There will come a day, though it might not come for a long time, when Trump’s presidency is assessed rationally rather than emotionally. When the tweets and rhetoric have faded to irrelevance and insignificant footnote, and the focus placed on policies and actions… and, specifically, on the downstream consequences of those policies and actions.
Some may be deemed good. Some may be deemed transient or superseded. Some may be deemed bad.
Some may be deemed catastrophic.
The most catastrophic, depending on how much backbone Senator Joe Manchin has, may turn out to be Trump’s petulant rejection of the election outcome. Not because of the Capitol riot, as some will argue, but because of the outcome of the Georgia Senate elections (which, as a reminder, took place the day before the Capitol riot).
Trump’s tantrum gave the Senate to the Democrats. The Democrats, unjustifiably giddy over their takeover of the government, immediately got stinking drunk on power, and started up an agenda that totally rejects the message of an election where they lost seats in the House and would have seen the Senate stay in the GOP’s hands but for Trump’s conniption. That Biden, the “moderate,” is pushing a platform that’s well to the left of his former boss, Obama, is quite the middle finger to the voters who were promised a return to normalcy and sanity, as well.
First, the undoing of all that Trump did, based not on the merits of each policy or executive order, but on the mere fact that Trump did it. Then, the power-grabs. Then, the spending. With some GOP capitulation, we are being done unto with a trillion dollar infrastructure bill that is a – only 6% infrastructure, and b – wholly unnecessary, given how much available money the government has lying around.
And, now, a $3.5 TRILLION dollar budget resolution, entirely partisan, being schemed for enactment via the reconciliation process that evades the filibuster handbrake. By one report, that bill is ten thousand pages long, and I guarantee not a single one of the senators who plan to vote for it know a fraction of its contents. We have a general sense of it, but each passing day offers up new nuggets of content to horrify and appall us.
It’s being rammed down America’s throat by the Democratic Party leadership, with Manchin getting who knows how much in the way of pressure, grief, and threatening phone calls, and the Senate Parliamentarian, who is the neutral party that rules on what can be enacted via reconciliation, certainly being piled on as well. No matter that there’s a trillion dollars worth of COVID money unspent, no matter that inflation is already here and will only be exacerbated by printing up another gargantuan pile of dollars (in the words of the Great Man, Milton Friedman, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output”).
I have no doubt that the Democrats will pay a price for this at the ballot box come the mid-term elections.
I also have come to conclude that they don’t care. Even if they lose both houses of Congress, whatever they pass now will be the law of the land at least until the GOP takes both houses and the White House. If it’s around long enough, it becomes the new normal, and therefore near-impossible to undo. That’s the calculus, and it’s why they aren’t worried about electoral blowback. Biden (or Harris if Joe bails or is pushed out) will preside over gridlock for the second two years of this Presidential term, and that’ll probably suit the Democrats at the top just fine if they’ve gotten their nation-transformative legislation enacted.
That it will cause economic havoc is beyond doubt. The government can’t procure a screwdriver efficiently, let alone manage the world’s largest economy to the micro-level that the Left so ardently desires, and no nation has gotten prosperous by taxing the bejeezus out of its wealth producers while spending twice what it collects.
This budget resolution is a suicide pact. For the Democrats, and for the nation as a whole. That they believe it’s a good idea shows you how out of touch our leaders are, and how insane it is that we keep investing more power and ceding more of our rights to them.
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