How disturbed can I be by the situation unfolding in DC? Well, the nice people in Congress appear to be doubling-down on stupid. They’re taking the “Thelma and Louise” approach to governance again.
THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!
Currently the House of Representatives and the Senate remain on vacation until September 9th. When they get back they have just a handful of sitting days to pass some sort of appropriations legislation to provide legal authority for the federal government to spend money. At this point only five appropriations bills have passed the House of Representatives. Those bills include:
Defense
Homeland Security
Interior-Environment
Military Construction-Veterans Affairs
State-Foreign Operations
One bill failed on the floor of the House of Representatives, namely:
Legislative Branch
A total of 12 bills need to pass both the House and Senate in the exact same form, be presented to the President, and receive the President’s signature by NO LATER THAN 11:59 PM on September 30th for the federal government to be able to continue to be able to pay the bills. Typically this doesn’t happen. The procedural mechanism to work around this is to pass what is called a “Continuing Resolution” that provides stopgap funding at 90-100% of the prior fiscal year’s funding levels while prohibiting new hiring, new project starts, and pretty much anything new until actual funding legislation is properly passed.
There is no known text of a continuing resolution out there at the moment.
Currently there is still talk of attaching a “poison pill” rider to any continuing resolution. The so-called SAVE Act would introduce unfunded mandates on local governments relative to administering election systems in terms of having new paperwork requirements relative to verifying citizenship of voters on the front end at time of registration. Mind you, it is already a fourth-degree felony for a non-citizen to vote in a federal election even without these more onerous requirements. All the poison pill rider does is add more of a paperwork burden and doesn’t increase the degree of severity of what is already a felony.
I was a federal civil servant during the longest federal government shutdown in history that lasted 35 days. That did record damage to the nation’s economy. If the Republicans proceed as planned to simply adopt a continuing resolution with the SAVE Act rider and then adjourn until after November 5th so that they could go campaign, we would be looking at a pretty much guaranteed government shutdown and a hellacious economic disaster.
This is becoming the “LOL, Nothing Matters!” edition of Congress. We don’t need a nutty presidential candidate metaphorically rushing forth declaring that only he can fix things yet that is an avenue that this would open up. A prolonged shutdown beyond 35 days would tank the markets and wreck the economy far worse than the orange man is hallucinating right now. The problem is that we’re no longer dealing with politicians but with cultists.
This is not your average election. We’re not just choosing between two people for the presidency. We’re choosing between democracy as well as normalcy on one side and on the other side we have a death cult mixed with fascism. If this country were anywhere near normal we wouldn’t be seeing polls as evenly divided as we see them right now.
This disturbs me greatly…