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| A big bill that actually is beautiful. Curmie wouldn’t make you look at MTG, Gentle Reader. |
A little over 15 years ago, in one of the first entries on this blog, Curmie wrote this about Sarah Palin: “I think she’s reckless, amoral, self-important, and proud of her own staggering ignorance: and that’s a very nasty combination. She seeks the spotlight more than Jesse Jackson, and she’s not above being incendiary for its own sake. And… this time… she’s being attacked unfairly.”
The specific topic was an ad featuring what appeared to be gunsights on Congressional districts represented
by Democrats who voted for the ACA but which the McCain/Palin ticket had
carried in the ’08 presidential election.
There was a follow-up tweet with the line “don’t retreat… re-load.” The usual leftie suspects accused her of
inciting violence for using the same kind of rhetoric pols and pundits had
employed for decades (at least).
But the sights were on the districts, not the incumbent
politicians. (It is sad but coincidental
that one of the Congresscritters named on the poster was Gabby Giffords, who
was indeed shot a few months later by a gunman not exactly playing with a full
deck.) Curmie presented what amounted to a “stopped
clock” defense of Palin.
Skip ahead a decade and a half. The 2020s version of Palin is Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of “Jewish space lasers” fame (yes, Curmie knows that was not a direct quote, but it’s close enough) and who more recently suggested that Pope Francis’s death was an example of “Evil… being defeated by the hand of God.” Like Palin, she’s shrill, bigoted, desperate for attention, dumber than the proverbial stack of burnt toast, and just generally the kind of person we hope our kids grow up not to be. But, like Palin 15 years ago, she’s being slammed unfairly. Well, sort of unfairly.
This all stems from an MTG tweet (or whatever they’re called now) in which she admits that she hadn’t read the
section of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” that strips states of their ability to
regulate AI, and that she would have voted against the bill had she known of
that language. The stopped clock
phenomenon has seldom been so pronounced.
MTG’s declaration is particularly significant this time
around, because if she had actually done so, the House wouldn’t have passed the
bill. (Or an idea so stupid that even
MTG recognizes how dumb it is would have been excised… or… well, you get the
idea, Gentle Reader.)
She writes that “We have no idea what AI will be capable of
in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states’ hands is potentially
dangerous.” (Curmie added that apostrophe,
hoping its omission was a typo.) She’s
right, of course. Curmie searches in vain
for anything positive to say about the BBB, but this section is, perhaps, even
more odious than the reverse Robin Hood stuff.
Curmie is no fan of taking money out of the hands of the
most vulnerable among us to give a huge tax break to billionaires. Even the most conservative (in both senses of that term) estimates suggest that even after accounting for
perhaps illusory economic growth, we’re talking about a 10-year dynamic deficit
increase of 1.72 trillion dollars.
(The CBO says $2.4 trillion.)
But let’s go with the “smaller” number: $1,720,000,000,000. (That’s a lot of zeroes.) People struggle to understand how big a
number that is. The median household income in the country in 2024 was $80,020. Spend
that much money every minute of every day, and it will take almost 41 years to get
to $1.72 trillion. And Curmie has yet to
see a rationale, even a spurious one, for the obscene tax breaks for people who
don’t come close to needing one.
There is literally no excuse for the Republican budget… but
at least it’s a budget. When They Make Me
Tsar™, anyone introducing anything into a budget bill that isn’t about budget
will be horse-whipped. If it’s something
as awful as capitulating to the techbros or interfering with courts’ ability to
hold government officials in contempt, it will also include kneecapping. (Note: the holding-in-contempt bit isn’t as bad as the
leftie commentariat would have us believe—go figure, right?—but it’s bad enough.)
But revenons à nos moutons. Of course, the lefties pounced on Greene’s
confession. Among those leading the
charge was Rep. Eric Swalwell,
who responded to Greene’s tweet with the following endearment: “You have one
job. To. Read. The. Fucking. Bill.” You
remember Swalwell, don’t you, Gentle Reader?
The partisan hack (yes, the Dems have them, too) who was accused a few years ago of having a romantic/sexual relationship with an alleged
Chinese spy?
