Dog Balls

            So when are they going to start teaching Civics in school again?  You listen to people on the street interviews and they are all fed up with Washington because “Congress doesn’t run the government right”.  Wait.  It is not Congress’ job to run the operations of government.  That’s the job of the executive branch. It’s called separation of powers.

And then you listen to another person say, “I don’t see why the Republicans want to shut the government down.”  Wait. The legislature’s job is to make laws and approve budgets. R’s and D’s get into arguments all the time, and that is the way things are supposed to be run.  That’s how laws and budgets are made.  It is clearly not the responsibility of Congress to rubber stamp spending.  We have been going for 5 years without a budget, because the Senate won’t take up budget items passed by the House, even 2009-10 when the House was being run by the Dems.  A Continuing Resolution, a blanket continuance with an 8% or 5% (Sequester) automatic raise, has been the way things have been funded contrary to the Constitution.  It violates Article I, Sect. 7 when budgets approved by the House aren’t even taken up by the Senate and together with the President they try to blackmail the House into approving a Continuing Resolution. You tell me, if a business never looked at its budget but just continued to blindly add 8% increases each year to every department, would it still be in business in 5 years?  Moreover, the “shutdown” is actually 83% business-as-usual and what’s at issue is whether the feds should deficit spend or live within their means.

Then a financial analyst, who is supposed to be someone who knows something about economics, warns that we might default.  Well, if there is a default, it is the choice of a President. The incoming revenue is far in excess of interest on federal debt.  So government should be able to cover it, unless the guy in charge of decision-making decides, like some ghetto-rat renter, they he is not going to pay the landlord.  Then there will be default.

“Beam me up, Scottie, there’s no intelligent life down here!”  Or at least no civics.  Or maybe we are chosing to neglect the Constitution.  What I have just written about is #39 of my list of things to impeach our President over.  This latest refusal to negotiate with the House and demand quite publicly that the Senate must not consider separate budgetary items, is trying to coerce unconstitutional (Article I, Sect. 7) results.  Number 38 is related.  Obama tried to shut down state highways leading to national parks.  Violation of Amendment 10!  The feds cannot tell states what to do with a state-built road.  Same goes for shutting down private monuments like Ford’s Theatre.

I catch myself thinking about those farmers to whom the Federalist Papers were written.  Those guys with wooden tools, farming with oxen, storing the milk in a spring-house cave to keep it cool, understood the Constitution yet somehow we can’t.  So when are we going to teach Civics again? We can survive Obama but how will we survive a populance of bozzos?

My very incomplete list of impeachables grows almost every week.  Sept 16, Obama ignored a law (“It’s already on the books and you should stop fighting it!” as he says about Obamacare.) that forbids US from arming global terrorist organizations in order to arm Al Nuzra and Al Qaeda in Syria.  So when a President disregards, violates, or changes the laws of the land, duly passed by a Congress and signed by a President, he violates Sect. II, “shall take care that the law is faithfully executed” and Section VI. If the ploughboys of 1789 had heard about the stuff happening today, they’d have taken up pitchforks and scythes and somebody would probably have been swinging a rope as they descended on Washington.  And it wouldn’t be because someone didn’t sending their government check on time.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act specifically required Congress to be considered as private citizens who must have and pay for insurance by the individual mandate.  Obama slyly offered to pay their way and they took the bribe.  Once again, violations of Art. II and VI.  In fact, Obama games and changes laws at will when he gives 2500 exemptions and delays the employer mandate from the specific start-up date of the law. 

So why does this stuff rarely get mentioned by the pundits or the citizenry?  The farmers of 1789 would be incensed and talk of tyranny would be rife.  The farmers I grew up with had a saying, “as plain as the balls on a short-haired dog.” Are we just pretending that we don’t see tyranny?