congress – Page 2 – Sheila Kennedy

Idiocy And Its Consequences

Most of us know people who ignore what is happening in Washington, D.C., or in their own state’s capitols. During my teaching years, I had several students who simply failed to connect the activities of policymakers to their own lives–governance seemed remote, almost irrelevant, especially when they were overwhelmed with efforts to balance school, jobs and families.

The extent of that civic apathy, alongside the ongoing culture war, goes a long way toward explaining why we have a Congress filled with clowns, self-important ignoramuses and assorted lunatics intent upon preventing, rather than producing, governance and policy.

Government gridlock matters, whether the apathetic crowd understands that or not. The most recent evidence is the downgrading of long-term American debt by Fitch Ratings, one of the three major independent credit rating agencies. Fitch downgraded the nation’s long-term debt from AAA, the highest tier, to AA+ — only the second time in U.S. history that the country’s debt has been downgraded. The first followed a cut by S&P Global Ratings in 2011, prompted by a fight between House Republicans and President Obama over raising the federal borrowing limit. Fitch cited a similar standoff this spring, when House Republicans again refused to raise the debt ceiling for several months.

The agency explained that “The repeated debt limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management.” Although it also listed America’s growing debt burden, the agency made it clear that the fact of the debt wasn’t the issue: it was the “erosion of governance” that had created doubts about the nation’s ability to cope with that debt. Fitch highlighted the GOP’s tax cuts, at a time when fiscal prudence called for increasing, rather than decreasing, tax receipts.

In their announcement of the downgrade, Fitch analysts cited “erosion of governance” compared to peers that “over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.”

In other words, as The New York Times observed, the downgrade was yet another sign that those knowledgable about the economy are increasingly worried about the effects of America’s political chaos–and especially about the recurring brinkmanship over the debt limit that is becoming entrenched in Washington–despite the fact that the U.S. economy is currently robust.

The immediate consequence of the Fitch downgrade was a sell-off on Wall Street, where retirement funds and stocks held by many of those apathetic citizens took a bath. And as ABC News reported, when government struggles to address debt issues, triggering such a downgrade, consumers face higher interest rates for loans– higher costs for borrowing for everything from credit cards to mortgages to cars.

So here we are.

I have drawn two broad conclusions from the country’s current failures of self-government: one, the apathetic Americans who have failed to “connect the dots” between government dysfunction and their own daily lives have facilitated the election of people who are demonstrably incapable of understanding the policy process. They have done so either by voting mechanically on the basis of partisan identification, or (frequently) by failing to vote at all. Two, far too many Americans cast their votes on the basis of cultural grievances, ignoring–or failing to understand–the actual responsibilities of the political offices to which they have elevated their chosen culture warriors.

For years, Democrats have complained about voters who–as they see it–fail to vote their own interests. What they mean by that is that such voters discount the pocketbook benefits they would receive from the enactment of Democratic policies. What that complaint ignores is the reality that, for most people, “interests” are not necessarily–or even predominantly–financial. The voters who return the Paul Gosars, Jim Jordans, Margery Taylor Green and their ilk to Congress are fighting social change and the perceived diminution of their privileged status as White Christians, males, heterosexuals, etc.

The problem for the rest of us–genuine Conservatives and moderates as well as progressive Democrats–is that this cohort has zero interest in governance and no ability to function as policymakers. Their sole interest is performative. They appear to be totally unaware of the consequences of those performances–one of which, as we’ve just seen, is to convince rating agencies that the United States government is incapable of dealing with the legitimate issues it faces.

We can only hope that culture warriors and apathetic Americans–aided and abetted by extreme gerrymandering–don’t vote in 2024 to return the clowns to what has become a dysfunctional Congressional circus.

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The Aliens Are Here

Sometimes, you have to laugh or you’ll cry….

Let me begin this post with some confessions: I love science fiction. I’ve read tons of it since I was a child. I’m a huge Star Trek fan, currently fixated on “Strange New Worlds.” My scientific knowledge is admittedly limited, but the odds have convinced me that humans cannot be alone in the universe–it’s really inconceivable that only one planet among billions has generated (semi) intelligent life.

But really, idiot Congress-critters!

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post had the story:

The aliens have landed. And they have a gavel!

