Not Exactly Sophie's Choice

It almost seems like the Republicans have boxed themselves into a corner here.

On the one hand, they want to renew the massive 2017 tax cut package, which will limit incoming dollars. They also want to launch a costly, unprecedented military action to round up undocumented immigrants to deport them.

But on the other hand, they say they want to reduce the deficit, too. Accomplishing both of these things is basically impossible.

On the campaign trail they make it seem like there is oodles of excess pork just waiting to be cut, to offset their ethnic cleansing wet dreams, but in reality, discretionary spending makes up very little of the overall budget. Once the math is done, it’s clear that their tax cuts for the rich will balloon the deficit even further. So what will they do?

They’ll pass the tax cuts, guaranteed. Because that’s what their rich donors put them in office to do. And they’ll find a way to blame Democrats for it, you watch. They’re already beefing about how much the California firefighting and projected recovery will cost, and like anything that happens in Cali, from fires to earthquakes to Oscar snubs, they blame Democrats.

Republicans only truly care about the deficit when the Democrats are in office. That’s when they rail for austerity and want to cut programs that help the average citizen, like Social Security and Medicare. They use the deficit as a lever to get rid of programs they don’t like. But once they have control of the government, like now, they throw open the vault doors like it’s a Billionaire Toga Party with multi-million dollar swag bags. They’re happy to let the next Democrat Administration come in and try to clean up the mess (and attack them for not doing it fast enough.)

Good luck keeping the Democrats united to stop them. I think the rich donor class has figured out by now that they need to buy themselves a few Democrats they can count on to vote with the Republicans every so often to counter any straying members of their own. Manchin and Sinema are gone, but I’m sure they’ve been replaced.

And now that the GOP is back in control, you can see how they’re already trying to embed themselves there, like a tick. Here’s one example of how they’ll do it:

The Felonious Guy (TFG) wants to dismantle the Post Office. It’s a double win for them… on the one hand, the mail gets privatized and farmed out to UPS, DHL, Amazon, etc. So Big Delivery gets a shot in the profits at the expense of us raggedy consumers.

The other benefit is it will throw a monkey wrench into efforts to expand or even maintain mail-in voting, which currently provides an end-around to their voter suppression tactics like under-assignment of voting machines, reduction of early voting, and sanctions against aiding people in line. (And those tactics are targeted at Democratic strongholds, of course.)

Whether they can do this is up in the air. After all, the Postal Service is provided for in the Constitution, and anything so based is hard to alter. It's not impossible, though, not with the Republican lapdogs in the Supreme Court.