The president dreams,
The Senate schemes,
The House then deems
And we are sunk,
Or so it seems.
Jubal Tarbox
So we are on the threshold of a momentous . . . I was about to say vote, but no, it isn’t that exactly. In economic terms, the House is poised to spread disaster and desolation. Speaking in constitutional terms, this bill looks like a corpse that has been in the water for several days. Speaking in parliamentary terms, this is a brown parking lot puddle covered over with some scum. This is funny business in excelsis.
There are multiple issues involved in all of it. The Democratic leadership appears to be all in, because they know they are not simply passing an onerous bill. It is not as though they are requiring that all Americans report to a clinic within three months to have their toenails pulled out. That would precipitate a revolt simpliciter. No, they are trying to pass, if you want to call it that, a measure which is a front-loaded entitlement. Once implemented, it will have a die-hard constituency — the kind of constituency that no mainstream pol, Republican or Democrat, will want to offend. The counsels of prudence will then prevail, or so the thinking goes, and the entitlement will be preserved — and those who gave it to us will be heroes.
The Dems are playing for the long term. They know they will take a bath in the mid-terms for doing this, but if they can get this thing established as a fixture before then, it is worth it to them. The Republicans are very, very bad at reversing things like this, and the Democrats are counting on that ineptitude. They have no reasons not to count on it.
On the bright side, pigs don’t fly. As Margaret Thatcher once put it, God bless her, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. We are about at that point — the money we are spreading about with such
wanton abandon right now is money which is, for the most part, non-existent. That means we are at a place where the jolly man, who is broke, who has nonetheless been buying drinks for the house, is going to have go outside for a minute to stick somebody up. That somebody is you, mon frere.
One of the things that Calvin’s lesser magistrates (governors and state legislatures) will have a responsibility to do in this crisis is pass and sign legislation that declares the health care monstrosity to be null and void in their respective states, and to declare that their citizens have no responsibility to pay any attention to it whatsoever. That is starting to happen in various states, and it needs to happen in all of them.
As it does, one of the things that Christians will then have to work through is their understanding of civil disobedience on issues like this. Christians will have to abandon their simplistic understanding of “Romans 13.” As I have been preaching through Romans, I have now come to that chapter. The intro to that subject will be posted at CanonWIRED soon, and we are going to work through the rest of that section very carefully.
But, as I mentioned in that intro, before Christians run off to join their local tea party, it is crucial that they resolve to avoid one common motive for these protests(panic), and to ground another common motive (anger) on the only proper foundation for such anger, which is repentance. We are not getting anything from our rulers that we do not richly deserve and, as one parishioner said to me after church last week, we may still be thankful that we are not getting all the government we are paying for.
But in the meantime, the spectacle of our Kangaroo Congress doing their thing ought to make the intelligent observer feel like he has a couple dozen spiders crawling around on the back of his neck.