That is as plausible a takeaway as any from this week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the curiosity formerly known as UFOs. The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:

That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.

That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.

That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.

That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.

That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.

That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”

That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it was a “total hack job.”

And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.

I’d tell you more, but then they would have to kill me.

I actually have a more plausible theory: there are aliens among us, and they are currently serving as Republican Right-wingers in the U.S. House of Representatives. (I mean, really, who thinks that Marjorie Taylor Green and the other loonies currently preventing anything remotely resembling governance are sentient members of the human race? Unlikely, I tell you!! They’re here to effectuate the paralysis of Earth’s governments–and they’re doing a pretty good job of it!)

Although the star witness in this hearing was unable to provide any evidence whatever to support his claims, Milbank noted that several Republicans on the panel greeted those claims with “total credulity, using them as just more evidence that the deep-state U.S. government is lying to the American people, covering up the truth and can never be trusted. Their anti-government vendetta has gone intergalactic.”

I’d almost like to believe that the U.S. has a government capable of pulling off a cover-up of this magnitude. Think about the thousands of people who would have had to be sworn to silence and the fact that their compliance would need to be closely monitored over decades…It’s a theory right up there with Robert N. Kennedy, Jr.’s insistence that the entire medical establishment must be “in on” the “truth” about those nefarious vaccines.

I love science fiction, but I’m getting pretty tired of following the clearly alien MAGA life-forms controlling today’s GOP.

Maybe I should just use my Space Laser to wipe them out…..

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A Perfect Candidate For The Fact-Free Party

I haven’t commented on the increasingly bizarre stories that continue to emerge about George Santos, the Republican candidate who won a Congressional race in New York, and was later “outed” as a serial liar–or, as several articles like to label him, a “fabulist.”

Initially, I ignored the story. After all, the media was all over it and it was unlikely that anyone who follows political news would be unaware of it. But a recent recap in the New York Times yesterday– just before Santos was scheduled to be sworn in– made me realize that Santos is the candidate who really epitomizes the current state of the once Grand Old Party.

On the off-chance that readers are unaware of the extent of Santos’ fraudulent biography, I’ll share part of the Times’ very abbreviated description:

Mr. Santos has said that he grew up in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. Until Wednesday, Mr. Santos’s campaign biography said that his mother, Fatima Devolder, worked her way up to become “the first female executive at a major financial institution.” He has also said that she was in the South Tower of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that she died “a few years later.”

In fact, Ms. Devolder died in 2016, and a Brazilian community newspaper at the time described her as a cook. Mr. Santos’s friends and former roommates recalled her as a hardworking, friendly woman who spoke only Portuguese and made her living cleaning homes and selling food. None of those interviewed by The Times could recall any instance of her working in finance, and several chalked the story up to Mr. Santos’s tendency for mythmaking.

His apparent fabrications about his own life begin with his claims about his high school. He said he attended Horace Mann School, a prestigious private institution in the Bronx, and said he dropped out in 2006 before graduating and earning an equivalency diploma. A spokesman for Horace Mann said that the school had no record of his attending at all.

There is much, much more: his claim to be Jewish and a descendant of Holocaust survivors, an attendee of universities that have no record of his ever being a student, an employee of firms that never heard of him…it goes on. He is evidently still wanted by the police in Brazil, where he admitted to stealing checks from an elderly man.

The extent of his fabrications was uncovered by the Times after the election, which raises all sorts of questions about the failures of both opposition research and the media covering the race. (A tiny Long Island paper, The North Shore Leader, had raised timely questions about his claims, but was ignored.)

Whatever lessons we may want to draw from those failures is one thing. More to the point, what the revelations really do is shine a bright and unforgiving light on the increasing disaster that is today’s GOP.

Kevin McCarthy has refused to comment on Santos’ deceptions, because he desperately needs the new Congressman’s vote for Speaker of the House–a vote he has thus far been unable to secure despite prostrating himself to the lunatic caucus. There’s a down-and-dirty fight for the position of Chair of the RNC–a fight featuring arguments over who has the most fidelity to Trump, and “serious “candidates like The Pillow Guy.

Santos’ campaign evidently focused heavily on his presumed (invented) bona fides–a perfect representation of the current Republican Party, which has abandoned even the pretense of policy advocacy in favor of a full-blown dependence upon identity politics.

