As expected, last week Mike Johnson huddled with Democrats and agreed to go along with more deficit spending in order to accommodate their anti-America agenda, an agenda that fails to provide a single provision to secure the southern border.  Sadly, 101 Republicans voted for the bill, which underscores yet again the reality that the main reason for the GOP’s existence is to help Democrats achieve their goals.

Republican apologists insist that “Speaker Johnson can’t do much, because Republicans only have a slim majority in the House.”  My genteel response:  Bulls__t!  Mike Johnson has the power to bring Democrats to their knees; what he’s lacking is the guts to acknowledge the elephant in the room — a government shutdown.  Even the bravest of Republican souls refuse to so much as mention it.  With just a one-vote majority, House Republicans could call the Democrats’ bluff and play the shutdown card if they had the courage and character to vote as a block.

Unfortunately, Republicans avoid even talking about the government-shutdown option, because the thought of being blamed for a shutdown is too terrifying for them to fathom.  Which is a head-scratcher for simple-minded folks like me.  Why does it not occur to Republicans that they are not obligated to accept blame for a shutdown?  Why does it not occur to them that they can point the finger at Democrats for shutting down the government.  After all, it’s the Dems who are bankrupting the country with trillions of dollars in profligate spending, and it’s Democrats who are refusing to end the invasion at our southern border.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump has thus far not commented on the latest uniparty abomination bill.  Trump did many great things during his first term as president, but cutting spending was not one of them.  In 2018, he backed down from his threat to veto a $1.3 trillion spending bill, rationalizing that the bill “provided needed funds for the military.”

After Trump signed the bill, he said, “I will never sign another bill like this again,” but the very next year he signed a $1.4 trillion bill to — you guessed it — avert a partial government shutdown.  Then, to rub salt in the taxpayers’ wound, one of his last acts as president in December 2020 was to sign yet another massive $1.4 trillion omnibus bill that included $900 billion in COVID-19 aid.

So now Puppet Joe is free to rack up another deficit — estimated at $1.58 trillion — which will give him a record-breaking total of $8.3 trillion by the end of his reign.  That’s without taking into account vote-buying schemes like cancelling more student debt and lots of new goodies for illegal aliens, generously offering to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, and, of course, never-ending money for Ukraine.

During the primaries, Vivek Ramaswamy said that if he were elected president, he would cut the number of federal employees by 50 percent and use zero as a baseline for the budget of every federal agency.  Whether he would have stuck to that pledge if he became the Republican nominee, we’ll never know, but Argentine President Javier Milei is proving it can be done.  Milei has fired 50,000 public employees since taking office, and is planning to cut 70,000 more government jobs and terminate more than 200,000 social welfare programs

It’s time to face up to the reality that the uniparty will never cut spending.  Not only will the national debt never be repaid, porky politicians will never stop adding to it.  FDR famously said “We only owe it to ourselves,” but was he really that dumb?  “We only owe it to ourselves” is just a euphemism for default, and when that happens, the U.S. dollar will collapse and lose its status as the world’s reserve currency, which in turn will reduce the United States to a financial basket case.

Republican voters appear to be outraged by Congress’s drunken-sailor spending, but for their elected representatives it’s just business as usual.  And the really sick thing about it is that those same outraged voters will reelect most of the big-spending politicians they are supposedly outraged about in the coming election.  There’s no way to skirt the issue that, when all is said and done, the voters are the real culprits.