This article from today's New York Times gave me food for thought on a lot of fronts. Not the least of which is the statement that balancing the federal budget without new revenues would require $5 trillion of cuts over the next decade. There's a lot that could be written just about that subject, and I suspect I will do so at this time next week. There's also the fact that the Republican Senators quoted in the article, as well as the author of the article itself, gave me the feeling of being just a bit premature in their assessment of whether or not they will have a majority to do some of the things they mention. But again, I'm content to discuss that later.
But the citing of the budget figures gave me a little thought about House Republicans and their insistence that President Obama must be absolutely perfect in taking care to faithfully execute all of the laws of the United States. This insistence is the reason that there's been so much talk about impeachment (and make no mistake: they are the ones who have initiated that talk).
The problem with this, of course, is that, sooner or later in the world we all wake up in, their faithful execution rhetoric has to collide with their austerity rhetoric, in much the same way that, during the Bush years, their tax-cutting rhetoric ultimately collided with their war-on-terror rhetoric. Whether you want the government to give everyone health care, or clean up all of the terror hot spots, you can't escape the fact that government costs money. The single biggest problem over the past 35 years with Republican politics, and therefore with American politics, is that the GOP has done everything possible to repeal, run away from, or otherwise ignore that fact. That is one reason, by the way, that you should waste no time listening to Republican complaints about the national debt: they are its architects.
And that forces me to ask the question: how much does the imperfect execution of our laws depend on the austerity budgeting. At the very least, plenty. And that shouldn't be surprising. When the GOP took over the House in 2010, its members admitted that imperfect execution was the real point. Starve the beast, and shrink it down to size. They didn't care about trying to change the laws to matched the budgeting. And, with the calls for impeachment, you can now see why. It sets up the win-win scenario of shrinking government and blaming Obama for the fact that things aren't working the way they should be.
Small wonder, then, that some people have responded to John Boehner's plans to sue Obama by suggesting that we, the people, sue Congress. A laudable goal, but, ultimately, a futile one; any court would just tell us that our constitutional remedy is the next election. And they're right.
But what about an alternative? What about putting together a cost estimate for the faithful execution of our laws, and submitting that, if not to Congress, then to the court of public opinion? Along with ways to pay for it, like closing corporate loopholes and slashing corporate subsidies? What about making that the election-year vehicle, from an issue standpoint (along with too-big-to-fail banks), that gets us our constitutional remedy.
Somebody good at crunching numbers should do this. And I mean right now. And then the rest of us should whack Republicans over their heads with it from now until Election Day. Personally, I'd love to help make this happen. How about you?
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