I know that very few voters actually read the party platforms that have routinely been produced by the parties until now, but the significance of the Republicans’ refusal to even bother creating one is obvious. Today’s GOP relies for support on two groups: rich people who don’t want to pay taxes, and White Christian Nationalists frantic not to be “replaced” by Jews and/or people of color. Its subservience to both doesn’t need to be spelled out in a platform.

Really, when you think about it, Santos is a perfect representation of today’s GOP–a party devoted to the Big Lie(s) perpetrated by a more successful con man. Like Trump, Santos won an election by pretending to be something he isn’t–in Trump’s case, a successful businessman–and has evidently used campaign dollars to enrich himself.

It remains to be seen whether Congress will be stuck with this character for the entirety of his two-year term, or whether he’ll be forced out. Either way, I think it’s safe to say that the next two years will feature the inevitable implosion of the current iteration of the Republican Party.

Pass the popcorn.

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The Decline Of Seriousness

A few days ago, I posted about the idiocy of proposals made by several Republican legislators who advocate arming teachers. On Facebook, a friend who is a lawyer posted a number of points in addition to the ones I’d raised; he’s a good lawyer, and in “lawyerly” fashion, he raised the following nine questions that focused on the significant liability issues involved.

Here are his contributions to the multiple other concerns that any such effort would raise:

1) If a child gains access to the teacher’s gun and something bad happens, will the school system’s insurance cover the liability?
2) If a teacher believes use of force is needed and accidentally harms an innocent child, will the school system’s insurance cover the liability?
3) If a teacher wrongfully decided that use of force is needed, will the teacher face criminal liability?
4) Will the school system (that won’t pay for pencils) pay for the gun, ammunition, training, a trigger lock, a gun cabinet, or other necessities?
5) Will teachers be required to “register” that they have a gun?
6) What happens, in the heat of the moment, if there is a shootout between teachers, each thinking the other is the shooter?
7) How will police differentiate an armed teacher from a school shooter?
8)) Can a teacher defend himself/herself against a police officer who thinks the teacher is the shooter?
9) Will a teacher face liability for failing to use force?

Anyone who has ever practiced law–or, for that matter, sold insurance–will recognize the pertinence of these questions.

Of course, just reading my friend’s questions raises several others. Why aren’t reporters asking proponents of this stupidity to respond to these and other obvious issues? Why are lawmakers–who ask for our votes on the basis of their presumed ability to consider the consequences of legislation they pass and programs they fund–seemingly blind to the existence of these very foreseeable concerns?

That was a rhetorical question; we all know the answer. They aren’t serious–not about arming teachers, and not about doing their jobs.

If it has done nothing else, this entire discussion about gun violence has vividly illustrated the vacuousness of current American politics and the inability of our institutions–especially Congress–to address the most pressing issues facing the country. It’s true that it has put a spotlight on the clowns–the cohort of embarrassing know-nothings, bigots and nut-cases–but it has also pointed to the reason they are there: voters who, for reasons I cannot comprehend, cast ballots for them.

Marjorie Taylor Green just won her primary. She’s far from the only certifiably crazy member of Congress, just one of the loudest. Remember Paul Gosar? His siblings took out television ads warning voters that he was unfit to serve, but despite the fact that several of his brothers and sisters warned that he was mentally “off,” he won his election. I’ve never seen Jim Jordan when he wasn’t screaming something partisan and off the rails. Most people who read this blog can name a number of others, and none of them seem to make the slightest attempt at transmitting gravitas, or seriousness. They evidently think they were elected to put on a performance (preferably on Fox News) not to study and consider the pros and cons of legislation.

Today’s GOP isn’t in the business of governing; instead, its members are providing bread and circuses.

With respect to my lawyer-friend’s very foreseeable, very logical questions, I’m quite sure these bozos have never considered any of them–they are too busy fighting a culture war and setting Americans against each other. The suggestion to arm educators is just one way among many to avoid actually thinking about the problem of mass gun violence–a glib and facile response that excuses them from doing the difficult job of thinking about the problem and devising and evaluating reasonable solutions.

