Hardly a conservative can be found who is a fan of the Consolidated Omnibus Big Fat Bloated Bill, or whatever the title is, that passed in December and funds our Federal bureaucracy for its fiscal year, meaning through September 30. I haven't read it (life is far too short) but am assured by the complaints of those who have, that it is a wet kiss to Barack Obama in his thankfully-last full year in office.
So let us ask the logical question.
Fact: the bill stinks from any fiscally prudent perspective.
Fact: the bill improves virtually nothing, in the view of conservatives
Fact: the bill was passed without majority Republican support but with Democrat votes.
Fact: in November 2014, the USA voted Republicans into both houses of Congress, to fix it.
Question: Why did the Republican leadership feel so gosh-darned obligated to push through a budget bill that was this bad for the USA, this fiscally irresponsible, accomplishes almost none of the goals for which they were given the reins of the legislative branch, and was, on principle, bad enough that loads of Democrat congressmen and senators voted for it?
Easy: The Republicans didn't want to shut down the government.
Fear of bad PR, we assume. We have to assume something, because if you're anything like me you were scratching your head. I mean, here are the presidential debates out there with a dozen folks clawing at each other to look more firm in their convictions. Four of those people are actually U.S. senators, but for purposes of this bill they might as well have been lapdogs.
OK, not fair to Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, who voted against it and, I suppose, Marco Rubio, who did not vote. Lindsey Graham voted for the bill, then went through a debate explaining why he thought he had to. He is no longer a candidate.
But if you look at the voting, 26 of the 33 votes against the bill in the Senate were Republican. I'm sorry, but I don't get it. If the bill stank so bad that half the caucus voted against it, then what was the bill doing there in the first place -- we have the majority in the $%&#@ chamber, don't we?
This, my friends, is a categorically perfect example of what is wrong with the "Republican establishment" as it sits right now. Unwilling to stand the publicity that would go with a so-called "government shutdown", the Republican leadership folded like a cheap tent. And that, friends, is just silly.
A few years back Barack Obama came up with the idea of sequestration, an across-the-board cut to Federal agency budgets. It was Obama's idea, though somehow it seems to have gotten blamed on Republicans -- and "blamed" isn't the right word; it was a good idea and should have been referred to as "credited."
That's because the sequester's effect in choking off some of the money supply to a rapacious government was to lower, somewhat, the acceleration of the growth in the national debt. Oh, sure, we're still about $20 trillion and rising, but weren't rising quite as fast. It is not the solution to getting to a balanced budget and cutting the debt, but it wasn't terrible.
And it showed us that we could live with a smaller ... well, a smaller rate of growth.
It also taught a lesson to those willing to accept it. A "government shutdown" could be an excellent thing, or at least far more tolerable than the name would suggest. For one thing, government doesn't "shut down" in a shutdown; it can't. Certain commitments and vital functions even went on during the last shutdown; how 'bout that. The sun came up; later on it went down and then rose once again in the morning.
In our own households, when income is choked off or reduced, we adjust -- hold on, now -- by spending less. Yes, when you're a 1099 worker like me and there's no contract and thus no income, you close, temporarily, your own household equivalent of the Department of Labor (say, by not eating out), the Department of Housing and Urban Development (perhaps not renting movies for a while), the Department of Energy (tighter Christmas), EPA, maybe even IRS (dream on). You adjust.
So if I were president, and Congress couldn't get its act together, I would celebrate by closing most of those agencies (keeping Defense and as little else as possible) and sending the employees home on an unpaid vacation that will not then later be back-paid. Federal bureaucrats can certainly take the same risks as employees that I do as a 1099, can't they? And son of a gun, we might decide after a month that we didn't actually need HUD or Labor or EPA.
I think we should welcome a government shutdown, no matter what the mainstream media portray it as. Imagine -- we do a shutdown and President Sutton declares first that only IRS is closed, right there, Day One, until Congress votes a funding bill. Well, you think the media will get any traction trying to say that's a bad idea? HUD and Labor can wait a week, but IRS closes immediately and all the horses' backsides harassing people like us can take unpaid leave.
The country would celebrate. And we'd have a lot more government shutdowns, you can just bet. So which will be the first candidate to pose that scenario for the good, beneficial and fiscally sound proposal it is?
It certainly wont be Hillary, even if she is in prison by then.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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