Something else we're missing

As I read the newspapers and watch the news on cable, I have been thrilled and frustrated and angered by the show out of Washington. And New York and California and Kansas. And all those other places where we elect people every couple of years.

Now, there’s nothing new in saying that our political system has turned into a blender, where our nation just throws grievance after grievance into a container, stirs it up with sharp blades, and pours out something that is neither tasty or nourishing.

Our president’s repeated embarrassments to himself and our nation are simply the icing on this overcooked cake of grievances and bile, and the search over who gets blamed seems to be going into the Summer re-run phase, with the same old culprits coming back over and over again in his tweets.

But, let’s look closer. Something is missing.  Something that is not being covered in the 24-hour news cycle, and hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves in our excellent but undersubscribed magazines.

Want to guess what that is? Want some choices? Trade agreements. Diplomatic relations with our friends and foes. National defense. The economy. Taxes. Health care. Infrastructure. Things like that?

Nope. They are all important, but they come to mind too easily. I’m talking about something that seems to have been overlooked.

If it’s a riddle, the answer is the same one that Bilbo Baggins solved when he was playing the ancient riddle game with Gollum. He couldn’t think of the answer. He was running out of time. He was about to be eaten. And so, he blurted out “time, time.”

Which, of course, was the answer. For him and for me.

Trump has been in office for half a year. Half of the first of his four years in office is gone. And, what does he have to show for it? Not very much.

There is a conservative-leaning Supreme Court justice - although most of the men and women on the Supreme Court change over time, and you don’t know what you have until decades after they are selected - but not much else. And, in truth, Trump wasn’t the  one who ordered the Republican Party not to act on President Obama’s nominee. That was Mitch McConnell, who got his way and is now paying a heavy price for it.

What? Well, when all the Democrats are frozen out of the action and you need every Republican vote you can get to pass a bill, you have made every one of those 51 Republicans a King who have near-absolute veto power over legislation. You think Ted Cruz would be trying to determine national policy if his vote was not so critical?

But, back to the president. And the time he has lost.

We normally measure time with clocks. We also measure it by geological layers of rocks. Or how long it takes to fill a warehouse with socks. (Just going for a cheap rhyme there. Ignore it, unless your business involves moving stock from one place to another, in which case you do measure the time it takes to have a full shipment ready to go).

In the president’s case, lost time should be measured in the changes that are taking place in the nation and around the world while he sits around and tweets and brags and threatens and does absolutely nothing. Things like North Korea getting closer and closer to developing a nuclear-tipped missile that can hit California, which also puts places like Japan and China easily in the cross-hairs.

Or the slowing of some sectors of the economy, and all the steps we are not even studying to prepare for a time when the bull market to turn into a bear market and we have to deal with the great wave of pain that comes when an economic cycle changes. Heck, he doesn’t even have anyone else to blame for that, except maybe Hillary.

We could talk about international diplomacy, and what happens when Russia or China puts pressure on some nation where we do not even have an ambassador to provide critical intelligence information.

We can also talk about domestic environmental problems. Heck, we could look at the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of people who have been denied the right to vote, or who have been redistricted in a way that their vote no longer counts for very much. Voter fraud, indeed.

But, modestly, let me suggest that the biggest loss we are suffering - the greatest waste of time, if you will - is in Washington, D.C. In the White House itself. It’s the number of jobs that have not been filled. The deputy secretaries and the undersecretaries and the technicians and aides and the small army of other people who are appointed by the president to fill posts that mostly go unnoticed until something bad happens. Then, of course, it’s too late.

Do we really need all those jobs filled in the Agriculture Department? Or the jobs in Commerce or Interior? Or any of those science jobs that used to exist in every cabinet jurisdiction?

Hey, we don’t trust them anyway. And we save some money as long as they go unfilled. What could go wrong?

Tick, tick, tick.

The Big Question

Once again, there is so much going on in Washington that it’s hard to figure out what to watch. So many people saying so many things. So much live reporting of people walking down hallways, so many self-serving statements being recorded by the media and endlessly repeated.

So much pontificating on the right and on the left, with much of it ending with people saying they just don’t know what is going to happen next.

Well, I think that what is going to happen soon - not just yet, but soon - is that the party in power will have to do something that it has avoided doing since Donald Trump was nominated as its candidate for President.

