Scott Spiegel

Ever since Democrats suffered historic, butt-spanking losses in the 2010 midterms, they’ve been whimpering for “bipartisanship,” “cooperation,” “compromise,” “togetherness,” “shared responsibility,” and “national unity.”

President Obama has been coaxing House and Senate Republicans to work together with Democrats to get things done.

Recently New York Senator Charles Schumer, one of the most viciously partisan individuals on the planet (you might say he’s full of “vitriol”), suggested it might be melodious for Democrats and Republicans to sit mingled among one another at Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address, rather than hunkering down battalion-style on opposite sides of the room.

Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn was the first to stupidly take the bait, followed by dozens of other Congressmen including Charles Grassley, Pat Toomey, Mark Kirk, Olympia Snowe, and—surprise!—John McCain.

Obama, it should be remembered, campaigned for president on the promise that he would usher in a “new era of bipartisanship.”

If the Democratic 111^th Congress took Obama up on his idea, they had a funny way of showing it.

When they weren’t shutting Republicans out of committee meetings to write the 2009 stimulus bill and health care reform act, they were failing to post bills online with enough time to allow Republicans to read them and offer input.

Democrats rammed health care through inappropriately using budget reconciliation, because they couldn’t keep their 60-vote coalition after Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown.

The health care bill was so partisan and calculated to exclude a single strand of GOP DNA that not one Republican voted for it—not because Republicans were stubborn, but because the bill was so egregious that even 34 House Democrats voted against it.  As Governor Haley Barbour noted, the only thing bipartisan about ObamaCare was opposition to it.

Despite the misconception that the GOP covered their ears during the health care reform debate and refused to offer suggestions, House Republicans introduced dozens of their own bills during 2009.  These acts proposed innovative free-market improvements such as allowing sale of health insurance across state lines; expanding tax deductions, vouchers, and health savings accounts for routine care, prescriptions, and long-term care; and enacting medical malpractice tort reform.

None of the Republicans’ bills left the referral stage.  None of the GOP’s suggestions was included in any of the Democratic versions of the bill.

For that divisive, impenetrable firewall between Democrats and Republicans, you can thank then-House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her sterling “bipartisanship.”

Ditto for the cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House in 2009 but stalled in the Senate, and not for Democrats’ lack of trying.  (Coincidentally, the partisan energy bill squeaked by in the House with the same vote as ObamaCare, 219-212.)

The bill, cosponsored by über-leftists Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, was so odious and economy-wrecking that 44 House Democrats voted against it.

(Hey—maybe the 111^th Congress was bipartisan, only not in a way that anybody predicted!)

Now that cap-and-trade has died in the Senate, Obama is scheming to have Lisa Jackson and other far-left appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency implement an emissions-limiting plan over the objections of most Americans.

To be clear, I don’t favor bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship.  I wouldn’t have expected Democrats to capitulate to Republicans on everything when they had a majority in both chambers just to be nice.  (I would have expected them to capitulate on everything because they were wrong.)

There are significant philosophical differences between the two major parties.  One party is based on mob rule and is incongruent with the foundational nature of our country, which is not a democracy.  The other party is based on individual rights, rule of law, an inviolate Constitution, and representative government and is congruent with the foundational nature of our country, which is a representative, constitutional republic.

In his speech last night, Obama declared, “[W]e are still bound together as one people… we share common hopes.”  No we don’t, Mr. President.  Liberals hope for the government to take over every aspect of our lives, and conservatives hope to be left alone to figure it all out for themselves.

While conservatives try desperately to cut spending in Washington, Obama’s speech was dominated by pledges to blow trillions more we don’t have on green research and jobs, college degrees for everybody, and high-speed rail and Internet.

Conservatives want to protect us militarily against our enemies, whereas Obama’s speech covered everything under the sun until it meandered into the realm of foreign policy, and even then mostly bragged about the end of the Iraq War, troops returning from Afghanistan in July, and the useless Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

So I favor any action, symbolic or otherwise, that clarifies and amplifies the philosophical, partisan differences between the parties, including maintaining the traditional seating arrangement of one party on each side of the aisle.

Republicans should never fall into the bipartisanship trap Democrats set.

Democrats’ idea of bipartisanship is asking Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman what they think, then doing what Harry Reid wants.

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This week the newly majority Republican House of the 112^th Congress will vote on repeal of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as The Albatross Around Democrats’ Necks.

