcrum may well shift to another mad house populated with legislators almost as extreme as the tea bags -- except of course, liberally extreme.  Additionally, all these Democrats will have leaned quite a lot from the constantly bad manners of the GOP clown car.  

These new House Democrats will not be breathing a sigh of relief and optimistically searching for a more constructive future.  Instead, they will be still stinging from the disrespect, vengeful far beyond the imaginary civility of the Congress and, most importantly, completely aware of the now revealed, cancerous "probity" of the owners of the Republican Party.

During the most violent period of the French Revolution the guillotines were dropping with the regularity of an OCD meth addict swatting flies.  Further, the silk bodice on one of those recently modified, headless corpses cost more than a year's salary of the man who pulled the rope to drop the blade.

No doubt, this astonishing lack of historical knowledge helps the GOP's billionaires drop off to sleep.