Dr. Debthate or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Government Shutdowns

President Obama’s blindness to government spending problem, and insistence on ever more tax increases on the rich towards always moving fair share-goalposts, makes refusal of the Republican House to raise the debt ceiling an acceptable option.

In the wake of the 2010 tea partier conservative epic GOP mid-term election landslide that returned control of the House of Representatives to the party, this columnist urged Republicans to risk a government shutdown during the 2010 budget negotiations as more palatable than risking “default” during the likely debt ceiling battle the following year.

What Republicans can’t do, can do, ought do and must do

Only President Barack Obama can cause the U.S. to default on its sovereign debt, and congressional Republicans must make this fact clear to the American people before the current debt ceiling is reached.

And only by owning the definition of “default” does the minority party in control of only one house of Congress have any chance of using the debt limit debate to rein in the Democrats’ out of control spending, spur job-producing economic growth and win the political argument going into the next election.

Of course, the Republican House of Representatives can, under Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, refuse to authorize the borrowing of any additional money on the credit of United States, and thus impose the balancing of spending with tax receipts, i.e. “the budget”. In that event, the Executive Branch would have at its disposal only tax receipts to spend on all “obligations” of the federal government based upon current law including entitlements and “discretionary” spending covered by the continuing budget resolution still in effect. But tax receipts only cover approximately two-thirds of current budgetary obligations, with the discretion to prioritizing expenditures in the President’s hands, absent a new law setting such priorities that both sides would have to agree to; and of course, that won’t happen.

Tea partiers save Boehner’s lame GOP duck from tax hike cliff

Could 2013 see the first GOP tea partier ambulatory duck House of Representatives, and if so, how should it deal with a Lame Obama Duck President?

Whew. Who knew that the Republican tea partier class of the 2010 landslide, after 23 months of impotence at the hands of their establishment “leadership” posing as Bob Dole-like tax collectors for the welfare state, were brewing for a Boehner-bruising as their last hurrah?

The Reagan-Newt-Dubya Republican No New Taxes brand remains intact:

[Speaker John Boehner and his fellow] House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on [a] bill [to extend current tax rates only on those earning less than $1 million/year] after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m…The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

Americans can still read tea partier conservative lips as non-fiction, if not those of a Benghazi flu and concussion-afflicted Obama Administration’s, flapping fast and furious.

Between Obama’s fiscal cliff and a Lame Duck desert floor

Calling President Obama and Speaker Boehner for safety net. If Lame Duck doesn’t break fall; after crash, dial 1-80O-bam-acare or estate tax lawyer.

America went over the fiscal cliff years ago

I’ve never bungee jumped or sky dived. Heck, since that candy apple leapt out of me at age 12 on the downswing of the roller-coaster at the Piedmont Interstate Fair, I’ve settled for such thrills on the Travel Channel; but I hear that many Democrats experienced the euphoric weightlessness of space when casting their recent vote for four more years. I hear its akin to the feeling of security a lobster feels while lying in a temporarily lukewarm pot of water on the kitchen stove while guests in the parlor await the main course.

Many Republican voters thought the American lobster, that had lain in the warmth of Bush-Pelosi-Reid deficits, would suddenly arouse with hopes of survival after being doused with Obama’s scalding hot and stimulating Obamacare waters, tripled deficits and doubled gasoline prices. Instead, while many John McCain voters  indulged a tea party and helped fire Pelosi; class envy or despair trumped too many of their old American dreams as they sat on their butts rather than take a chance that Mitt Romney would return America to the pre-Obama nirvana that was Clinton-Gingrich work requirements for welfare.

It seems now that many Obama-Biden voters that voted to re-hire those that couldn’t fix the mess left by President George W. Bush in “only” four years (I hear mother Barbara performed the job thousands of times in less than four minutes, but I digress), somehow think that “it” can be fixed in just four more weeks by a Lame Duck Republican House if only it would heed the “obvious mandate” from the American people and reinstate some of those same Bush tax cuts (aka Taxmageddon) etc:

1. The payroll tax reduction passed in 2010 will end.
2. The temporary tax rates passed under President Bush will lapse.
3. Obamacare’s taxes will come due.
4. The Alternative Minimum Tax will expand to many more taxpayers.
5. Extended unemployment benefits will expire.
6. Some $78 billion in federal spending will be sequestered.
7. Medicare “doc fix” will expire.

College professors take salary cuts to lower tuition?

