Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I don’t know if anyone took Civic or Government recently when I was in High School it was a required class, but I know that my son only had pass a basic civic test as a freshman and subsequently hasn’t had to take a full semester of civics. I think that is a travesty because there are a lot of Gen Z that know very little about how their government works. There has been a war on education in the past 20 to 30 years and I truly believe that the powers that be want an undereducated electorate so that they can continue to subjugate the masses. So, I am going to give a basic government class here and let those of you reading what some of ‘rules’ that continue to be used and abused are actually constitutional.

The U.S. Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch (makes the law), the executive branch (enforces the law), and the judicial branch (interprets the law). That seems simple enough but the nuance in the separation of those powers in our two-party system has been severely bastardized.

The House and Senate, mainly the House of Representatives controls the purse (money). The House members are up for election every 2 years, that was an attempt to make those members more accountable to their constituents. That 2-year election cycle doesn’t seem to have dissuaded lifetime politicians. Representative John Dingell, Jr., of Michigan, had more than 59 years of service and holds the record for longest consecutive service took office in 1955 until 2015. Longest-serving Speaker of the House: Sam Rayburn of Texas served as Speaker for a total of 17 years, two months, and two days, serving from 1913 to 1961. Don Young the Representative from Alaska served from 1973 till is death in 2022. These terms in office seem excessive and not fitting the citizen legislator that the founders had in mind.

The House currently has 435 members and passes bills with a simple majority and the Speaker is voted in by simple majority and historically represents the party that has 218 or more elected members. The ruling party gets the privilege of majorities in committees and can bring bills to the floor for a vote. Basically, the party in power gets to run the show and if there is a bill, they don’t agree with they don’t ever have to bring it to a vote.

(This lesson is going long so today I am only going to talk about the House of Representatives)

The current fight over the budget and the debt ceiling is a bogus fight in the House and the Republicans are currently holding the country hostage over something that was never in the Constitution. In fact, as I discussed in a previous post, the XIV Amendment that was passed after the Civil war states that the debt of the country cannot been questioned and must be paid. This Republican House majority is trying to negotiate the debt ceiling by cutting future spending rather than repealing tax cuts that run up the debt.

So, the debt ceiling argument wasn’t even a thing. The present debt ceiling is an combined limit applied to nearly all federal debt, which was substantially established by the Public Debt Acts of 1939 and 1941 which have subsequently been amended to change the ceiling amount. As previously stated, not in the Constitution. Subsequently that limit has been routinely lifted the first time the Republicans use this tactic was when President Obama was in the White House, with Trumps tax cuts exploding the debt the debt limit being increased wasn’t even questioned by the Republicans in the house. Now with President Biden the debt ceiling is miraculously a huge concern for the ‘not so’ fiscally responsible Republicans. ‘Anyone else see a pattern?’

Today we exposed the Debt Ceiling as a ruse, tomorrow I will talk about the Senate and the Filibuster.