As Predicted ( by a moderate republican no less) The Horrifying Stupidity has begun.

The five dumbest things Congress did in its first 100 days

Pointless battles with President Obama accomplished exactly nothing

 

A hundred days ago, Speaker of the House John Boehner opened the new session of Congress with great hopes.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Ever since the first months of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, it’s traditional to pause after the first 100 days of a new government to see what’s been accomplished.
It’s been 100 days since the Republicans took charge of the U.S. Congress, but unlike FDR’s flurry of activity that transformed both the government and the economy in 100 days in early 1933, the 114th Congress has done almost nothing.
And what little it has done has been overwhelmingly dumb.
How dumb? Congress tried to do a lot of dumb things, but failed to actually get anything accomplished.
Here are the five dumbest things Congress has done in its first 100 days:

Keystone Pipeline

Politicians make a lot of symbolic gestures: cutting ribbons, naming courthouses and expressing joy or outrage in congressional resolutions. That’s fine, as long it doesn’t get in the way of doing actual work.
Spending an inordinate amount of time on symbolic gestures is dysfunctional. The House and Senate devoted weeks to debate on a symbolic bill on a symbolic issue. The bill would have forced President Barack Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline to bring Canada’s tar-sands oil across the Plains to U.S. refineries.
The House took eight roll-call votes on the measure, and the Senate took 22. And then Obama vetoed the bill, as he promised he would.
A press release denouncing Obama’s gutless wavering on Keystone would have served the same function as all those weeks on the floor.

Climate change





As part of the Keystone debate, Senate Democrats forced the Republicans to vote on an amendment declaring that climate change is “real.” That amendment passed with just one “nay” — Mississippi’s Sen. Thad Cochran. Hurrah for science! But a subsequent amendment declaring that humans have “significantly” contributed to global warming failed, with most Republicans refusing to take any responsibility for the gravest threat to global prosperity and security. Hurrah for denial!

The budget

Republicans in each chamber have passed budget resolutions, which puts them one up on the Democrats when they ran the Senate. But the Republican budget is so dumb! After shutting down the government and pushing it to the brink of default over the principle of fiscal restraint, the Republicans abandoned those principles as soon as it was convenient.
The budget is full of dumb gimmicks, like the one that puts most defense spending “off budget” and therefore outside of the budget restraints that Obama and past Congresses agreed to after so much political fighting. The budget resolution also changes the accounting rules that both parties have lived with for decades, making it easier to justify tax cuts (but not spending increases) that will drive deficits higher and, coincidentally, enrich the Republicans’ core constituency: the top 1%.

Estate tax

Speaking of the 1%, the House voted Thursday on one of the Republicans’ top agenda items: repealing the estate tax entirely.
Forget the fact that this is another symbolic vote — Obama has promised to veto this turkey too — repealing the estate tax is a dumb idea all by itself. The estate tax applies only to a small number of extremely loaded estates, but the revenue it raises is a vital part of keeping the deficits down.
Republicans say the estate tax is immoral because it amounts to double taxation: once when the income is earned, and again when it’s passed down to the next generation. (They don’t seem to find it morally objectionable when a worker’s wage is double-taxed when it’s earned and then again when it’s spent.)
The moral argument against the estate tax utterly fails because many of the assets passed down are never taxed. Most of the wealth of the ultra rich (the top one in 1,000 or the top one in 10,000) is accumulated capital gains that are never realized and therefore never taxed. When those assets are inherited, the tax on the unrealized capital gain is wiped out forever. The heir gets to value the cost base of the asset, not at its original price, but its price at the time of inheritance.
In this way, hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized capital gains escape taxation every year. And vast fortunes are accumulated without even a nod to the tax man.
If we thought that America’s biggest problem is that our rich folk aren’t rich enough, then repealing the estate tax might make sense. But in my opinion, if you are rich enough to care about the estate tax, you’re rich enough not to have a care in the world.




Union-busting

Apparently, another seething injustice plaguing our nation is that working people have too much bargaining power on the job. That’s the view of the Republican lawmakers who tried, and failed, to block a new rule by the National Labor Relations Board to give workers a better chance of forming a union if they want one.
The previously emasculated NLRB recently approved a new rule that would prevent companies from indefinitely stalling votes by workers on whether to form a union or not. Rules like these can be blocked by Congress, which the Republican leadership tried and failed to do when Obama vetoed their disapproval resolution.
Republicans said the new rule would allow “powerful union bosses” to “ambush” unsuspecting companies by requiring a speedy vote once a sufficient number of employees have signed a unionizing petition. Never mind that the extremely business-friendly labor law requires just that: a speedy vote if workers want one.
In the past, companies have used every delaying tactic imaginable to avoid a union vote, including filing frivolous litigation and preventing workers from hearing the pro-union side of the debate. Not to mention firing anyone who even mouths the word “union.”
In a particularly Orwellian moment, Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner, Sen. Lamar Alexander and Rep. John Kline argued that the NLRB rule requiring a speedy vote would violate the workers’ free-speech rights. Yes, in exactly the same way that exercising your rights violates them.
Not only were these five things dumb, they were pointless. Republicans didn’t get any closer to achieving their goals. It was all for show, just to prove to the folks back home that the Republican Congress is standing up to Obama.
If I had infinite space and time, I could describe other dumb and pointless things Congress has done: voting yet again to repeal Obamacare, threatening to shut down the Department of Homeland Security to protest Obama’s executive orders on immigration, voting to sell off our national patrimony, blocking more of Obama’s nominations on grounds unrelated to their fitness to serve, voting for yet more restrictions on abortions, and trying to push us to start a few more wars in the Middle East.
I can hardly wait to see what the next 100 days will bring.




 “What are we getting from Republicans? Climate denial, theocracy, thinly veiled racism, paranoia, and Benghazi hearings. Lots and lots of hearings on Benghazi. We’re about to get two years of intense, horrifying stupidity. If you thought Benghazi was a legitimate scandal that reveals Obama’s real plans for America then you’re an idiot, but these next two years will be a (briefly) happy period for you.”

Chris Ladd

Few things are as dangerous to a long term strategy as a short-term victory. Republicans this week scored the kind of win that sets one up for spectacular, catastrophic failure and no one is talking about it.

Chris Ladd

 ‘There is nothing more horrifying than stupidity in action.’

Jawaharlal Nehru