Swalwell’s fellow California Democrat Ted Lieu chimed
in with “I read the AI provision, that’s one reason I voted no on the GOP’s
big, ugly bill. Also, ICYMI, the bill also has the largest cut to healthcare in
U.S. history. PRO TIP: It’s helpful to read stuff before voting on it.”
Damned near every left-leaning pundit joined the party. Curmie counted five different articles just
on HuffPost. (He’s not going to link them; you can get there on your own,
Gentle Reader.) Were they right to try to humiliate MTG? Yes.
And no.
First off, Curmie has got 20 bucks that says that both
Swalwell and Lieu have voted on bills they haven’t read in their entirety, and
they probably voted for a bill they didn’t read all the way through. The distinction here is that if there’s
something on page 6 that’s so horrible you couldn’t possibly vote for the bill,
you can stop reading, at least until there’s an amendment to cut the offending
provision. But if you’re tempted to vote
for a bill, you’ve got to read the whole thing, lest there be something on,
say, pages 278-79 (to pick page numbers completely at random, of course) that
would make you change your mind.
Second, the BBB is over 1100 pages long. True, that’s with big fonts and lots of white
space, but even someone who reads pretty quickly would still take over a day to
read the whole thing with any care.
Third, MTG is being pummeled for doing the right thing. In this case, it’s admitting a mistake and
trying to fix the damage. But it’s easy
to expand that concept into, say, going to a check-in with immigration officials
only to be walking into a trap. Curmie
hopes to follow up on this idea in a future post.
Fourth, and this may be the most important point: it’s easy
to miss things. Curmie’s Beloved Spouse
works in the financial aid office of a university. She reports that her professional organization,
the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, only recently
(apparently after the House vote) noticed that the BBB eliminates subsidized
student loans, meaning that students would start paying interest on loans the
second the ink is dry instead of upon graduation. The NASFAA folks aren’t incompetent; they
just missed it.
This kind of thing happens all the time. Curmie just finished a draft of an article he
hopes to publish in a theatre studies journal.
His argument centers on his belief that in quoting one sentence of an
unpublished document, two rightfully well-respected scholars erred in failing
to recognize the significance of the succeeding two sentences, thereby leaping
to a conclusion unproven by the facts.
Finally, where were the Democrats and the allegedly leftie
press? Curmie knew that no argument
would sway his own spineless and dim-witted Congresscritter from prostrating
himself at the feet of Dear Leader, so he relied on news and opinion pieces
rather than poring over the bill himself.
He did, however, read dozens of stories about the BBB. And when did he become aware of this
particular obscene provision? When Marjorie
Taylor Greene wrote about it. Congressman
Lieu has indeed been an advocate of regulating AI, but Curmie can find no
references to his objections to this part of the BBB until after MTG’s tweet.
To be fair, there were some articles published prior to the
House vote, such as this one from the AP. But Democratic leaders certainly didn’t make
much noise about this provision, and Republicans went out of their way to avoid
talking about the bill at all, especially after the evisceration of a few of their
number by constituents at town halls. Was
Curmie’s ignorance about the AI proposal until MTG’s reversal excusable? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly explainable.
If you are reading the blog, Gentle Reader, you are likely to believe that one of the few times Elon Musk has told the truth in this calendar year was in describing the BBB as an “disgusting abomination.” Anyone who voted for the BBB or will do so in the future is at least one, and probably more than one, of the following: an idiot, a sociopath, or a coward. This person should be removed from office (legally, non-violently) as soon as possible. That certainly includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is perhaps the dimmest bulb in the less-than-brilliant Congressional firmament.
Yes, she was apparently fine with all the other intentionally cruel, fiscally irresponsible, and authoritarian aspects of the proposed legislation. She is indeed a strong contender for the less-than-coveted title of America’s Most Embarrassing Legislator (Curmie almost said “Politician,” but the Executive branch has that title sewn up for the near term). But admitting her error and probably getting one of the worst parts of an overall awful bill cut doesn’t warrant this level of vitriol.
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