Tea Party Republicans
and the Smaller Government
Hopefully
we have put the question of whether the Government Shutdown was a good tactic
or not by now. Somewhere between stupid and the worst idea ever is the realm
where my vote resides.
On
the topic of “less government”, here’s my question: Just what exactly does the
Tea Party want exactly? Is it less spending? Or is it less government? Or, just
maybe, is it the size of the government they are looking to reduce?
If
reducing the size of government is what the Tea Party is after, there is only
one way to approach this question to my way of thinking. That simply means less
government by reducing the number of people involved in the government. What
else could it be?
Not
having the answers at my fingertips, I went to the internet. The Internet, you
know, the keeper of all the information of value to any right thinking
individual. My source for the data referenced here is the Office of Personnel
Management (http://www.opm.gov/about-us/).
I have to make some
simple assumptions of the data represented on the website because, as usual, it
is not completely self-explanatory.
First off, I have to
assume that the elected officials: the President, Vice-President, Congressmen,
Senators and the Justices of the Supreme Court as well as lower judicial
officials are included in the numbers presented in the reported departments as represented
in the data on the website. Regardless of the assumption, the numbers
associated with the men and women within these categories make up a miniscule
portion of the overall numbers reported on the website. So let’s move on with
this assumption having little or no effect in the grand scheme of the argument.
The most recent numbers
reported in OPM’s data are for the year 2011. Al data on the site is reported
in the thousands, so the numbers are rounded to the closest thousand (assuming
that no category has exactly 000 personnel). At the end of 2011 the Executive
Branch reported 2,756,000 civilians, this number, due to the way the data is
reported must also contain civilians working within the Army, Navy, etc. as the
second category reported is Uniformed Military Personnel at 1,583,000. The third (and smallest) of the reporting
categories is Legislative & Judicial with 64,000 personnel. The grand total
being: 4,403,000. That’s right, almost 4.5 million people are employed by us,
the US tax payers.
One would naturally
assume, from the general conception of government workers, that there must be
some percentage of that number that are not holding up there end of the
bargain. OK, maybe so, but I’m not going there. That’s a discussion for another
venue.
Let’s look at the effect
of some arbitrary levels of reduction. These levels are based on no real facts
and are just assumptions for the sake of our discussion.
Let us assume that we
reduce the government by 10%. That results in 440,300 more people on
unemployment and//or the welfare rolls. Isn’t this category, loosely defined as
entitlements, one of those that the Republicans are trying desperately to
eliminate; more spending? But let us not stop there. Some Republicans want a
25% reduction in government. Where do they suppose the 1,100,750 will find
work? There’s not that many manufacturing jobs coming back from China—not any
time soon! There’s no Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps around anymore.
Reductions approached by
this method just doesn’t work! To reduce the government there has to be a
viable alternative. Has anyone heard of or read what the Tea Party plan is in
relation to government reductions? Let’s hear the plan first. Until there is a
PLAN, this ideology needs to go away, FAR away.
The Democrats and Legislation – Like it or not
Then there’s the
Democrat Party questions. In the interest of equal time; I can’t leave the Dems
out.
First came the
Healthcare Website abomination. Every already understand that the
Administration was not ready to release this fiasco upon the American populous.
They knew it wasn’t ready and pretended that it was OK and would be better
momentarily. Then they told us it was broke but they would have it fixed by
now. We are yet to see how this worked out.
Then those letters started
going out! They were being delivered at almost exactly the same time that the
President was saying: “If you like it, you can keep it.” Many found this to be
an UN-Truth.
From
Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Posy, I read: The President calls a hasty
news conference urging insurers and states to reinstate millions of such
policies. Except that he is asking them
to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy
after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These
plans were canceled because they do not. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-democrats-outbreak-of-lawlessness/2013/11/28/3184b6f2-579b-11e3-8304-caf30787c0a9_story.html
The
problem here is as Krauthammer continues: “The law remains unchanged. The
regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing has changed except for
a president to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.
This is banana republic stuff except that there the dictator proclaims from the
presidential balcony.”
Next
along comes Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader with the “nuclear option.”
Harry says: “Congress is broken.” Then Harry holds an “along party lines vote”
to abolish a rule that has been in place for over two hundred years (1789).
From
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post I read: “If Congress wasn’t broken
before, it certainly is now. What Reid (Nev.) and his fellow Democrats
effectively did was take the chamber of Congress that still functioned at a
modest level and turn it into a clone of the other chamber, which functions not
at all. They turned the Senate into the House.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-the-democrats-naked-power-grab/2013/11/21/60ef049a-5306-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html
Milbank
continued: “Certainly, Republicans have abused the dilatory tactics that Senate
minorities have, for centuries, used with greater responsibility; they seem
intent on bringing government to a halt. And the Senate in 2013 is hardly a
healthy institution. Yet it has achieved far more than the House — passing
bipartisan immigration legislation and a farm
bill and working out deals
to avoid default and to end
the federal government shutdown — largely because, until Thursday, Senate
rules required the majority party to win votes from the minority.”
That’s
the way it was meant to work. Compromise. The Republicans are way out of line
in blocking the President’s nominations; they have failed to compromise. The
Framers of the Constitution added “Cloture” for a reason. The House was
established to respond to popular opinion. This is why EVERY member of the
House of Representatives is elected every two years—so when popular opinion
changes corrections to the status quo can be effected. The Senate was
established to be the longer seeing (and focused) body of the Legislative
Branch. This is exactly why only one-third of its members are elected every two
years for a six year term—taking a longer view of what is happening in the populous
and changing within the country at large. The President falls right in the
middle of the fray; elected every four years. Two-Four-Six; that’s how it
works. Around this corner is the Judicial Branch with the even longer view
(life) and mission of keeping everything right in accordance with the
Constitutional.
Even
a top member of the current Democratic administration has said: Then-Sen. Joe Biden said in 2005 when a
Republican Senate majority threatened to use a similar “nuclear option” to
allow a simple majority to carry the day: “The nuclear option abandons
America’s sense of fair play . . . tilting the playing field on the side of
those who control and own the field. I say to my friends on the Republican
side: You may own the field right now, but you won’t own it forever. I pray God
when the Democrats take back control, we don’t make the kind of naked power
grab you are doing.”
These
guys can’t and refuse to work together. So, what do we, those that are really
supposed to hold the keys to the castle, do?
Let’s
VOTE ‘EM ALL OUT! Let’s start with a new group the next go round. We can do
that in the House. The Vote comes up next November (2014). I realize that we
can’t fix the Senate completely for some time to come (6 years) but we can
start with one-third next November.
How
about we push that term limit thing just a little. The job was never envisioned
by the Framers to be a lifelong occupation. Let’s correct that tangent as soon
as we can.
Above
all; how about we require all incoming members of the House and Senate to take
and pass a class in American History and Government before they set foot on the
floor of their respective chambers. While we are at it, let’s have those incumbents
re-take the same class every three or four years.
Good
place to start—don’t you think?