An Open Letter to the Republican Party on the Eve of Political Disaster

Enough.

Stop playing subversive games with my children's future. 

Stop aiding and abetting the destruction of the American economy through your childish temper tantrums and suicidal demands.

The time to discuss financial reform is before you spend the money, during the budgetary process, not when the bills come due, during the debt limit process.  I note with dismay that this tends not to happen – neither the timing nor the actual discussions.  You don’t discuss.  You demand, and when you don’t get exactly what you want you make threats.

Honestly, I didn’t put up with that nonsense from my children when they were still in diapers.  I see no reason why I should put up with it from people who are supposed to be adults.

Get this through your skulls:

The government will be funded.  And you will do it.

You will do it because this nation cannot afford to be left without services because of the selfish politics of the few.  You think it can, and you’ve certainly done your best to make that happen.  But sooner rather than later it will occur to you that this is mistaken.  It will cost you money.  It will weaken our security.  It will play well to your most partisan base but that base only wins primaries, not elections.  Eventually it will occur to you that when the poor have nothing left to eat they will eat the rich, and you will get uncomfortable around condiments.

You will do it because you have no leverage.  You control one half of one third of the federal government, and you have turned it into a cesspool of insanity.  You’ve managed to screw yourselves into a hole and even your own supporters think you’ve gone too far.  The rest of us are just waiting to see how much it is going to hurt us while we laugh at you.

The debt limit will be raised.  And you will do it.

You will do it because you’ve already spent the money and backing out on it now is not sound financial policy – it’s skipping out on your credit card payments.  And if you think the local bounty hunters are nasty, just wait until the international financiers take over the chase.  If you think the Chinese and the rest of the nations who keep the American economy afloat are going to tolerate losing their investments because of your inability to understand that point, you will be dreadfully, dreadfully disappointed.  You will discover that your world is built on sand.

You will do it because you have no way not to that doesn’t involve your own pain.  I am aware that other people’s pain is not important to you – your entire political platform is predicated on that simple fact.  But when your benefactors start to howl, when your donors dry up, when it finally becomes clear to you that cutting off your own nose to spite others is a bloody and useless business, you will do it.

You will do it because the Affordable Care Act is now law.  It was written by your own party.  It was implemented first by your own party.  It was upheld as constitutional by your own hand-picked Supreme Court.  And the more you rail against it, the more you engage in farcical rhetoric, attention-whore semi-filibusters, and underhanded dirty political tricks, the more you confirm the revulsion that American citizens already have for you and the more you will set yourself up to lose the next thirty years of elections.

Remember Social Security?  It wasn’t just good policy.  It was a political goldmine for the Democrats.  You could have jumped on the ACA bandwagon, claimed it as the child of yours that it was and ridden that all the way to power, but instead you fell under the sway of extremists, radicals, and subversives bent on destroying the nation, and you lost your chance.  Man up, move on, and try to come up with real solutions to real problems for a change.

The time to discuss the ACA is over.  You lost.  Get over yourselves.   

If you insist on taking the American economy hostage to further your political ambitions, remember this: Americans do not negotiate with terrorists.  You will lose.  You will lose grandly, publicly, and permanently.  And you will spend the rest of this century chewing over the rancid taste of unnecessary defeat.  A great many people will go to great lengths to make sure that you do, and I will support them.

The choice is yours.

Don’t screw it up any more than you already have.