But at this point, no, I don't believe that's actually what's animating it. Selective election denialism is as nihilistic about local institutions as it is about national ones, while theories about state legislatures overridding citizen ballots sure isn't moving things closer to the people.
Whether you can take me seriously isn't any particular concern of mine, whether you can take the actual underlying topics seriously is the primary matter of concern.
The J6 response from the Republicans is all you need to know about power and politics in the party these days. Law and Order is fine long as it's only applied Biden's son. Nevermind the attack on institutional democracy.
This.
This was the problem with Democrats for a long time. They weren't for anything, they were just against Republicans. Republicans in government used to be well-educated and their main ideological thrust was based on a set of principles of limited government, free-market capitalism, and maximum agency of the governed. They fell short of this ideal, but the ideal was there.
Not any more. They're doing stupid symbolic things like this resolution to "get them Democrats" not to actually fix anything, and not as a matter of principle. Part of the problem is any conservative leaning person of any intelligence or reasonable level of education doesn't go into government, they go into business. We end up stuck with bozos like we have now.
This move to abolish the IRS is as much theater as the move to "abolish" daylight savings time in the U.S. which never goes beyond submission of a bill.
If they'd backed this with something like a flat tax, that would have been a bold move, even semi-realistic. But this is circus fare.
Edit: When they controlled all three during the beginning of the previous President's time in office. Still waiting for infrastructure [week] to end and I'm still waiting to see what the Republicans ACA replacement will be... SMH
People are getting savaged by inflation while the Democrats want the IRS to hire more agents that have a habit of targeting the middle income and poor because they are low hanging fruit.
That's what the additional funds is trying to rectify.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-20/super-ric...
>They currently target middle income people because the lack the funds to go after the affluent and the wealthy and the obscenely rich.
Low-hanging fruit: The obvious or easy things that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/low-hanging%20fru...
It's not nonsense, it's the reality.
Additionally, do you really believe US corruption is minor enough that politicians will target the major donor class for tax violations en mass?
> do you really believe US corruption is minor enough that politicians will target the major donor class for tax violations en mass?
Not giving the enforcement agencies the means to do the enforcement is not going to help either. If you are worried about corruption in the US, support efforts that get money out of politics, reversing Citizens United, etc. Not by virtually absolving rich people from paying taxes "because they already bought the politicians".
But that's not what this does. This doesn't do anything to transition power away from the federal government. It just makes it impossible for the federal government to do its job.
That doesn't prove that they're not interested in the well-being of the country, but only because they know this won't succeed. If they thought it could pass, it would be wildly irresponsible. Instead, all we know is that at this moment they've chosen to make a grand and pointless gesture instead of actually governing.
And what do you suppose should be the priorities for the federal government? What needs actually governing that can't be better done at state and local levels at the moment?
We could have a decent argument about which jobs are better handled by a federal government and which aren't. The notion that the federal government isn't actually doing anything and could just vanish tomorrow is absurd and not worth discussing.
Even so, I'd be willing to say, "Sure, fine, the government is doing more than it should". That's pretty vacuously true, and also irrelevant. Getting people to agree on which parts are important, and finding a better way to implement them, seems a more germane question.
Where do I sign up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia
I'd refer you to their web site, but they don't appear to have one.
A charitable interpretation of Republican "fundamental ideology", as it were, would be that they prefer more well-functioning social institutions at lower levels of government, closer to the people those institutions are meant to serve. It would make sense than beyond just a publicity stunt to lower federal taxes and have states and localities tax more.
I can't take you seriously if you're claiming that one of the two major parties in this country isn't interested in the well-being of the country.