Whereupon Things Start Getting Interesting

Idiots across America are celebrating the Republican party's triumph last night and I'll be the first to admit that it was impressive. The GOP managed to do better than I expected, even while nominating psychopaths like Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Carl Paladino. They won despite throwing away perfectly good seats that the Democrats had no business holding.

Well, the Tea Party is holding the keys now. If the biggest victory since 1948 isn't a mandate, I'm not sure what is. And you know what? I couldn't be more thrilled. Now the time for mindless and misleading rhetoric is past and we get to see how these assholes actually govern.

I think John Boehner knows what I'm talking about, although he's going to essentially going to be a handpuppet for lunatics like Michele Bachmann. He's looking down the barrel of an economic shotgun and the prospect of it has him so frightened and humiliated that he broke out in tears during his victory speech.

This is going to be great, friends. We get to see what these people are made of, and I'm sure that it will be exactly what I've saying for over a year: Nothing. You're not going to balance the budget by eliminating a piddling $50 billion in earmarks (a promise that the Republican leadership started walking away from six weeks ago.) Let's break out the popcorn and watch these lying scumbags try to manage the economy.

The first test is coming up fast. In the very near future, Congress is going to have to vote on raising the debt ceiling. If they vote nay, the government runs out of money and shuts down. If you want to throw a national mandate away, there's no faster way to do that than to stop the Social Security checks from going out. However, if they vote yea, their childish supporters in the Tea Party are going to flip the fuck out. The Republicans are trapped by their own rhetorical excess.

Speaker-designate Boehner said last weekend that one of the first things that he plans to do is to restore the half-trillion in Medicare "cuts" that ObamaCare will implement. Let's see how you explain yourself as fiscally responsible when you throw an extra $500 billion on top of the atrocity of the health care reforms because there's no way that they're going to repeal ObamaCare in anything other than the most symbolic ways.

Then there are the Bush tax cuts, an issue on which everyone has been playing politics and no one has been serious. If you look at the numbers, you quickly come to realize that America can't afford to extend any of them. The Democrats want to extend $3 trillion worth of them and the GOP wants to make the whole $3.7 trillion wad permanent. No one has even bothered to look for the trillions of dollars needed to pay for them over the next decade. No one.

The President's Deficit Commission reports next month, and I fully expect the Republicans to completely ignore its recommendations, which will be funny to watch. That's where we get to see what the Republicans are really all about. I expect that the Commission will call for brutal cuts in things like Medicare and defense and very probably call for a national Value Added Tax. If I know how the average Tea Partier thinks - and I do - they'll respond by demanding even more tax cuts. And no Republican is going to cross the Tea Party anymore.

Here's the only thing you need to know about Tea Partiers: they're children. They honestly believe that if they get everything they want, everything will be okay. All that demonstrates is an utter lack of understanding about the power of how mathematics works in the real world.

I've had Tea Partiers commenting here for over a year, telling me that the cuts will be significant. The only problem is that they haven't been able to point to a single promise that their candidates have made to that effect. Some might point to the Ryan Roadmap, but the GOP has had Paul Ryan in hiding for the last three months. Besides, the Ryan Roadmap only addresses Social Security and Medicare reform for folks collecting in twenty years and the problem is looming now.

Then there are their calls for a "constitutional restoration", which are even more hilarious than their economic plans.

You are never going to pass a constitutional amendment creating congressional term limits. But there's another way to do it and the GOP is uniquely positioned to pull it off. As of this morning, the Teapublicans control the governor's mansions and state houses in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alabama, Michigan and Wisconsin. You want term limits? All you have to do is redistrict in such a way as to make congressional districts competitive again. Does anyone think that they're going to do it?

If the Founding Fathers really wanted a Balanced Budget Amendment, I'm pretty sure that they would have included one in Article I of the Constitution. I'm as hardcore as you can get about deficits and I think that I've demonstrated that over and over again. And the Republicans have demonstrated over and over again that they aren't. The last Republican to balance a budget was Dwight Eisenhower and he needed a 91% top marginal tax rate to do it. You cannot be serious about balancing the budget while supporting discretionary wars and massive tax cuts.

As a matter of fact, I'm not sure that you can balance the budget at all as long as Social Security, Medicare and the Pentagon continue to exist as they currently do. The unfunded liabilities over the next four decades, combined with the almost malignant interest on the debt, makes that implausible. And there isn't a single Teapublican who has mentioned that. Not one.

And can we please forget about the line item veto? The Supreme Court has already struck it down once and there's little doubt that they'd do it again. The Constitution is pretty specific about who controls government spending, and it isn't the president.

The Tea Party wanted power and now they have it. Watching their rhetoric wither and die in the harsh light of reality is going to be one of the great joys of my life. I'm only sad that Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell aren't going to be in the Senate to watch it firsthand.