The End Of The Republican Party?

The budget deal that Trump yesterday threatened to veto and then inexplicably signed just hours later was an unmitigated disaster. The more we learn about it, the worse it becomes and what is worse very few of our "representatives" even knew what was in it outside of a few bullet-points. Senator Rand Paul tweeted out a picture of himself holding this monstrosity...

⚡️ “Tweeting the 2018 Omnibus”https://t.co/qgTCivVbrX

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 22, 2018

And he seems to be one of t he few people that bothered to actually try to read it. A few Senators, including Senators Paul, Cruz and Lee voted against in but it passed overwhelmingly with "bi-partisan" support, a sure sign of a bad bill laden with pork. Trump signed the bill and the "Great Negotiator", Mr. "Art of the Deal", the Grand Master of 4-D chess, got completely hoodwinked by the doddering Nancy Pelosi and Smirkin' Chuck Schumer. Maybe more time fighting for priorities and less time blustering about fighting Joe Biden?

As an example, the budget fully funds Planned Parenthood to the tune of $500 million dollars. That money would have made a nice down-payment on a border wall but instead it is used to subsidize infanticide. No wall and funding for Planned Parenthood is pretty much what we were promised from Hillary Clinton but instead that is what we are getting from Trump, who has inexplicably linked border wall funding with "DACA reform", i.e. amnesty, which makes little sense as there is no compromise on the horizon on DACA and therefore no border wall either. The obvious way this is going, as I have said before, is that Dems will get amnesty for hundreds of thousands of illegals which will in turn make them life-long Democrat voters in return for an empty promise to maybe, someday, think about what it might take to build a wall. On the "bright side" there was a massive increase in military spending. According to Defense Secretary Mattis it is the biggest ever:

“Today we received the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding,” Mattis said. “Together, we’re going to make our military stronger than ever.”

If you are keeping track at home, we are not technically at war with anyone other than the amorphous "War On Terror". Our main military "rivals", the Russians and Chinese, have combined two aircraft carriers, the Russians with the rattletrap Admiral Kuznetsov, she of the freezing toilets, and the Chinese with the hand-me-down Ukrainian carrier renamed the Liaoning, which is technically just a training aircraft carrier so the Chinese can learn how to sail aircraft carriers in the first place. I would guess that a showdown between either party against the U.S. Navy with ten or eleven aircraft carriers would be a short and very one-sided conflict, Russia's new magical super weapons (supersonic missiles, nuclear powered cruise missiles, etc.) not withstanding. So by all means let's spend the biggest military budget in human history at the same time we pass a huge tax cut and just recently eclipsed $20,000,000,000,000 in national debt. Even leftist mouthpieces like CNN are suddenly worried about the national debt now that Trump is in office, pointing out that we are on an unsustainable course (emphasis mine).

In our latest nonpartisan analysis, we found that interest payments will quadruple, topping $1 trillion per year in as little as a decade. That's more than we will spend each year on the military or Medicaid, and as a share of the economy, it is the highest in history.

Read that again, just servicing the interest on the debt, NOT playing any of the debt off, will eat up more than $1 trillion dollars per year. There are 327 million people in America so that means that to service the debt each person will need to pony up over $3000 before we spend any money on stuff like the military, education, infrastructure or health care. The silence on the debt from almost all Republicans is deafening.

The grand bargain we are supposed to cheerfully accept is that “conservatives” get limitless military spending, which is basically just big-government-in-uniform spending that enriches large global corporations, in return for liberals getting pretty much everything else they want. Lost in this bargain are middle and working class Americans who are not very interested in foreign wars fought for every reason but American national security. As “regular” Americans, we get nothing we are promised in return for showing up in droves to vote for Republicans. What we get instead are accusations of privilege, jobs shipped overseas, a laughable “immigration” policy and our sons and daughters returning in caskets or missing limbs from the latest neocon war adventures. It has been painfully obvious that the ruling elite of the Republican party are not “conservative” in any historically meaningful sense and what is needed is a new political movement. Trump’s latest betrayal is not that he is acting like a Democrat, rather he is acting exactly like what we have come to expect from Republicans: big talk on the campaign trail and repeated betrayals in office. The way Trump is heading is indistinguishable from how a Jeb! Bush or Hillary Clinton would have served in office and is quickly losing any resemblance to the promises and rhetoric of candidate Trump. Why exactly should we show up in November of this year to protect the Republican House majority or to add to the Republican majority in the Senate?

Oh I know, we shouldn't.