Stuck On Stupid?
posted at 1:00 pm on March 29, 2011 by Mitch Berg
[ Going Galt ]
To: US Senate Republicans
From: Mitch Berg, Cheesed-Off Conservative
Re: Get off the can, get on the stick.
Senators,
I get the need for compromise.
I get the fact that the Democrats still control the Senate, and they’re not going to get their way for the asking.
I get that.
What I do not get is how none of you establishment Republicans ever seems to learn from history. It was six years ago when you had a majority, and a sitting President, and you – many of you occupying space in the Senate right now – blinked, and gave the Democrat minority everything they wanted – a legislative Manhattan, in exchange for some meaningless procedural trinkets.
And you’re doing it again, cutting a “deal” with the President to pass a continuing resolution in exchange for a vote on a Constitutional Balanced Budget Amendment.
A vote.
Erick Erickson (with emphasis added by me):
The GOP is not telling the Democrats they actually want the Balanced Budget Amendment, just a vote. This is wholly unacceptable. If Barack Obama wants to increase the debt ceiling, the GOP should go all or nothing — they must have their Balanced Budget Amendment in exchange for it. A vote is utter nonsense without a commitment from the Democrats to pass it by a two-thirds vote from both Houses.
But it gets more insane from there. Everything we feared, everything we knew would happen, is coming to fruition.
Why?
Because you, the “Senate GOP Leadership”, the ones who’ve been there forever, fear another government shutdown. You remember – and have created a mid-level “leadership” that remembers – how badly the last shutdown cost you at the polls.
But that was in the cha-cha nineties, when things were generally awesome and the greatest crisis facing this nation was a lothario President, when the stock market was booming and people were generally fat ‘n happy, and the media was only too happy to tell them so.
But – I’ll emphasize this – it’s 2011 now. The Obama Recession is underway. A vast movement of Americans has had enough. They reversed the Obamascenscion and put your – our – party back in power twenty years earlier than anyone thought it would be possible in 2009. Because we are that pissed off! There is a blogosphere, and talk radio, and Fox News; the mainstream media don’t have the stage all to themselves. We can control our own narrative this time - if you are bold enough to seize the opportunity.
You, the “leadership”, apparently don’t get that. Erickson (again, emphasis added):
Why? Because the GOP is finally being forced by the base to push for actual, substantive spending cuts instead of the death by a thousand paper cuts strategy of the leadership…Luckily for us, conservatives made such a stink about the last short term CR being, in fact, the last short term CR, the GOP is now forced to be a leader. The leaders are, however, reluctant.
Look, it is very simple — demand passage of a balanced budget amendment, defund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood, and if the Democrats balk, shut the government down.
Unfortunately for you and me, the GOP leadership is scared to death of and hell bent on avoiding a government shutdown. They may have no choice, so they better get ready.
Look – here’s the deal; we sent you there to kick ass, and kick Ass. We sent you there to repeal Obamacare, to slash spending, to roll back tax hikes.
And we – the people who sent you to Washington in the greatest electoral turnaround in decades – are hungry for exactly that.
And if you don’t have the cojones to do the job, we will send someone to DC that does.
Cut the budget. Shut down the government if you need to. We’ll be there if you do. The situation is different than in the nineties; the media that covered the Democrats’ behinds back then doesn’t have a complete stranglehold now. So do it. Do what we sent you there to do.
And if you don’t? You can join your constituents on the unemployment line. Soon.
Do it.
That is all.
Cross-posted at Shot In The Dark.









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Ditto.
rbj on March 29, 2011 at 1:34 PM
I feel you, shipmate. I’ve thought from the very first interim spending bill, however, that if the GOP can accomplish cuts through a series of interim measures — cuts it would not get in a comprehensive budget deal for 2011 — that would be preferable to the drama of a shutdown, with its uncertain outcome.
I don’t trust the present GOP leadership not to blink, under shutdown conditions. A much more zealous group of vintage-1994 Republicans blinked after the government shutdown of 1995.
A WSJ article pointed out this weekend that Republicans could get $60+ billion in cuts piecemeal by funding the federal government 2-3 weeks at a time for the rest of the year. I want to see Planned Parenthood defunded too, but frankly, the place to start is with Obama’s slew of new programs and funding. He has added so much to the spending spree in the last 2 years that the obvious strategy is to go for that stuff first. Even if the Republicans get only some of it by the end of FY2011, a good precedent would be set.
As far as I’m concerned, any budget deal reached while Harry Reid holds the Senate and Obama the Oval Office will be deficit-overspending business as usual.
Markets and the global finance sector can take that in stride, to some extent, especially if it amounts to a little marginal improvement over the deficit-overspending levels of the last two years.
But it would be a signal of something new and different — NOT business as usual — for the GOP to hang on and prevent another comprehensive budget deal that’s bad. I’d rather have the federal government funded 2 weeks at a time from now until January 2013 than any of the most likely alternatives.
J.E. Dyer on March 29, 2011 at 2:10 PM
The GOP should take a page from the Democrat script. Promise to vote to repeal the Bush tax hikes in exchange spending cuts now. Get the spending cuts and then crawfish on the taxes.
SAMinVA on March 29, 2011 at 2:30 PM
Government-by-Mexican standoff? What will that do for my freedom, J.E.? Or yours, for that matter? We will not accomplish anything important in America as long as we are just inside our respective comfort zones. We need to move just outside them, or else the decline of our republic is inevitable.
If a standoff is what’s coming, we the people had better make sure we’re on the right side.
gryphon202 on March 29, 2011 at 3:53 PM
Concur. Slash deep, slash hard and slash often until big Govt is a skeleton of its former self.
AH_C on March 29, 2011 at 4:16 PM
me likey….
right on , right on, right on
cmsinaz on March 29, 2011 at 6:15 PM
We are on the path to destruction. Unless some people with real MAN skills steps up and destroys the Dems we are done.
(even then the freeloader riots will probably destroy us).
The Taxpayers have had enough. The freeloaders are going to have to go. Don’t go away mad, just go.
What about the GunWalkers ? Thats treason folks. String em up high, with real hemp ropes (Libtards like hemp right?). The rest will get the message, trust me.
Sadly the Taxpayers are too busy working to stay alive.
We are playing the game by the rules and losing at every turn.
I predict a great rise in PrivateSecurity Corps in the near future.
orbitalair on March 30, 2011 at 10:16 AM
gyrphon201, AH_C — there’s no possibility of slashing hard and deep. Not while it would take overriding an Obama veto to do so. The Senate will prevent unsignable proposals from even getting to Obama’s desk.
It simply isn’t going to happen. Slashing hard and deep will have to wait until 2013. Meanwhile, the currency and the global economy depend on how the finances of the US government are handled in the interim. It would go better for us to have a time-out period from “business as usual” than to have a big showdown — government shutdown — followed by a hard-slamming reversion to business as usual.
The latter would send investors and foreign finance planners scurrying away from the US. It would be seen as the Tea Party’s Waterloo. Preventing that unnecessary “decisive defeat” leaves the issue undecided — and the hope open that the US really will reform its deadly spending ways.
J.E. Dyer on March 30, 2011 at 4:52 PM