The New American Political Terrorists

They don't go around shooting people. They don't wear suicide vests. They don't bomb anybody.

But they are more dangerous than Al-Qaeda ever was.

That famous terrorist organization has been able to kill thousands of innocent people. Not just on 9/11, but all over the world. They have killed, maimed, and terrorized people in multiple countries. Governments have correctly put them on wanted lists and are actively pursuing them. The assassination of Osama Bin Laden was a necessary military operation widely praised as a victory against terrorists.

But we have a special type of terrorist who is capable of inflicting more damage, and is much more reckless than the average Islamic extremist. For lack of a better term, we can call them political terrorists and they reside in the US House of Representatives.

Representative Louie Gohmert from Texas is a prime example
of the fanatical wing of the Republican Party.

Miriam-Webster defines terrorism as: The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion. What is noteworthy in this definition is the lack of violence, guns, bombs and other military type implements of destruction. What is key is the use of terror, or fear as means to coerce. That is why kidnapping, hostage-taking and other non-lethal ways to extort are part of the terrorist toolkit.

We currently have, in the Republican Party, a sizable group of politicians who are willing to jeopardize their own country, and even the entire world, to get their way. This type of behavior used to be the stuff of James Bond movies where an arch-villain was willing to endanger the entire planet to get a personal benefit.

It has become fashionable for people to blame Speaker of the House John Boehner for a lack of leadership and an inability to work with the President. This is the same charge leveled at president Obama when people alleged that the President was unable or unwilling to work with the Congress. The answer for both of them is that one cannot (must not) negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages more acts of terrorism.

Senator Mitch McConnell steps up to the plate and
shows that there are still reasonable Republicans

Another characteristic of terrorists is their apparent inability to learn anything productive. The ultras who refused to work with the President on health care reform essentially got it shoved down their throats for their trouble. They had an opportunity to work constructively with the President but preferred instead to be obstructionists. And the lesson they apparently learned from that was to become even more intransigent, even more belligerent. For example, Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party darling and a leader of the ultras, not content to be humiliated in her doomed quest for the presidency, announced proudly yesterday that she filed the first bill of the new 113th Congress. She is proposing to repeal “Obamacare,” a bill less likely to pass through Congress and be signed into law than the repeal of the Star Spangled Banner as our national anthem.

As the great sage, Yogi Berra, was prone to say, this March it will be “Déjà vu all over again.” For some reason, the conservative claque of the Republican Party has convinced itself and a large portion of the public that the debt ceiling is a negotiable item. They call it leverage. That is like calling bank customers leverage if you are a bank robber. Yes, bank customers can be leverage, but only if you are willing to kill them to get what you want. The consequences of exercising this type of leverage is morally reprehensible, not to mention catastrophic. The debt ceiling, contrary to what these political terrorists allege, is not a license for more government spending – it is simply the government paying its bills. It is nothing short of extortion for the Congress to threaten not paying its bills. The consequence of America not paying its bills is catastrophic, not only domestically, but with dire consequences for the entire world economy. So calling people who would threaten to not pay America's bills political terrorists is not an exaggeration.

Speaker John Boehner breaks with the "Hastert Rule"

There are clearly items which need to be addressed. Government spending is indeed out of control. Much negotiation will be necessary to bring government spending down. Everything should be open for discussion and real solutions should be discussed and implemented, but holding the good faith and credit of the United States hostage is not the way to achieve a lessening of the debt. It is a sign of people incapable or unwilling to negotiate in good faith. Terrorism as a political tactic is a sign of weakness, not strength. It is practiced by people who are unable to play by the rules, who do not believe in democracy. It is borne of desperation, suitable for totalitarian regimes.

There are ultra-conservative people, many of them in the Tea Party, who allege they are living under a totalitarian regime. Ironically, this posture is a ploy by which they capture votes in a democratic system. Then, when elected, they adopt undemocratic tactics in order to pursue their anti-government agenda, their real goal put forth under the guise of concern with the national debt.

...holding the good faith and credit of the 

United States hostage is not the way to 

achieve a lessening of the debt. 

Their main accomplishment so far is the downgrading of America's credit rating due to the last debt ceiling fight, a feat that could very well be repeated in March. It is inconceivable that America would default on paying its debts, but the mere fact that this is even a remote possibility is sufficient to get the ratings agencies nervous and the ironic net result would be that we would end up increasing our debt, not lowering it.

Vice President Joe Biden shows why
President Obama picked him as his running mate.

However, there is some hope on the horizon. The last “fiscal cliff bill” may show us the way to the future. A future of real bipartisanship. Senator Mitch McConnell, finally freed from his number one priority of making President Obama a “one-term president," got down to business and forged a bipartisan consensus with Vice-President Joe Biden and Majority Leader Harry Reid and sailed a compromise bill through the Senate on a 89-8 vote, proof that the Senate can work on a bipartisan basis. The Senate vote was so overwhelming that the House had no choice but to pass the same bill with no amendments. Speaker Boehner even broke the “Hastert Rule,” the idiotic tenet that former Speaker Hastert promoted that bills could not be put to a vote unless a majority of the majority was in favor. In this case, it was the Democrats who made the difference and only 85 Republicans were needed to get the job done. Even the pathetic “No Tax” Grover Norquist endorsed the bill by twisting himself into a logical pretzel, pretending that at least the taxes on 98% of Americans did not go up, thereby simply agreeing with President Obama's consistent position since his first election.

While the pundit class is whining away, predicting more and more gridlock, the gridlock mold has been broken with this vote, rendering the political terrorists temporarily irrelevant.

For the sake of the country they should only stay that way.