Your Humble Blogger had thought that the one lesson that was there for the learning, gleaming in the muck of the last few days of legislative charcuterie, was that this business of setting up a Deadline with a Bad Law booby-trap was no way to run a proverbial. And yet, as Jon Bernstein alludes to, it is likely to continue for the next two years at least.
Perhaps this was inevitable, once the Other Party realized that they could fuck with the debt ceiling. That is, the debt ceiling is in itself a Deadline with a Bad Law booby-trap; our legislature used to simply avoid the booby-trap before the deadline, and that was that.
Actually, now that I am thinking about it, the Alternative Minimum Tax is a Deadline with a Bad Law booby-trap, and that has always worked just fine. Similarly the doc fix. I suppose some people assumed the sequester was just another DwaBLb-t. Maybe in a legislature with two functioning legislative Parties, the DwaBLb-t is—well, still stupid, obviously, but a minor irritation of stupid, like the business about that and which. On the other hand, in a legislature with two functioning legislative Parties, wouldn’t it make sense to just stop with the Bad Laws?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.