Having some fun on Facebook

A friend of ours posted on FaceBook this image with a link to an Esquire piece titled, “The Reign of Morons is Here”


We totally misconstrued the point of the post thinking it was in reference to Republican leadership’s tacit approval of the President’s U.S. citizen drone assassination and domestic spying programs as that does indeed appear to have bi-partisan support. Besides, naming a situation in time a “reign” when the object of your scorn has neither control of the Senate nor the Oval Office is just a really stupid title for an article.


As it turns out, the article was about the government shutdown slowdown which still makes the title of the article non-sensical.


So, in the course of being set straight as to the ostensible purpose of the article in the comments section of the FB post, we received this comment from another friend of ours:

It seems to me that a better tactic would have been for the Republicans to have let the ACA go into effect and let our country fall apart as they claim will happen. But that won't happen will it? Instead the extreme right shuts our government down hurting thousands of hard working people. Shameful. The ACA was voted for and signed off on by two houses of Congress, signed by the President, litigated and deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. Then there was an election that Obama won handily. The right can't then go back and hold our country hostage like terrorists- is this how we're going to continue governing? Guess the right wants to guarantee never taking the White House back.

Maybe its our lack of small motor skills or FB’s inability to grasp the concept of paragraph breaks so rather than respond in that medium, we decided to liberate the whole thing, as you are witnessing, to the Beers with Demo blog.


Our response:

Hi ( ), You find no irony in that you bemoan your perceived sorry state of governance while casually throwing around the terms “hostage” and “terrorists”? I find that state of mind fascinating and hope to achieve it some day.

Now to your specific non-ad hominem points:


You are suggesting the House Continuing Resolution that passed late last Saturday night somehow defunded or struck down the ACA. This is false. The House funded all government operations and merely delayed the implementation of the individual mandate by one year. If “delayed by one year” sounds familiar, it should because that’s what the President has done for a select few. So, what the House did for all Americans, the President has already done for the politically-connected i.e., Big Business, some labor groups and, of course, Congress.


What the House did through the legislative process, the President did illegally through executive fiat. An entirely reasonable CR which funded all government operations while delaying for a year a law no one seems too stoked on at the moment was dismissed out of hand by Senate Democrats and the President. By their inaction, they own this slowdown.


I hate to be the one to break this news, but nowhere in the Constitution does it give the President the power to decide to whom laws apply and when they apply. It simply does not exist. The House, however, has the lead in financial matters and has the authority to decide which parts of the government to fund. This is not terrorism, this is the Constitution.



As for opposing what is the law of the land, I don’t think I need to go down the laundry list of odious laws that used to be on the books that passed legal muster and which were still railed against by a principled opposition and eventually overturned… some of which we actually fought a war over. Believe that?
Minority party opposition to crappy policy/legislation is not anarchy. It’s not terrorism. It’s practicing Constitutional republicanism.


In a Constitutional republic passing legislation should not be and is not meant to be easy. ObamaCare with it’s myriad of bribes, kickbacks, backroom deals, midnight Christmas Eve votes and which, at the end of the day, is really just one big payoff to the health insurance lobby which I thought we all hated, appears to be proof of that.


To wrap things up, I find no end to the irony that a political set of people that just 40-50 years ago stood in opposition to laws of the land, that used to wear t-shirts that said "Keep Your Laws Off My Body", are now full-fledged shills for personally intrusive mandatory government programs.



Hope and Change, baby…. Hope and Change!

That's all for today, folks.




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