After joining Democrats to pass the first draft of the bloated, heavily ideological and cronyist “infrastructure bill”, the Republicans have succeeded in passing a series of meaningless amendments that will be promptly dropped in the “budget reconciliation process.” This process allows anything framed as a spending measure, including mandating that all new cars be built with an interlock device and tracking technology, to be passed without a single Republican vote.
The Republicans put out a memo in which they claimed to have put the Democrats in a difficult position over their amendments. These amendments included things like preventing federal funding of abortion and preventing the restriction of fracking, and a prohibition on Critical Race Theory.” The Republicans could have prevented this by not voting for the first version of the bill, the one tailored to pass with fewer poison pills but which is also radically ideological and filled with crony handouts and vote-buying schemes. But the GOP leadership voted for the Bill, demonstrating the fighting spirit of the Afghan National Army.
The jumped-up claims that they are truly putting Democrats in a difficult position are an attempt to fool their base into believing that voting GOP matters in an election. But in reality the GOP at the national level is a faux opposition party, soundbiting one way, and yet acting as supine collaboration to the Democratic Party’s totalitarian ambitions.
The entire Republican Party is a hollowed-out wreck without a soul, substance, or fight and is either off acting like crazed angry bloggers with nothing more than red-meat reactionary rage or as moderate voices whose chief pleasure is getting the Partisan Press to say a few nice things about them.
The infrastructure bill is a radical, partisan, and authoritarian intolerable act that any thinking and intelligent population would positively rebel against and any elected politician would be run out of office for supporting. Thinking and intelligence can hardly be considered traits of an electorate “educated” by partisan-run public schools entirely focused on ideological, irreligious, anti-family indoctrination and almost incidentally focused on science, math, reading, and the like. Democrats control the education establishment almost as a youth wing of their Party and most teachers are more partisan revolutionary hack than actually teacher.
The GOP leadership, instead of condemning and resisting with vigor, has played collaborator to, despite its symbolic but not substantive “amendments” which will most definitely be dropped from the reconciliation package. This may stem from decades of public school indoctrination and mental health abuse within a partisan-run education system that is itself all symbolism over substance.
Basically, the Senate Republicans aren’t capable of understanding that they are collaborators, that their opposition is symbolic and meaningless, and that if the Democrats ever gain the monopoly power they crave, these useless idiots in the opposition will have won no favor for their collaborative efforts. While it is virtually impossible for Democrats to achieve this aim without literally becoming a totalitarian junta or something like that, and while this is also impossible given the US political structure, if this ever happened the collaboration party would be tossed aside like waste.
In the end, the Democrats won’t vote on these amendments, they simply won’t write them into the reconciliation version of the bill. On that ground, they won’t have meant anything, but the fact the Republican leadership in the Senate voted for the first part of this monstrosity is all the substance one needs to observe in order to accuse the GOP leadership of collaboration with the radicals who run the Democratic Party.
Finding gaps for freedom in this emerging authoritarian environment where the opposition is a collaborationist party will become increasingly difficult for freedom seekers and the skilled freedom builder who can organize people locally to defy this trend will become extremely valuable. If this bill passes, the freedom builders will have much work to do in order to help people organize at a sufficient local scale to build their own gaps for freedom which allow them to avoid these intolerable acts and their edicts as much as possible, without becoming outlaws.
The collaboration party, the GOP, will continue to offer insubstantial opposition that is merely words and the individual who is not either very rich or connected to a local network of freedom seekers led by freedom builders, will find their own horizon of possibilities shrinking and their basic human rights, human dignity, and human flourishing undermined.
What the Senate Republicans have done is give Democrats one more step closer to monopoly power and a government and mega corporation controlled economy, culture, and civil society all exploited to benefit the few at the expense of the many. There are many reasons the Democrats will fail, but Republicans aren’t one of those reasons.
