Is anyone surprised at gridlock of congressional ‘super committee’?

By David McElroy · November 22, 2011

The congressional “super committee” is a super failure. The only question I have is why anyone ever thought it had a chance of success.

This super committee was set up as a result of the congressional budget deal in August. Formally, it’s called the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, but everybody just calls it the super committee. Its job was to do what Congress was supposed to have done during the fight a few months ago — figure out how to reduce the federal budget deficit that’s threatening to grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

Democrats on the committee want tax increases and few spending cuts. Republicans want no tax increases and slightly more serious spending cuts. The two sides have positions that are locked in concrete. They aren’t budging. Monday, the members announced that they’re giving up, because no deal is possible.

If you read various stories about why the negotiations failed, you almost have to come to the conclusion that the two sides might as well be on different planets insofar as how they view the world. Democrats view high-income taxpayers as cows to be milked. Republicans want to keep milking those cows, but just not as hard. The narrative that’s probably going to prevail in the media is the one that says Republican insistence on extending the Bush-era tax cuts is to blame for the failure. I think the truth is simpler and less exciting to TV news.

This country isn’t united in what it wants. It’s not even close. Maybe it never has been. But the fissures are getting deeper. The unity that exists in history books and government classes and romantic imaginations is gone. We have less and less in common. There’s nothing united about today’s United States.

The things that I believe are moral about how society is organized aren’t negotiable. I can’t say, “Hey, this is theft to take this money, but I’ll agree to let you steal that guy’s money, but only this amount.” Even for those for whom taxation isn’t a moral issue have certain things that are non-negotiable to them. For some people, it’s the belief in enforcing social morality through coercion. For others, it’s the belief in providing basis services for everyone that’s not negotiable. There are more and more of these things that are non-negotiable to more and more people. It can’t ultimately lead to anything except a breakup of the country.

We don’t all want the same things, and that’s fine. My theoretical utopia isn’t the same as yours. Some people want individual freedom and others just honestly don’t want to be free. It’s time for us to face those facts and then face up to the fact that we have to have an adult conversation about how we’re going to go our own separate ways.

The idea of a breakup of the United States still seems like sacrilege to many people. They’ve been indoctrinated in the modern civic religion so well that it’s unthinkable. At some point, it’s going to happen. We can either be adults about it and agree on a peaceful divorce while we still can — or it can become a bitter and violent disaster after an economic collapse.

We still have a choice now about how to handle the breakup, but we’re edging closer and closer to having no choice about the matter. Social and economic collapse are coming.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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