The government shutdown has ended and the possible default
has been averted. For now. We’ll be going through democracy-by-hostage-taking
again in just a few months. The Republicans have ample time to figure out their
next round of demands. (Make me a sammich or we’ll shut down the gummint!) The
Tea Partiers were ready to play Russian roulette with the global economy just
because they hate Obama. The next time the US tries to impose democracy on some
other country, the rest of the world is going to laugh in our collective faces.
And they should.
This shutdown was brought to us by the party of fiscal and
personal responsibility. That’s $24 billion of our tax dollars wasted by a
bunch of 3rd grade playground bullies stomping their expensively
shod feet about a law they don’t like. These are not statesmen, doing the work of
the people. These are petulant and vindictive men who were willing to make the
whole world pay because they didn’t get their way. This is why any person
running for any office (local, state, national) who says they hate gummint
should be immediately and permanently disqualified.
Will the party of fiscal and personal responsibility be
taking up a collection to reimburse the taxpayers for the $24 billion? Don’t
hold your breath. The poor lambs planned the shutdown for months, and then got
miffed when a shutdown meant actually shutting things down. One take away from
all this? We should really stop waiting for Texas to secede and take preemptive
action. If they want to elect dunderheads like Ted Cruz, Randy Neugebauer, and
Louis Gohmert to state government that would be one thing, but sending them to
DC where they can mess with all of us? Sorry, Texas. This just can’t be allowed
to go on.
As for GOP fiscal responsibility, we’re seeing it right here
at home. The 2014 legislative session will begin in January, where they will
have 638 bills to contend with. So far. The Senate cut off for filing LSRs is October
30, so we can count on a last minute flurry of filings. The average cost of an
LSR (legislative request/potential bill) is $1500. Representative JR Hoell, of
Dunbarton, is this year’s winner in the most bills filed category, at 21.
That’s 21 bills, at a cost of $1500 each – Representative Hoell is going to
cost NH taxpayers $31,500. Given that he’s a remarkably ineffectual legislator,
we can be sure that few if any of these 21 bills will be passed. In 2013 Hoell sponsored 12 bills. None
of them passed.
Hoell is not a member of the Free State Project, but he’s
the next best thing. He’s part of the extremist libertarian crowd. They worship
at the altar of Koch, Rand, and Paul (pere et fils.) They hate gummint, so they
work tirelessly to become part of it. To show their contempt, they file endless
nuisance legislation, to waste the time of their colleagues, and taxpayer
dollars. They claim to hate wasteful spending, but they do it themselves at
every opportunity. They also claim to hate the nanny state, but they are
desperate to play stern patriarch to the uterus bearing population of NH. A
sardonic tweet the other day (from an observer of the nanny state uterus brigade) read: “It’s not uterYOU, it’s uterUS.” To
summarize Hoell’s bills, he wants everyone, everywhere to have unrestricted
access to guns, wants to eliminate the judiciary and the police, and he wants
women to serve as involuntary incubators. He might want to rethink giving the
involuntary incubators unrestricted access to guns.
Coming in at 19 LSRs is Rep. Dan Itse, from Freemont. That’s
$28,500 worth of taxpayer waste. Itse is another extreme libertarian, not a
Free Stater, but certainly an ally. Many of Itse’s bills are aimed at ensuring
that food produced in NH is exempted from the Food Safety and Modernization
Act. These folks hate gummint regulation, and feel that in the free market, you
should be able to choose for yourself what you buy. If you want to buy
contaminated food, that should be your decision. If you buy it unknowingly and
get sick or die, well, next time you won’t buy from that guy!
Itse also wants to recodify education laws, laws relative to
law enforcement personnel, and wants to eliminate proprietorships from the
business enterprise tax. He also wants to prevent students from voting. The
extreme libertea crowd hates law enforcement and hates the judiciary. They
sympathize with the crowd of whiny wife beaters who feel hard done by that they
have to pay child support, but they don’t get full custody. Still, this year
Itse made an effort to reel himself in. Last year he sponsored 42 LSRs, at an
estimated cost of $63,000. Not a single one of them passed. I’m sure we’re all
happy to know that fiscal conservatives like Itse and Hoell are looking out for
us.
There are at least a dozen gun bills proposed, because,
after all, in a state with 500 bridges that are on a red list for structural
impairment, the only possible solution is guns and more guns. The unemployment
rate is at a firm 5%, and obviously the best way to deal with that is GUNS!
The northern Carroll County delegation has managed to
comport itself with admirable restraint. No one has filed an epic number of
bills, no gun bills, or anything that (so far) seems like nuisance legislation.
A pity that can’t be said of the legislators from the southern part of the
state. We sell the good people of Massachusetts cheap booze and cigarettes,
mock them for being socialists, and they thank us by sending their misanthropes
to populate southern NH where they run for the legislature. Massachusetts gets
the last laugh.
“This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.” Charlie Pierce
© sbruce 2013
Published as a bi-weekly column in the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.