Republicans have named their bill the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” proving again that Republicans are more likely to give their legislation names that are corny, contentious, and accurate, whereas Democrats are more likely to give their legislation names that are slick, mollifying, and deceptive.

Pundits expect H.R. 2 to easily clear the House, where ObamaCare narrowly passed 219-212 last March, before the great Republican Reckoning of November 2010.  In that election, not only did Democrats lose a net 63 seats to Republicans, but the remaining Democratic flotsam left after the tsunami realized they ought to consider switching their votes unless they wanted to be swept away in November 2012.

In an insightful analysis, The Weekly Standard reported that in swing districts, just 28% of sitting House Democrats who voted for ObamaCare held onto their seats in the 2010 elections.  In contrast, 57% of sitting Democrats in swing districts who voted against ObamaCare kept their seats.

If all House members still in office after November’s election voted the way they did last spring, all newly sworn-in Republicans voted to repeal ObamaCare, and all newly sworn-in Democrats voted not to repeal ObamaCare, the House would vote for repeal by 255-180—a margin more than 10 times as large as the one by which ObamaCare passed.  That’s assuming no newly sworn-in Democrats—none of whom are saddled with a prior vote for ObamaCare, and some of whom campaigned on the promise that they would have opposed it—will vote to repeal it.

Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic leadership have alternately been laughing at and warning against the repeal effort, which they claim is both pathetically useless and grievously dangerous.

Reid announced that Congressional Republicans “have to understand that the health care bill is not going to be repealed…  [They] should get a new lease on life and talk about something else.”  White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs smirked that the repeal effort “is not a serious legislative effort.”

Meanwhile, Obama has insinuated that repeal would be a grave mistake that would send the nation “backward.”  Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius cautioned that repeal could cause 129 million Americans with preexisting conditions to lose their health insurance—a ludicrous claim promptly deconstructed by the Cato Institute.  (New ObamaCare slogan: “If you liked your health insurance, you can’t unkeep it!)

Pelosi plans to march a parade of living-in-their-parents’-basements twentysomething moochers and other sad sacks in front of Congress to talk about the wonders health care reform has already worked for them.  The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel wailed to Ed Schultz on MSNBC, “The Democrats need to tell real-life stories.  They need to bring people into this process and blanket this country with tales of those whose lives have been improved.”

Learning disabled Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee declared that repealing health care is “unconstitutional.”  (Now there’s some irony for you!)

Lee’s brilliant reasoning is that repeal would involve “denying someone their life and liberty without due process.”  She asks, “Can you tell me what’s more unconstitutional than taking away from the people of America their Fifth Amendment rights, their Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the right to equal protection under the law?”  (How about taking away their right to an education that includes a basic understanding of the Constitution?)

Now, even the bill’s authors are admitting that ObamaCare may not reduce costs as planned, and that the government might eventually have to go the way of Massachusetts via price controls and increased taxes, or Tennessee via massive dumping of patients from its rolls.

Yes, it’s true that even after the House repeal bill passes, Reid is likely to refuse to bring H.R. 2 before the Senate, where it probably wouldn’t pass anyway, and certainly wouldn’t clear the 2/3 majority needed to override Obama’s veto.

But Republicans are expected to take over the Senate in droves and bolster their House majority in 2012, at which point they would have enough votes to repeal ObamaCare.  By then, they wouldn’t need 67 votes in the Senate if a Republican president were elected.

In the meantime, House Republicans plan to defund ObamaCare step-by-step via the appropriations process.

Twenty-six states—a majority—are now suing the federal government over the constitutionality of the individual mandate and other ObamaCare provisions.  Democrats previously ridiculed the possibility of challenging ObamaCare in court, but they’re not laughing over that prospect now.

The House vote is the first step on the legislative track toward derailing this heinous legislation.  Congress may not end up being the route by which it is eventually immobilized.  But the momentum to abolish this bill is unstoppable.



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What do the following quotes have in common?

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.”

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

“I don’t want to quell anger.  I think people are right to be angry.  I’m angry.”

“I want you to argue with them and get in their faces.”

“I’m itching for a fight.”

“Fight for it!”

“We’re gonna punish our enemies.”

“Our job is, keep our boot on [their] neck.”

“We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.”

“[Republican victory would mean] hand-to-hand combat.”

That’s right—they were all shouted at Tea Party rallies by Sarah Palin supporters resentful over a black President!