They have to decide, and then act on, the big question. Just who is in charge here?

Either the Donald has become the Republican Party, heart and soul, or the Republican Party is not Donald Trump, heart and soul. The Republican Party either stands for precisely what the president wants or it is something different.

And, if that is true, it will sooner or later become the enemy of the Trump Party. Different is wrong to someone who sees everything as a net sum game, where he wins and someone else loses.

Now, our president has shown that there is some room for independent action by his underlings - including those members of Congress who rode his coat tails to victory last year - because The Donald is a big picture guy. He really doesn’t sweat the details. That’s what he has other people do for him.

Take health care. All our president wants is to get rid of the job-killing Obamacare that is already dead - and which he is trying best to kill by administrative fiat - and replace it with something better and less expensive and which will cover everyone. At the same time it will also let people decide not to get any health insurance and let insurance companies sell thick, complicated policies which are cheap and which cover very little...just like the good old days before the Affordable Care Act.

Or take Russia. The efforts to get Trump elected.

You know, the thing that the fake news keeps harping about. All of the commentators on the right say nothing happened. The people who work for the president say it never happened. The thing that those weak-willed enemies in Congress keep holding hearings about.

Oh, did I say “enemies?”.  Yes. It has come down to this. The question, again.

Since Donald Trump got elected, he has charted the course for the Republican Party. And you are either with him or disloyal and against him. Perhaps you are a Republican in Name Only, expressing some kind of loyalty to your voters back home, or to something else which does not follow the Trump agenda, which we all know comes directly from the President himself, even if he can’t explain exactly what he wants it to be.

Yes, after all this time in office, the president is finding it really hard to get his work done,  and not because all those government jobs are still not filled - we all know that a lot of what goes on in government is unnecessary red tape, otherwise something bad would be happening - or because of some disloyal people keep leaking things about him.

No, the only reason that the Trump presidency is having a rough time right now is that he needs to spend so much of his time dealing with his number one problem, the one that he defeats and defeats and somehow never stops.

Look there. On the lawn of the White House itself. 

The sun is setting, the shadows are getting longer. And there, in the Rose Garden is the very shadow of Crooked Hillary.

Quick. Gotta Tweet.

So, explain it to me

Ah, I had a wonderful vacation, taking a summer class on the history of freedom and democracy in the west at Cornell. Didn’t cover everything, of course, but left our class with a lot to talk about over lunch.

One thing I didn’t do was watch the news, or read any newspapers. Vacation is, after all, vacation.

But now I am back, and I see things are right where I left them. Repeal and Replace. Repeal but don’t replace for two years. Repeal and replace earlier, by letting the free market do what it did before the nation decided that the Affordable Care Act was needed.

Now, President Trump is telling me that we have to repeal and replace because the Affordable Care Act is already gone. Dead. Kaput. There are counties in this great, vast nation where insurance premiums have gone up 50 or 60 or even 100 per-cent.

Darn, but he never says where those counties are. And, when he singles out a whole state - say Wyoming or Alaska - for big increases in health insurance premiums, he doesn’t say how much those premiums actually are.

An oversight, probably.

But, after listening to all of this for the past few days - remember, it sounds new to my vacation-rested ears, and so has more shock value - one question keeps coming up for me. I wish the media would ask someone about it. Maybe in one of those non-televised press conferences, so everyone can argue about what was actually said.

Ready?

If Obamacare is already dead, gone, kaput, why is everyone still arguing? Why do you have to repeal something that is already gone. It’s kind of like executing a prisoner for a series of horrid crimes, then locking him up for 40 years. Sort of a waste of time.

Now I know the President has suggested that we simply repeal the corpse of the Affordable Care Act, but not do anything about it for two years, which would put Congress under a lot of pressure to actually do something about coming up with a replacement for it.

We could let insurance companies sell really cheap health insurance which doesn’t cover very much, or has a huge deductible, and finance our nation’s health care needs with lots of little cans on 7-11 counters, with pictures of somebody who badly needs medical treatment but can’t afford it.

But I don’t think there are enough 7-11 stores in Chicago or New York or Boston to meet the needs of the people living there, and the rural communities in the heartland of America don’t have a large enough population to keep giving and giving and giving as more people get sick from year to year.

Maybe there is a town that is just the right size for this system to work. Springfield, maybe? But which one?

