Welcome to another mid-week accounting of the Swamp shenanigans! Congress returned to session. According to some some modest deliberations before Labor Day, the House and Senate are providing their recommendations on the budget to the respective Ways and Means committees to be deliberated between the two chambers and enacted in some manner.

The price tag is reported as $3.5 trillion bucks, spread over ten years of expenditures. If we add the estimated $5 Trillion already allocated to fight COVID, we are talking about the equivalent of two full years of Federal spending created on the touch-screens of Congress and added to the tab we are handing the Grandkids. Given the date, we are half-way through a momentous month in which the very nature of our Republic appears up in the air.

Part of that was the California recall election that seems to have confirmed Governor Newsom’s term will continue. It was by a significant margin- 64% in favor of keeping him on, and deflating the media buzz about an African-American White Supremacist overturning the old order.

The controversy about the results, which will not be formal until all the mail-in ballots postmarked by yesterday are counted, is already beginning. Reports of hundreds of ballots found in automobiles used as mobile sleeping platforms and registered voters being forced to cast provisional ballots at the polls. They were informed “You already voted” on their first attempt. But there is a parallel set of narratives in play with interesting dynamics. The first, like what some voters were told, is that we already voted. Relax. Everything is fine. The other one is that there appears to be some question on how our elections are run. That one leads off into some other interesting questions that appear to have no answers.

Meanwhile, video surfaced this morning of North Korea’s latest missile shot, reportedly a sea-launched cruise missile capable of carrying an atomic warhead to Japan. Iran is reported to be within a month of producing enough plutonium to construct their first nuclear weapon. China has deployed warships to conduct operations in the US-declared Exclusive Economic Zone off the Aleutian Islands, responding to American naval deployments in what China claims as it’s own territorial limits in the South China Sea.

So there is excitement in the new multi-polar world to add to concerns about our budget deliberations. A single Senator could hold the balance on the next step in adding to as astonishing national debt that will crash through $30 Trillion if our representatives decide to do so. The fiscal year ends in two weeks, at midnight on the 30th of September. Without some agreement, we could face another of those inconvenient government shut-downs.

The number of questions contained in the budget resolution amounts to about the number of pages in the bill that has not been open to debate as yet. Depending on Senator Manchin, a Democrat who has announced his opposition, we could be sailing through an unresolved budget ceiling authorization, a still-gigantic Defense bill, and the institution of a Voting Rights bill that will permanently transform our Republic into something that looks a bit more like a “democracy.”

We will see about that, of course. But the talk down by the Loading Dock is that there could be an interesting couple weeks coming up. But whatever happens, how we arrived at this point in our history will be an entertaining story. If it is ever told, of course. But that in itself is a great story!

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com