House Republicans Cheered as They Took Life and Liberty from Millions of Americans

(Substitute Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week)

Well, it passed, as we all knew it would. The so-called “moderates” and even the alleged “conservative hard-liners” folded like the empty suits they always were. Here’s the video of the moment. Look at all of them cheer and laugh and celebrate that millions of their fellow citizens will go hungry, and that millions of their fellow citizens will sicken and (likely) die, and that the United States will do nothing about the climate crisis, but that millions more will be pumped into the quasi-official law enforcement operations currently running amuck on the streets of America. Look at how happy all of this makes them. Look at the faces of the monsters among us.

After the Congress had passed the Compromise of 1850 and its odious Fugitive Slave Law, Senator Charles Sumner said of those measures:

What act of shame, what ordinance of monarch, what law, can compare in atrocity with this enactment of an American Congress? ... Into the immortal catalogue of national crimes it has now passed, drawing, by inexorable necessity, its authors also, and chiefly him who, as President of the United States, set his name to the bill, and breathed into it that final breath without which it would bear no life.

The immortal catalogue of national crimes just got one entry fatter.

Millions of our fellow American citizens will be deprived of life and liberty, and they will have to pursue happiness in ankle weights. But there was cheering and laughter in the House chamber, and chants of “USA, USA!” as if this had anything to do with the United States of America as originally constituted or as amended and improved down through the years, especially the latter. A bill with 29 percent public support, according to a Quinnipiac poll, just rearranged the entire country down to its poorest citizens, and the people who represent them cheered.

Happy Fourth of July to all the shebeen, where the old republic lives and is celebrated forever. Be well and play nice. And spare a thought for all of us. We’re going to need it.