Paul Ryan’s $3.9 Trillion Budget Is The New “Conservative” Benchmark

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Please explain to me, or to people that think like me: Where then is the hope for a federal solution to any of this?  The fact of the matter is, sans a federal balanced budget amendment, the current crisis we suffer under is only going to become more insufferable.  Since we know what they’re doing to the dollar and we know what’s happening to real wages, you can see the decline written on the proverbial wall. “  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  The other solution that, of course, no one wants to talk about — you’re just a radical if you talk about that.  We should talk about nullification.  If you nullify this, if you tell your state legislature to nullify this, my state nullified it.  When I asked my state representative how he intended to enforce it, he couldn’t answer the question.  As a matter of fact, he didn’t even understand the question.  He did not know what I was asking him.  He went: What do you mean are you going to enforce it?  We passed the law.  I said: Okay, when I don’t purchase an insurance plan and the IRS sends me a bill or confiscates part of my federal tax return and you say they can’t do that, how are you going to enforce it?  Are you going to get my $1,400 fine back for me?  Are you going to tell them they can’t collect that from a citizen of Louisiana?  He did not understand the question.

I bet you that most state legislators are of the same ilk.  They can rabble-rouse when it comes to talking about nullifying Obamacare and what have you, but unless you’re going to get the governor, and unless you’re going to get the supreme court or judiciary of your state, if you’re not going to bind all of them in defense of you from the national healthcare corporatization, then how can you possibly defend yourself?  How can you be prevented or excused from the Affordable Care Act?  I don’t see any way that you can.  Maybe I haven’t looked at the problem deeply enough.  You can see the evolution of the Republican establishment slowly but certainly force feeding and becoming first angry, then not so angry, then we’ve got our own idea, then lukewarm, now getting hotter to actually accepting the 2013 addition of the welfare-military-industrial complex state, endorsing it, and now defending it.

Please explain to me, or to people that think like me: Where then is the hope for a federal solution to any of this?  The fact of the matter is, sans a federal balanced budget amendment, the current crisis we suffer under is only going to become more insufferable.  Since we know what they’re doing to the dollar and we know what’s happening to real wages, you can see the decline written on the proverbial wall.  You’ve got to read parts of this piece by Molly Ball, “Why This Round of the Republican Civil War Was Different.”  I hate to break the bad news to you as we get close to Christmas but that’s the fact, jack.  Here’s what she said:

[reading]

Another round of the long-running GOP civil war broke out this week, and you could be forgiven for greeting it with a yawn.

House Speaker John Boehner proposed something; conservatives immediately rose up against it, egged on by right-wing pressure groups. News flash: There’s disunity in the Republican ranks.

But this chapter of the story turned out very differently than last time, when the clash between the Republican establishment and grassroots memorably ended in a two-and-a-half-week government shutdown. This time, it’s ending with a bipartisan budget deal, brokered by GOP Representative Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray, that will keep the government open for more than a year. The House passed the bill by a resounding 332-to-94 margin Thursday evening, putting final passage in the hands of the Senate.

 

So what happened? Why didn’t those Tea Party lawmakers and conservative groups get their way? Here’s what happened: Boehner took control. [Mike: She puts the video clip of Boehner saying: This is ridiculous.  You guys need to shut up and back down.]

“Frankly, I think that they’ve lost all credibility,” Boehner said. “They pushed us into the fight to defund Obamacare and to shut down the government.” And then, he noted, some of them even admitted they never thought that ill-fated tactic would actually work. “Are you kidding me?”

Not much gets Boehner worked up. He is laid back to a fault. But the revelation that he and his fellow lawmakers were essentially pawns in a game played by agitators accountable to no one was too much for him to stomach.

[end reading]

Mike:  I have a question for you, Ms. Ball.  Who are citizens that do not wish to live under this tyranny, who are we to be accountable to, madam, and for what?  Is that my price for freedom?  Is that what my share of “freedom” costs me, I have to be accountable to someone that is a functionary or an official member of the State?  Is that how I am an American now, really?  You see, folks, we’re all accountable to someone.  If we’re not accountable to someone, then we’re just a bunch of rabblerousing louts out here.  We’ve finally been smacked down by the man who could do it, Boehner and his buddy Ryan.

[reading]

Boehner’s willingness to publicly express the frustration many Republicans have privately felt with the groups’ tactics was a turning point. House leaders stopped trying to get along with the enforcers of an impossible conservative standard and started fighting back.

[end reading]

Mike:  In other words, what is being asked of these intrepid defenders of the Constitution and of conservatism, which is why, folks, some of us have cautioned you over and over and over again to not confuse conservatism with Republicanism.  The two are mutually exclusive.  You have all the evidence that you will ever need.  Now more than ever, you have all the evidence that you will ever need to make and defend that case.  Yet, is that case being made and defended?  If it is, I don’t hear it.  I hear people still being angry about this and screaming loudly on Facebook posts and messages on internet comment boards. This doesn’t move the ball down the field any.  Only being on the field can actually move the ball.  Then she writes this:

[reading]

There was another, less public development this week that represented a similar turn. The Republican Study Committee, a group of House Republicans who meet weekly to talk about policy and tactics, had long served as a venue for conservative members and outside groups, chiefly the Heritage Foundation, to plot strategy together. But on Wednesday, the committee’s chairman, Louisiana Representative Steve Scalise, fired longtime Executive Director Paul Teller, accusing him of betraying lawmakers’ trust by leaking to outside groups.

That was precisely the point. Republican lawmakers were sick of being at the mercy of outside agitators whose demands they viewed as increasingly impossible.

[end reading]

Mike:  In other words, the conservatism of believing that the State has no role and you should always oppose it when it bites off more than it can chew, because it is going to be injurious to your current liberty and tyrannical to future liberty — once it takes something it never gives it back and then it seeks to take another bite.  That thought process is now no longer part of a conservatism that the Republican Party in Mordor on the Potomac River is going to exercise.  This should not be news to those of you who know what the term decepticon — coined by me back in 2009 — means.  You already know this and you already knew this.  Many of you are new listeners and have not been chastened by any of these things.

[reading]

But some conservatives acknowledge Teller had gone too far and say he deserved to be ousted.

The broad approval of the budget deal demonstrated a few things. First, it showed the enormous credibility Ryan has with his colleagues.

[end reading]

Mike:  They’re going to call him conservative.  I’m telling you, the Ryan budget deal is now going to be the benchmark against which conservatives are going to be — if you want to cut a dime off the Ryan budget, you’re some kind of radical nutjob hack, in other words.  [mocking] “What are you, a Praetorian?”

[reading]

Many gave the deal more of a hearing than they might have because of Ryan’s long track record of conservative policy proposals and his good relationships with other lawmakers and activists on the right. Second, it showed that Republicans learned a major lesson from the shutdown. Few want to go down that road again given the political price they paid and given the policy argument about the health-care law that Republicans generally think they are winning. Nearly three-quarters of House Republicans, 169, voted for the deal, while just 62 opposed it.

The conservative pressure groups have power because of their threatened ability to oust lawmakers who don’t meet their standard. But now Boehner, Ryan, and the rest of the Republican leaders have defied them, essentially calling their bluff. Can they really exact revenge on three-quarters of the House Republicans? Or will they have to accept that they’re not in charge anymore?

[end reading]

End Mike Church Show Transcript