Any time you hear Washington talk about bipartisan agreement, America, grab your wallet and run!
Once again, lawmakers in Washington have finally cut through all the thorny brambles of partisanship and discovered (yet again! yippie!) something they can all agree upon: spending scads and scads more of other people’s money that we don’t even have!
Ah, yes, bipartisanship. It ranks right up with gonorrhea and cancer and chronic ingrown toe nails for just really fun all around things to have.
Of course, to hear all the jabbering gasbags on the news channels, you would think these people had just discovered a flu vaccine that actually works. Finally, they all say, this is how Washington is supposed to work!
Yes, blowing the most modest little spending caps and burning through torrents of more money that our children and grand children will have to repay — that is certainly how Washington has always worked. Not so sure whether that is how it is “supposed” to work.
God forbid that any of these kleptocrats cut some spending. Or, better yet, take a meat axe to the entire federal government.
Question: Honestly, if the Department of Labor were shuttered tomorrow, dear lowly taxpayer, how long do you think it would be before you actually noticed it?
This is a bit of a double-edged trick question. Of course you would notice immediately because the media would instantly break out in hives and go into a 24-7 meltdown over it so you would hear about it incessantly. It would probably be more proof that President Trump is somehow in cahoots with the Russians.
Other edge of the trick question is that of course if it were not for the blabbering media, you would NEVER know that the Department of Labor had shut down.
And there are about 14 other federal departments that are every bit as useless as the Department of Labor that could close down and the poor suckers who pay for all this nonsense would not notice for literally years — if ever. (If it were not, of course, for the stupid, blathering media.)
Mr. Trump in so many ways has done so much to salvage America from the freedom-hating socialist agenda of ex-President Obama and his party of Ponzi scheme thieves. He celebrates freedom, believes America has borders and — as he said so eloquently during his State of the Union Address — has stopped apologizing for the greatest nation on earth.
Mr. Trump has been a truly radical electrocution to Washington politics. I only wish he were more so.
I get that the president is wisely picking his battles and I respect his strategic thinking. He signs the spending bill so he can take the battle deep into Democrat territory and destroy them on illegal immigration. Brilliant.
But in my dreams, I still imagine Mr. Trump calling into his office — on live television, produced by Mark Burnett himself — every single one of his cabinet secretaries and demanding that each explain why his department should not be eliminated. What is so utterly vital about every single department that Mr. Trump should not just get rid of the whole thing right now.
Each secretary would have five minutes to make his case. No notes allowed.
Then Mr. Trump would purse his lips into a duck bill, bob his head, point to the guy and say, “You’re fired!”
Or, if the case has been made, “Deal!”
And the first job of every cabinet secretary who was not summarily fired would be to draft a proposal for how to slash his department by 60 percent.
This is, of course, what happens in board rooms and at kitchen tables all over America whenever things get tight or debt piles up to high. Why should Washington be immune from the same tough choices.
Perhaps this is all just a pipe dream. But with Mr. Trump, it seems, anything is possible.
Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com; follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.
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