Republicans steered Congress off a cliff

[Guns Guns Guns]

"We have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party".

​

Republicans are now more conservative they have been since, well, the era when women could not vote, blacks could not share the same public space as whites and the income tax was a distant dream of a forward-thinking Republican reformer, Theodore Roosevelt.



If the House majority were really fiscally responsible they would at least close tax loopholes.


But they won’t, because 238 of the 242 House Republicans have taken a pledge to Grover Norquist to never raise revenues, shirking their duty to put country first.

Nor is it the pathos of Republicans who let the most dangerous demagogues among them — highlighted by freshman Representative Allen West, whose latest absurd claim is that up to 81 Democrats in Congress are members of the Communist Party — lie without censure.


What we got with the 2010 election was a group that creates its own facts. They deny the elemental fiscal math that the United States will never balance its books without raising somebody’s taxes.


A big majority of Americans want taxes raised on millionaires who pay a lower rate than their secretaries. A CNN poll in April found that nearly three-quarters of the public favored the so-called Buffett rule.


If Congress were representative of the public, you’d see some of that will of the people in the vote.


Yet all but five of 234 Republicans present voted against this.


We get the Congress we deserve, and when Republicans gained 63 seats in the House in the 2010 elections, voters took a chance with a sustained temper tantrum.



At least in 2010, the insurgents were an unknown commodity, produced by the faux populism of talk radio and the Tea Party.


If this majority is voted back in, we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves for a democracy that, at this moment, no longer has the will to self-govern.






http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/do-nothings-and-know-nothings/?src=me&ref=general

 

[Rune]

Good thing we have the Citizens United decision to ensure most of these bastards stay in power.

 

[Guns Guns Guns]

The Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe.

Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard.

A Romney economic adviser once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

As it happens, these doctrines have overwhelmingly failed in practice.

For example, conservative goldbugs have been predicting vast inflation and soaring interest rates for three years, and have been wrong every step of the way.

But this failure has done nothing to dent their influence on a party that is unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.


And why is the G.O.P. so devoted to these doctrines regardless of facts and evidence?

It surely has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires have always loved the doctrines in question, which offer a rationale for policies that serve their interests.

Indeed, support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business.

And now the same people effectively own a whole political party.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/krugman-plutocracy-paralysis-perplexity.html?_r=1

 

[NOVA]

If the President and the Democratic Senate cared even an iota about the economy, one

would think they would have written and agreed upon a budget at least once in the last 3+ years.....

 

[SmarterthanYou]

Good thing we have the Citizens United decision to ensure most of these bastards stay in power.

I guess it's a better thing for them that most people just don't give a shit enough about their government to educate themselves, preferring to be led around by the nose via tv commercials.

 

[Guns Guns Guns]

Just now, Republicans say they want to prevent student loan rates from doubling, which will happen soon if the Do Nothings do nothing.


They passed a bill in the House, but it raids health care to pay for it, ensuring a veto.


This balancing would be fine if Republicans were consistent.


They aren’t. The Bush tax cuts will end up costing $2 trillion over a decade, but this huge debt is treated as a trifle by the reality-denying majority in Congress.



I would add one other big consideration to all of the above: these people in Congress, and this mess, are the voters’ fault.


We put Democrats in control in 2008, and they’d no sooner started to govern when we put Republicans in charge.


http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/do-nothings-and-know-nothings/?src=me&ref=general