Not. Why not just increase student loans, keep tuition high, blame Republicans for not caring about the poor and middle class priced out of an education because they won’t increase student loans even more, and keep the high salaries for the Democrats in academia?

File the above with other headlines you never see, such as:

• Labor unions voluntarily reduce pay to save company
• Government employees voluntarily increase their contributions to pension fund to prevent tax increase
• Teachers voluntarily agree to end tenure and adopt merit pay plan
• Democrats agree to cut non-defense spending

Democrats constantly demonize “Big Oil”, “Big Pharmaceutical” and Big Business in general and tilt at other faux man-made global warming aka “climate change” windmills such as Republicans as racist, bigot, homophobes that want widows and orphans to starve in the streets rather than prove they “care” by supporting the latest Democrat-sponsored bill. And we fully expect September or October surprises that would “bail out” Sallie Mae and debt-burdened students much like Dodd-Frank bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and let them continue their business and serve as employment agency for rejected and retiring Democrat pols.

Could we please, finally, hold democrats accountable for the failure of their policies?

How many more cities and states run by Democrats for decades have to reach the Detroit stage of a return of city limits territory to pasture status before voters will quote Sheriff Andy Griffith’s deputy Barney Fife and say fool me for decades, shame on me; and join the tea partier reversal that began with the 2010 election landslide for conservatives?

MonObamachromatic soul searchings miss JFK’s moral issue as old as the scriptures

A mixed race Trayvon Martin is killed by a mixed race, and so far uncharged, George Zimmerman, and We the People are admonished to search our souls since the deceased looks like President Obama’s imaginary son.

Souls are searched.

Souls in Florida impanel a grand jury to determine if sufficient evidence exists to bring charges against a broken nosed-Zimmerman for the homicide and a U.S. Justice Department investigation to be commenced to determine if Martin’s civil rights were violated.

Problem solved? Not according to the souls of New Black Panthers, certain non-Pastoral “Reverends”, and the director of “Do the Right Thing”.

Obama makes kept skyrocketing energy prices promise an orphan

Part III of our Why the poor should vote Republican series

For the past 30 years Democratic Party presidents, congressmen and candidates have opposed expanded oil, coal and natural gas exploration and production, as well as permits for new oil refineries and nuclear power plants. Democrats have based their policy arguments on safety (despite the absence of any significant nuclear power accidents in the U.S.) and environmental concerns; as well as the promise of “clean” solar and wind energy.

Other conscience objections after ObamaCare abortion pill mandate is dropped

The free exercise of religion was fundamental to the founding of America, but so is the right to freely bargain with health care and insurance providers

After President Barack Obama inevitably drops the recently announced mandate that even church-affiliated employers provide health insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and “Plan B” morning after abortion pills (aka RU-486), will we look back at this exercise as a ruse to make ObamaCare seem more palatable to voters this fall?

Class warfare/envy-produced unemployment define 2011

DeVine Law Gamecock’s Stone Mountain of Georgia roost-view of what matters most about the news, politics and law of 2011:

Unemployment and the Economy

If enough Americans give up on finding a job, the regularly reported unemployment rate (U-3) could fall to Zero percent. As it happens, the current U-3 rate of 8.6% would stand at over 11% if the labor force were as large as it was in 2007. The more comprehensive U-6 rate measuring all those that are unemployed and those only able to find part-time work is now at Depression Era levels over 17%, which rate doesn’t count self-employed individuals nor those that have dropped out. Over one in five American men are no longer in the labor force.

Jobs Plans, Occupiers and Class Warfare

Three years after President Barack Obama and super-majorities of his fellow Democrats in Congress enacted their Stimulus-Dodd-Frank-ObamaCare-GM takeover/UAW Bailout-Solyndra, anti-Keystone Pipeline and anti-Boeing jobs in right-to-work states, Gulf Oil and ANWR oil-drilling moratorium agenda; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) stands at an anemic 1.8%.

Does GOP want to own Obama’s 20,000 lost Keystone jobs?

Claiming fatigue from kicking cans down the road, Speaker of the House John Boehner engineered a rejection of a Democratic Party-controlled Senate-passed bill that would have cleared the way for the Canadian Keystone Pipeline project that President Barack Obama has delayed for three years of “study”.

The bill, which also extends unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut for 60 days, would have authorized construction on the oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf unless the President explicitly rejected the project before March 1, 2011.