Teabagggers Unveil Contract From America

It almost escaped my notice that the Teabaggers have a new manifiesto called the Contract From America because the April 15th Teabagger rallies that were so loudly touted by Teabaggers themselves and the media failed to make a dent in the April 15th news day.

They stayed away in droves.

This is somewhat upsetting to me as I had hoped the Teabagger revolution could last at least as long as until the time that the Texas Ethics Commission levies heavy fines on all of these groups that are taking people’s money for political causes, but not reporting any of it to that governmental body that was set up to monitor fraud, corruption, and abuse.

So the Teabaggers have themselves something akin to the Communist Manifesto now. It even has a preamble.

But yes, it nearly escaped my notice except for the fact that on his false news cable TV program, The Daily Show, Jon Stewart highlighted one of their ten points: That the federal tax code cannot be longer than the 4,543-word long United States Constitution.

I wonder if that includes the Amendments.

The joke being that behind the many Republican complaints about the 2100-page long healthcare reform bill, and all of these other lengthy complicated tomes, Republicans are mainly concerned over the length of these bills because they don’t like to read.

I, on the other hand was quite taken with point number 3: “Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike.”

Now that’s funny.

Funny on two levels.

California has a law just like that. It was a provision of their Proposition 13, a provision that requires that the State Assembly pass a balanced budget every year, and that it pass it with a 2/3ds majority.

Because ever since then California has had to whittle and whittle and whittle essential government services, like public education, so they could live within the meager means that are dictated by a conservative minority.

California is a poster child for everything that has gone wrong with states that have been driven into the ground by their manic minority parties.

But here is the other thing that is ironically funny about the Contract From America. If you look at it you will see each point has a percentage figure tacked on to the end of each item. This is an artifact of the “transparency” with which the Contract From America was written. The percentage refers to the number of votes that each item received in online voting that took place before the final draft was unveiled.

Item #3 received a divine 69.69% of the vote.

Item #3 is an item that specifically calls for a 2/3ds majority vote on the federal budget. Because a vote on something this important requires a super majority.

But obviously, the manifesto itself is not nearly as important because each of the ten items that comprise it required only a simple majority to be included.

Now items 1 through 3 passed with super majority votes (82.03%, 72.2%, and 69.69%, respectively). But items 4 through 10 received less than 66.66% of the Teabagger votes.

So by their own standard, The Contract From America only has three points. The rest didn’t pass muster.

Or maybe it’s just this. Jon Stewart is right and Teabaggers really do hate to read and they just stopped voting after reading the first three.