Actually, they were all uttered by our Commander-in-Chief or members of his administration in reaction to electoral, ideological, and other political opponents.

All are also apparently examples of the “civility” Democrats keep demanding conservatives display when engaging in political discourse.  This command was most recently circulated after Jared Loughner attempted to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people at an event in Tucson, Arizona.

Liberals are up in arms because last year Sarah Palin’s website featured a map pinpointing the locations of Democrats in conservative districts who voted for Obamacare, with a crosshair symbol over each one.  Giffords was one of the Democrats Palin targeted.

The map was accompanied by a pep talk from Palin that included such violent, blood-soaked rhetoric as “Let’s not get discouraged.  Don’t get demoralized.  Get organized!”  (Palin considered putting Hello Kitty images over her targets, but her handlers decided crosshairs would better fit her brand.)

To make the case that Palin/Tea Party rhetoric inspired Giffords’ shooter, a thinking person would ask whether Loughner was a Palin/Tea Party follower, and thus whether he could possibly have been inspired by them.

Anyway, moving on to what Democrats did, they instinctively shrieked that the right wing was creating a “climate” of vitriol and hate that was erupting in spontaneous acts of violence.  (We know how good Democrats are at making climate predictions!)

In fact, what we learned about Loughner is that he “favorited” a creepy YouTube video showing a terrorist lookalike burning the American flag.  (Remind me: Is flag-burning one of the major planks of the Tea Party platform or just a minor recommendation?)

Former classmate Caitie Parker wrote of Loughner, “As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.”

Loughner’s favorite works of literature include The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.

Some commentators have argued that Loughner was not consistently right-wing or left-wing, since the Manifesto is left-wing but Kampf is right-wing.

In fact, Kampf’s author—Adolf Hitler—and his party were dyed-in-the-wool socialists, as in Nazism = Nationalsozialismus = National Socialism.

Closer to today’s liberals than today’s conservatives, the Nazis believed in an all-powerful government with centralized power held by smarter-than-everyone-else elites, not a limited government distributed among many sources and concentrated on the local level.

Chapter 12 of Volume One of Kampf is called “The First Period of Development of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”  Volume Two is titled “The National Socialist Movement.”  The Nazi platform included such gems as “That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished,” “We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions,” and “The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.”  I think it’s safe to classify Kampf as a left-wing publication.

Maybe Loughner’s mental illness led him to embrace such extremist works.  But I notice that paranoid schizophrenia somehow never induces people to become feverishly obsessed with The Road to Serfdom or the collected works of Milton Friedman.

Unlike what the more honest elements of the mainstream media have been telling us, Loughner isn’t a random crazy—and he’s not even a random crazy leftist.

Just during Obama’s time in office, we’ve been subjected to:

•    A leftist anti-Semite opening fire in D.C.’s Holocaust Museum

•    A posse of union thugs beating up a black Tea Party supporter at a town hall meeting

•    A liberal biting off a conservative’s finger at a health care protest

•    A left-wing Obama supporter and biology professor shooting three fellow professors in Alabama

•    An anti-corporate Obama voter crashing his plane into an IRS building

•    A liberal Ground Zero Mosque supporter stabbing a Muslim cabdriver in lower Manhattan

•    An environmentalist trying to blow up the Discovery building in Maryland

•    A 9/11 Truther opening fire on policemen in the Pentagon

At this moment, spoiled leftist thugs are torching Greece, France, Great Britain, and half of Western Europe, upset that the socialist way of life their governments promised them is unsustainable and must be scaled back ever-so-slightly.

But according to liberals, we’re suffering from a deluge of conservative hate speech that’s derailing public discourse and sparking acts of violence.

Our own President’s dearest friends, mentors, and idols have called for violent overthrow of the government, and in some cases actually committed such acts, including: William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Frank Marshall Davis, Mark Rudd, Van Jones, Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party’s most violent association is Sarah Palin clubbing fish with her children on “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”

If Democrats wanted to claim that every act of political violence is committed by a disturbed, nonpartisan nut job, fine.  Republicans would be classy enough not to attribute the actions of an admittedly long string of psychotic lone wolves to the entire population of liberals.

But if Democrats keep trying to pin these acts on right-wingers, we will punch back twice as hard.

