Government Shutdown
to End by October 18; Real Reason for Republican Intransigence is to Create
Grounds for Impeachment
On October 16, the voters of New Jersey go to the polls to
elect a United States Senator to replace Frank Lautenberg who died in June. The race is between two mayors: Steve Lonegan, an avowed Tea Party devotee who tried to ban
Spanish billboards in Bogota when he was mayor (the town is 40% Hispanic), is
against abortion and is in favor of the current government shutdown
“unnecessary parts of the government have been closed down – good.” Lonegan is
consistent. He opposed federal aid for
Sandy victims in New Jersey as a budgetary measure.
Lonegan’s opponent is Newark Mayor Cory
Booker. Booker is a reliable liberal
with a couple of conservative speed bumps.
He is somewhat of a celebrity, but favors abortion rights, embraces
diversity, and is against the government shutdown.
If the House of Representatives hasn’t
caved by then, the election returns from New Jersey on the morning of October
17 are going to send shock waves through Washington. Booker is going to win by a handsome margin. The narrowest poll so far has Booker ahead 54%
to 42%, normally considered a landslide; with the distance between the two
being as high as 35% earlier in the campaign.
Unfortunately, reopening the government is not going to
make any difference because the real Republican strategy is to use the shutdown
to create the issues on which they can impeach Obama.
The reason the
government is shut down is because of an 1870 law called the Anti-Deficiency
Act. This act was designed, with
amendments over time, to prevent any expenditure of money without the approval
of Congress. Of course, there is an
exemption for health and safety; but everything else must stop if Congress does
not appropriate money.
And by stop, I mean
stop. Federal employees are prohibited
from volunteering to do their jobs without pay.
Why? Because in the past, Presidents
tried to end run the congressional control of money by getting people to work
for free, and then making a claim against the government for pay. So, the law has been successively tightened
to prohibit the executive from incurring obligations without the consent of
Congress.
Once the government
gets back to work, the irredentists in the Republican caucus in the House will
start combing the books of the executive department looking for that errant
expenditure that took place during the shutdown, but was not related to health
and safety. Due to the diligence of
previous congresses, spending money not appropriated is a criminal act. Violŕ. The eager beavers
in the House will be sure to find a $4.58 expenditure
spent outside appropriations but not for health or safety, perfect grounds for
impeachment.
In this way, the Republicans will attempt to destroy the end of Obama’s presidency, in the same way they did to
Clinton.
So, the real reason for the budget impasse has nothing to do with
the Affordable Health Care Act, nor the deficit, but with the fact the
Republican Party has become a racist religious organization. It is because Obama
is black that they hate him; if they hated deficits, they would have at least
objected once to Bush’s pursuing a war while simultaneously cutting taxes.
And that is the long and short of it. Andrei Gromyko, the late Soviet Foreign
Minister, in his Memoirs refers to
“mass ideological psychosis.” Beginning
with Goldwater in 1964, and going through Nixon’s southern strategy, the base
of the Republican Party has become white southern racists. There are no black Republican House members
and only handful of Hispanics.
The Republicans,
unable to appeal to the growing minority population, has instead turned to a
religious belief in their program combined with tactics to reduce and change
the voting population: voter ID’s; shorter and fewer early voting
opportunities, and the end to same day voter registration; in short,
administrative means of preventing the working, the poor and the young from
voting.
And this applies
especially to Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who masquerades as a
moderate because he talks to right-wing Democrats. (In fact, he abuses the legal process to
advance his political career. Most of
his Democratic support comes from double-dippers who probably should be
indicted.) The Special Senate General Election
on a Wednesday in October; the primary in August; all designed to reduce
turnout. In addition, he has manipulated
the debate schedule for his own gubernatorial re-election campaign so that they
all occur before the Special Senate election.
The governor is trying to deep six his own race in order to deny
coverage for his opponent and prevent an examination of his record. I’m glad I didn’t risk my life in Vietnam to
defend the freedom and democracy of the Vietnamese. The political system in America is an
outrage; and Christie is considered a serious candidate for president.
The good thing
about this situation is that tens of millions of white American Obama supporters are learning, albeit vicariously, what
race prejudice is all about. It doesn’t
matter what Obama does or is. It’s just that simple.
But the racists have always been with us and
slowly, over time, have been losing ground.
In the old days, when racism was stronger, there were no blacks in
positions of power like Obama. Now that there are powerful blacks, the
racists are able to hide their racism behind legitimate issues; in this case,
the Affordable Health Care Act and the deficit.
Systemic Issues –
Gerrymandering and the end of the Draft
It is not just the
racist Republicans who are to blame. It
is also decades of Supreme Court decisions that have destroyed the non-partisan
nature of the constitution and replaced it with a two-party system. Last year, more people voted for Democratic
candidates for the House than voted for Republican candidates. So, why do the Republicans control the House
by a large margin? Because of gerrymandering. The blacks and minorities have been bottled
up in the central cities in virtually all black districts where their votes for
the House of Representatives effectively do not count. Housing segregation and gerrymandered
districts have created a situation where one party or the other is virtually
guaranteed victory in November. This strengthens
the extremists in each party, making compromise in policy matters more
difficult.
And the second issue
is the end of the military draft in 1973.
All men born in the United States between 1922 and 1955 were subject to
the military draft. They, by necessity,
had to pay attention to world affairs and other people. They planned their lives on the assumption
that two or four years of the prime of their lives would be devoted to public
service. At the very least, this put
people who served in the military at a competitive disadvantage in their
careers to their peers who did not serve.
Since
the end of the draft, a whole generation of people,
many of whom are now coming into positions of power, have not had to spend a
single nanosecond thinking about or doing for anyone other than
themselves. And they haven’t. The
explosion of CEO pay, the chicanery and disregard for the public good that
permeates the highest reaches of government, business, academe; the misuse and
rebranding of non-profits into predatory organizations: hospitals turning 33%
profits; money losing arts organizations paying CEO’s million dollar salaries;
the list goes on and on. The House of
Representatives is only one of them.
The goal of the Constitution
was to create a system of government of the people, by the people and for the
people. The Framers were most suspicious
of hereditary power and government by the betters, the elite, the wealthy. In fact,
over the past fifty years, the United States has become everything the founders
of the nation feared. A
millionaire’s club in the Senate.
A political system where, whether one is a Kennedy or a Bush, private
fortunes held in tax-avoiding trusts buy political power and then pass it down
from generation to generation like inherited property, whether they win the
election or not.
Naturally, these
people would detest Obama; an upstart, and black no
less, who not only won the White House, but who actually delivered on a six-decade
old Democratic promise to provide health care to the American people. Worse
still, he refuses to use American military might to kill hundreds of thousands
or millions of dark skinned third world people.
And worse yet, actually wants to sit down and talk to
America’s enemies. People whose
only interaction with minorities is with them as servants hate Obama and understand, correctly, that he is a threat to
their way of life. He must be stopped
and destroyed at all costs and they are willing to destroy, not only the United
States, but the world economy as well in order to do it.
It is the megalomania of a Hitler who felt that if the Germans
lost the war, well, then they were just not worthy of his vision and victory. This is what Obama
is up against. Religious, racist,
fanatics who do not care about anyone or anything but themselves; and anyone
who holds a differing opinion deserves to be destroyed.
[This article is dedicated to the memory of my mentor Robert Benedict
Brady who taught me most of everything I know about electoral politics. He was a submarine veteran of World War II
and while studying for the Navy at Harvard in November, 1942, pulled several
people to safety from the Cocoanut Grove fire, the second most deadly fire in
United States history, where almost 500 people perished.]