Our Government is headed to far out left field

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?