So, now that we have a CBO score and lots of numbers of people who will be without health insurance under the latest version of this Trumpcare plan, it’s up to the media to start getting the right answers to the right questions. Things like these.

“Mr. President, if you won’t own the disaster that is Obamacare, will you own the disaster that will be Trumpcare, or will it be the fault of someone in Congress?”

“Mr. President, you blame the Democrats for not supporting health care reform. But, how could they do it if your party won’t let them discuss it in the House or the Senate?”

“Mr. President, what ever happened to the idea of repeal and replace on the same day, possibly on the same hour? Is two years within the acceptable margin of ‘at the same time?’ that you said would be the goal?”

“Mr. President, when you said Congress should stay in Washington until health care reform is done and that you are at your desk with pen in hand, waiting to sign the new bill, does that mean you, too, will be in Washington pressing the Republicans in Congress to come up with a new health care plan that will be better than the Affordable Care Act, and will be cheaper than the Affordable Care Act and will cover more Americans than the Affordable Care Act?”

And, finally, “Mr. President, will you be able to keep your doctor under Trumpcare?”

Go, media. I’d settle for your asking just one.

A week off

I am taking a week off from thinking about the world, the president and the economy to go on a nice, simple vacation.

I will be going back to school, taking a week-long course in the development of democratic thought in the western world. At least that's what a course that goes from Plato to early feminist writers and ends with Marx seems to promise.

For the record, I want to deny the fake news story being circulated by my friends that I could become the first person to be expelled from a non-credit adult education course at Cornell.

- Mitch

Our Founding Fathers...

Let us take a  moment, now that the Fourth of July has come around again, to look at the wisdom of our Founding Fathers and how they might see the world today.

A lot of Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction, reject the wisdom of our Founding Fathers completely, seeing them as an elitist group of rich white men who met for a brief time to decide on the future of our nation, then went back to their plantations where their overseers kept money coming in by mistreating slaves.

You have to give them some points for accuracy, although not all of the Founding Fathers lived in the south and the debate over ending slavery almost killed our nation before it was even born. If you doubt it and don’t want to actually read a history book or two, go watch a movie - 1776. It's pretty accurate, about as accurate as Hamilton and it won’t cost you nearly as much.

A lot of Republicans (or maybe Conservatives, it’s hard to tell the difference nowadays) look upon our Founding Fathers as Gods, giants who strode the earth and stood for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. At least they strived for those things for the same rich white men who could actually afford it. And the ones in the north who didn’t keep slaves could always rely on their indentured servants to work for no money for a good seven years, then pat them on the head and send them away to find their fortune. Someplace else.

But, they did have a point. They didn’t believe in government interference, certainly not big government interference.

Which, in their wisdom, our Founding Fathers turned into a virtue, especially when the big government they opposed was far away, on the other side of the Atlantic. When they became the government, of course, their view changed a bit. They did have a point.

So, as we look back on our history this July, let’s take a glance at some of our problems today and see how our Founding Fathers might have actually handled them. Trust me, it will be fun.

First, let’s look at immigration. Just how did those Wise Men handle the question of who was allowed to come into their newly independent colonies?

As you might guess, state’s rights were King. Every state made its own policy on immigration. And, it caused a lot of consternation. That’s when three of the wiser Founding Fathers wrote a paper we call Federalist Number Two, under the name of Publius, suggesting that the new federal government take over the power from the states. Which was fine with them, because it was causing more problems that it was worth.

How about national defense? Well,  if the principals of our Founding Fathers were in use today, every governor in every state would have the right to keep their troops home in an emergency. Don’t think the battle in Syria is worth fighting, then just don’t send your men and women over to fight it.

Think of the debates we could have. 

Or think you should have more money coming into your state from the federal government? Just demand that the Army build a new training camp for 30,000 or 40,000 in some needy part of your state, or they get no new recruits. Think of the jobs you can create that way.

And then there is the matter of tariffs. That’s what we charge other nations to bring their goods into the United States.

Well, our deeply independent Founding Fathers believed in tariffs, but each state could decide on its own what tariffs to set. Each state could also print its own money, appoint its own army officers, and decide whether or not it wanted to pay its share of federal taxes.

That’s why our Founding Fathers changed their mind after a few years,  held a new convention, and decided to form a much stronger federal government. Ah, yes, the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.