Get used to this.
Unless there is another Watergate-sized disaster in the White House or the Republican Party fades into oblivion from lack of demographic or pseudo-religious support of gun geeks then there will be a GOP-controlled House, most likely a barely-controlled Democratic Senate, and definitely a Democrat in the White House for most of our natural lives.
As each generation passes and the diversity of the national electorate expands, the realistic numbers, as they have the past decade-plus, will dramatically skew Democrat, but the entrenched districts across most of the South and Midwest will also secure an impenetrable Republican legislative coalition.
Thus, the Republicans, slyly gerrymandered and considerably well-versed in local politics, will hang onto a small but crucial part of our tri-balanced system and continue to act as all nearly powerless groups tend to; defiant, petty and destructive. This is what transpired in the ludicrous debt ceiling debacle of 2011 and what is happening right now with the wholly nonsensical shutdown of the federal government.
This action is the very definition of terrorism; to enact your will in glaringly anti-establishment ways when civil ones are not available to you.
Before your head explodes, we can bag the term terrorist for, say, insurrectionist or radical. It’s your choice. Whatever the semantics, this jacking around with the running of government and paying the debts the nation has already rolled up to grandstand ideology masked in empathy for the common good is a desperate ploy utilized by those rendered mute by the powers that be, which is normally viewed by the minority group as tyrannical.
It’s juicy stuff. I love it for its historical perspective and entertainment value; but, of course, there is no end game to any of it, just as we have learned with fundamentalist Islamic extremism in its violent third-world ways. Pissing on systems in which you are neutered is a classic response; wholly understandable, if not irrational.
Because it is irrational for one party of a two-party republic to ignore the tenets of law it has collectively sworn to legislate. As unpopular and perhaps asinine as the Affordable Care Act may end up being, it is a law; upheld by every available avenue of the United States Constitution.
You see, you draw up a bill, vote on it, and the president of the United States signs it into law. This is the fundamental structure of this American experiment.
Now, if that law is unjust, according to the rules of said Constitution, it has its day in court, such as the atrocity known as the defunct Defense of Marriage Act. And so the ACA had its legal dissection by the third branch of government, the Supreme Court, and, unlike DOMA, was upheld, cementing the very strength and integrity of the democratic system formulated 225 years ago.
The last vestige of eradicating the existence of this flawed and perhaps disastrous law was left to the gaining of access to the final branch of the government: the executive. Less than a year ago, this nation chose quite decisively to re-elect the man for which the law is now pejoratively named, Obamacare, Barack Obama, thus electorally putting the final ribbon on the ACA.
Legislation, judicial review and election results solidified an acting law; and yet those powerless to stop it, continue to cause a ruckus, as if the U.S. Constitution was merely a suggestion. Not because they don’t like it or think it’s bad but because every possible means for them to have a voice has been squashed by decorum.
Those who spend hours in the great halls of Congress, this hollowed body currently approved by an historically abysmal 10 percent, shouting about the primacy and infallibility of said Constitution, are now shatting on it like bratty sore losers.
Those who simultaneously rail against systemic equality, and who cite the will of 57 percent of the populace that despises the law, but ignore 90 percent of the populace that begs for mandatory gun legislation and a realistic immigration bill, shout equality for everyone.
If the government had not been shut down and used as a blackmail scheme, then this would be fine political theater, but pushing this hissy fit into the governing realm for which they were elected is simply insurrection, radicalism and really, terrorism.
At one time or other in my life, I have supported a degree of each, so believe me, it is plain as day and it is not going to stop anytime soon, if ever; because to throw systemic bombs into the works, to endlessly filibuster committees and obstruct votes is not the way of democratic law, but the way of the powerless to dismantle it.
And so the national demographics won’t change and the districts in the House races won’t budge.
Get used to this.
The media has, the stock market has, and even the members of the government that closed shop this week have.
This is the norm.
Remember, as Napoleon once mused, “It ain’t rape, if you sit back and enjoy it.”
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James Campion is the Managing Editor of the Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight for Cinderella”, and “Y”.