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In a recent article on the upcoming 112^th Congress, the Associated Press warned that gridlock between the Republican House and Democratic Senate might result in a failure to act that “could threaten the nation’s economic health.”

Are they kidding?  What do they think has been going on for the past two years, when Democrats controlled both chambers and the White House and put us further in debt than the first 100 Congresses combined?  Gridlock in Congress is the best prescription for helping our economy recover.

Mainstream news outlets have noted that Republicans hold two main objectives after their swearing in on Wednesday: repealing or defunding ObamaCare and finding a politically palatable solution to the imminent overrun of the federal debt ceiling President Obama signed into law last year.

If Republicans don’t vote to raise the ceiling above its existing limit of $14.3 trillion by March 4, when the current stopgap measure runs out, we are told that they will be responsible for a government shutdown like the one in January 1996.

Obama’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee declared that failure to raise the debt ceiling would have a “catastrophic” effect, in that the federal government would essentially be in default.

In contrast, if we pass a resolution increasing the debt ceiling and continue to spend into the stratosphere, the world will be fooled into thinking that we are on financially sounder footing.

Huh?

An arbitrary limit chosen by Congress that will be increased repeatedly in coming months and years will have that much of an impact on our global creditworthiness, but our actual spending behavior won’t?

If I understand correctly, the purpose of a debt ceiling is to prevent politicians from spending so much that the federal government goes into debt at a level higher than that specified by the ceiling.  In other words, the ceiling is set so that spend-happy legislators trolling for votes can’t overrun a predetermined limit in the future.  The fact that the ceiling is voted into law means the debt level is inviolable and cannot be increased.

Something seems to have gone wrong here.

If we don’t stop increasing the debt ceiling to ever-higher levels, what’s the point of having one?  What meaning does it hold?

Is it at least possible that the world might interpret our declining to raise the debt ceiling as a sign that we intend to scale back our meteoric rise in federal spending and return to earlier levels?

Hasn’t the party that failed to pass a budget for the last two years, and passed but failed to live by its own sanctimonious PAYGO “pay-as-you-go” rule, damaged our international standing more than the GOP’s failing to declare a meaningless debt ceiling could?

Goolsbee scolded Republicans for “playing chicken” with raising the debt ceiling.  This is exactly the same thing Congressional Democrats did when they accused Republicans of being ‘the party of ‘no’” on health care reform, financial regulation, and extending the Bush tax cuts for only the middle class.  Goolsbee threatens that not raising the deficit ceiling will result in a greater financial crisis than the one in 2008, just as Democrats claimed that not enacting all of their other policies would result in catastrophic consequences for the nation’s economic well-being.

Everyone knows there are two ways to reduce the federal debt, one of which is to cut spending.  (The other involves taxes, though liberals and conservatives disagree on the direction: liberals believe raising them increases revenue, whereas conservatives believe lowering them does.)

In that light, I highly recommend for educational purposes the New York Times’ Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget from November of last year.

I, for one, was able to eliminate the projected $418 billion 2015 shortfall, and the projected $1,345 billion 2030 shortfall, without raising a single dollar in taxes, obtaining 100% of my savings from spending cuts.

I achieved this primarily by: (1) capping Medicare growth starting in 2013, (2) raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, (3) reducing the tax break for employer-provided health insurance, and (4) increasing the Medicare eligibility age to 70.  That’s it.  Each of these four measures resulted in $100 billion or more in projected savings to the deficit by 2030; combined with other, more minor cuts, the job was done.

True, I had to reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 60,000 by 2015, and trim some other military spending, in order to cross the finish line.  But I didn’t have to resurrect the estate tax, reinstate taxes on capital gains and dividends, allow any of the Bush tax cuts to expire, impose a millionaire’s tax, or institute a national sales tax, a carbon tax, or a bank tax.  (I didn’t even have to cut Vice President Joe Biden’s salary to its market value of $13,500!)

And all of this was done without relying on the assumption that cutting taxes will increase total government revenue, as it has every time taxes were cut, by Presidents both Republican (Reagan and Bush II) and Democratic (Clinton).  Such increased revenue would mitigate the need for spending cuts or yield budget surpluses.

The budget can be “solved,” without raising taxes or the debt ceiling, solely by cutting spending, in a framework so clear and intuitive even a child could do it using an interactive online “puzzle.”

If certain stubborn teenagers in Congress can’t figure that out, then the government ought to be shut down so they can have a nice, long timeout.



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