Bottom line, I am SO TIRED of people who spit on a Constitution they’ve clearly never read or studied, who refuse to give taxpayers a single day’s real work for the dollars we pay them, and who spend zero time or effort considering the national interest or the common good.(They think any effort to legislate for the common good is socialism–and they’re agin it.)

And I am really, really OVER the morons who vote for them and the millions of non-voters whose absence at the polls increases the likelihood that the morons’ candidates will win.

Okay–rant concluded……See you tomorrow.

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From Soup To Nuts

Gazpacho..Gestapo… let’s call the whole thing off….

In case you missed it, The Guardian has the story.

The extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene triggered a wave of viral jokes on Wednesday after ranting about the “gazpacho police” patrolling the Capitol building in Washington DC.

Greene was apparently mixing up the famously cold Spanish soup gazpacho with the Gestapo – the brutal Nazi-era secret police in Germany….

“Not only do we have the DC jail which is the DC gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff and spying on American citizens,” she said, referring to the Democratic speaker of the House.

Greene seems unperturbed by the fact that she’s become a joke–a punch line–for previous, widely-reported accusations that being made to wear a mask is equivalent to what Jews suffered during the Holocaust, and that California’s forest fires were started by “space lasers” funded by George Soros.

What is truly sad is that she is not an anomaly in today’s GOP.

The RNC has just labeled a violent insurrection meant to overturn an election as “legitimate political discourse.”

A Republican Congresswoman has quoted Hitler–approvingly–in a recent speech.

Billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump ally, who is funding an effort to elect Trump-aligned candidates in 2022 says he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and has deplored the extension of the franchise to women.

In one of her recent “Letters From An American,” Heather Cox Richardson detailed the increasing hysteria of statements issued by various Republicans as the investigation into the insurrection tightens around them.

Richardson reports that Peter Navarro responded to receipt of a subpoena from the committee investigating January 6th with “a fire-eating statement “calling the members of the January 6 committee “domestic terrorists” engaged in a “partisan witch hunt.” He also tried to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police for the violence on January 6, and accused Mike Pence of treason for saying he lacked authority to overturn the election.

it isn’t just at the federal level.

In Nevada, that state’s “most notorious pimp” just won a Republican primary in a campaign for the state legislature.

In Utah, a bill to create a digital driver’s license program was derailed when dozens of protestors flocked to a House committee to share fears that the measure would result in a United Nations takeover or establishment of concentration camps.

One woman invoked the New Testament’s Book of Revelation when she called digital driver’s licenses “moving one step closer to the mark of the beast.”

In Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has apparently decided to join DeSantis in pandering to the GOP’s irrational and racist base.

On Face the Nation, he said: “This commission is a partisan scam. They’re going after—they’re—the purpose of that commission is to try to embarrass and smear and harass as many Republicans as they can get their hands on.”

Yesterday, he released a video saying “Biden is sending free meth & crack pipes to minority communities in the name of ‘racial equity’…. There is no end in sight for this lunacy.“

Well, there certainly doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for GOP lunacy. No one--and certainly not Biden–is sending “free meth and crack pipes” to anyone, and suggesting that such items are being directed to “minority communities” is clearly intended to play to the Republicans’ increasingly racist base.

Per Richardson:

Exaggeration and demonization of their opponents has been part of politics for years, as Republicans tried to fire up their base by describing their opponents as socialists, lazy “takers,” baby-killers, and so on. Now, though, these over-the-top attacks on the committee and on the Democratic administration seem to be part of a new political project.

The frantic edge to them suggests concern about what the January 6th committee might uncover.

But statements like those yesterday of Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who claimed the Department of Justice was reading his mail; Nehls, who claimed that Pelosi was using the Capitol Police to spy on him; and Greene, who claims Pelosi has a “Gestapo,” normalize the practices of authoritarian government.

“Back in the day,” as we old folks might say, it would simply have been unthinkable that embarrassments like Greene, Gohmert, Gosar, Boebert and numerous others of their ilk would be elected to Congress. There were certainly undistinguished, patently ignorant and even evil people who brought shame and disrepute upon that body, but I am aware of nothing approaching the current multitude of profoundly unserious, bat-shit-crazy bigots that has aptly been dubbed (by former Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, if memory serves) “the lunatic caucus.”

From soup to nuts…..

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