The More Things Change…
By Todd Douglas
Nov 23, 2014
The Republicans have won a landslide victory in the recent midterms; taking control of the Senate for the first time in seven years, extended their control of the House of Representatives, and won the lion’s share of the governor’s races nationwide. Just as when the Democrats won a big victory in the 2006 midterms, the talk is all about how things are going to change, and how the American people have rejected the policies and failures of the incumbent president.
I have a little different take on the election results. When the Democrats took control of the congress in a similar sweep in the 2006 elections, they promised to end the Iraq War that they voted for, and to “drain the swamp” and “end the culture of corruption” in congress. Nancy Pelosi proclaimed,
“Today the American people voted for change, and they voted for Democrats to take our country in a new direction….the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history…And nowhere did the American people make it more clear that we need a new direction than in the war in Iraq.”
Harry Reid announced, “All across America tonight . . . there is in the air a wind of change.”
After the shellacking and the Democrat takeover of both houses of the federal legislature, exactly nothing changed. The war in Iraq continued and was fully funded by the Democrat-controlled congress. The congress continued to be infested with corrupt and craven political opportunists, including Nancy Pelosi, who has steered more than a billion dollars of subsidies to benefit a company in which her husband is a major investor. Harry Reid, in one of innumerable corrupt actions that have made him a millionaire by serving in congress, secured $18 million in federal funds to build a bridge over the Colorado River that would land on the Arizona side of the border right by a housing development on land he owned.
The Republicans have had their share of scandals as well. When Dennis Hastert was the Speaker of the House, he secured $207 million of taxpayer money for a highway to be built past land his wife owned – sending the value skyrocketing. The lists of scandals, dirty deals, legal bribes, and other shenanigans by members of the Republicrat ruling elite could fill volumes.
Obviously the blatant corruption will continue apace in the cesspool on the Potomac, but that’s not all that won’t change with the changing of the guard in the Senate. The federal government will continue to meddle in the healthcare business; whether Obamacare survives or not, the Republican majority will simply impose their own government-based “solutions” to healthcare costs, with the result being continued increases in medical costs for consumers.
There will be no return to constitutional government; the Departments of Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and labor will continue to exist outside of any constitutional justification. Likewise for the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency. All of these agencies will continue to write law and act as their own police, judge, and jury when enforcing their edicts. The Federal Register which holds their tens of thousands of laws will continue to grow.
The government will continue to spend trillions of dollars of money it does not have; John Boener’s demand for “fiscal handcuffs,” that he touted during the debt ceiling charade a few years back, will not be renewed now that his party has their hands on your money. The debt ceiling will be raised again, and we will move ever closer to total collapse – albeit a little more slowly.
In the 12 years from 1995 to 2007 that the Republicans controlled both houses of congress (except for loss of the Senate between 2001-2003) they increased the national debt by 87 percent; averaging 7.5 percent per year. In the two years the Democrats controlled both houses, they increased the national debt by 61 percent, or 30.5 percent per year. In the past four years, the two parties have split control of the congress and increased the debt by 29 percent. The difference is like driving straight off a cliff at 25 miles per hour with a Republican driving or 100 miles per hour with a Democrat at the wheel; the result is the same. The only way to save our republic is to get our republicrat political masters out of the driver’s seat permanently.
When a government like the one in Washington grows into the largest, most powerful force on earth, that has long ago broken free of any constitutional restraints, it will attract the worst sort of people who want to control its apparatus for their personal benefit. That same power will draw vast sums of money in the form of legal and illegal bribery from every conceivable interest group that seeks to co-opt the government’s muscle for their own advantage, or simply to protect themselves from the government’s power to destroy them.
Our once great constitutional federal republic has degenerated into a circus, where the political class has divided itself into two opposing camps – but they do not oppose each other on principle – only over who controls the monstrous state apparatus. They are in complete agreement that the power of the centralized command-and-control government should be perpetuated, and that our primary means of dealing with other nations continue to be through the use or threat of military force.
More than 50 years ago, the philosopher Ayn Rand provided a perfect description of what the American government was becoming;
“Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good.”
The next two years will provide a great distracting spectacle of carefully choreographed “battles” between the two camps of the republicrat ruling class who have reigned over us for 137 years. The two year long presidential campaign, with it’s scripted and vapid “debates,” will provide Americans with another opportunity to feel as though they are participating in the process of governing; but if you pay attention, you will see that the more things change in Washington, the more they stay the same.
http://todddouglas.liberty.me/2014/11/23/the-more-things-change/?refer=libertyme --
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