Insurgents

The fiscal cliff crises turned out to be just another pretend catastrophe drummed up by Congress. "Averted" by kicking the hard decisions down the road a couple of months, it appears we are being set up for a re-run. Only this time there is the added threat of shutting down the government and / or defaulting on the Nation's debt, two things that might actually be catastrophic.

Rational people realize this would be an act of utter insanity - which puts the threat firmly in the camp of the T-Party / Republicans and no one else. Apparently this is how democracies fail. It isn't that everyone in the society decides to commit universal suicide and runs together off a cliff. Driving off a cliff is the wrong analogy. A better one would be a demented few deciding to blow up the house and bring it crashing down one everyone else. Not an act of shared dementia but of terrorism.

Of the 433 members in the House, 233 are Republicans, and of them 51 are T-party members. (These 51 have Michele Backmann as their leader. That pretty much says all that needs to be said as to how bat-shit crazy this group really is. Michele Backmann as their leader?) Without those 51 votes the Republicans have 182, the Democrats 200. Fifty-one extremists control the Republican party.

Fifty-one. Amazing. We should also remember that these 51 people are not Representatives of a democracy in any normal sense of the phrase. Because of gerrymandering the only political reality threatening their positions is if some Republican, even more bat-shit crazy than themselves, mounts a challenge for their seat. But even that seriously overstates their level of support. For example, T-party leader Bachmann vastly outspent political neophyte and Democrat Jim Graves in this last election, yet managed to beat him by just 4200 votes; and this in a supposedly solidly Republican district. Even in these gerrymandered districts the crazies often just barely hold on. And we are talking about just 51 of the 435 congressional districts in the country. The overwhelming majority of us are being threatened by an astonishingly small segment of the society. Which is the way of terrorists everywhere.

One might wonder why 51 terrorists can't be rounded up, charged with treason, and carted off to jail, or Gitmo, or just disappear into the government's anti-terrorism maze. After all they wouldn't even fill one Greyhound bus. The citizens living in those 51 districts would get to hold another election and try again. They could even elect some more T-party types so long as blowing up the economy was not a tactic they embraced as a viable, political tool. The debt "crisis" in the US is not a crisis, it is a problem to be solved. Defaulting on the debt and blowing up the economy? Now that is a crisis. One that, in this case, would be avoided if these 51 went away.

Normally I would be sure that rounding up elected officials is the end of the end of a democracy. What I'm not sure of is that these 51 fit the definition of being "elected officials". I think they are better described as insurgents, and maybe we should just treat them as such. (Though a drone missile strike might be a bit "over-the-top".) Baring that, Obama and other leaders of the Democratic Party (such as they are) should simply walk away from anything that even hints at "negotiating" with the terrorists. Call them for what they are, crazy people bent on destroying the economy in order to get their way.

If it was me I would make it kind of clear. If, forty-eight hours before the country defaults, the Republican House is still standing in the way of a bill, they get locked up in the Capital building and surrounded by the American Military machine. There they stay, no food, no outside communications, no aids or lobbyists, until they come up with an answer. No weapons either, and no rules. Should they fail then the Senate and the White House act alone, with the entire house of Representatives being dismissed, (losing any accumulated pensions and all other retirement perks) and new elections held. That's why no weapons and no rules. If 382 discover that the 51 will still not be swayed, perhaps the majority will rule the old fashioned way.

If it was me.