Budget bill

Timothy Noah, New Republic -   “As democracy is perfected,” [HL] Mencken wrote in 1920, “the office [of the President] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

You’ve probably heard that quote before. We could conduct a lively debate about when Mencken’s prophesy came true. In my opinion, it was in January 1981. (You must remember that before he was a secular saint, Ronald Reagan was a person whose forehead-smiting ignorance occasioned a steady stream of news stories.) If not Reagan, then certainly George W. Bush fulfilled Mencken’s prophecy. Which means I should have been used to the phenomenon by the time Trump came along. I am not.

The occasion for these sour observations is the Senate Republican majority’s version of the House-passed budget reconciliation bill, or anyway the most contentious parts of it (text; section-by-section summary; shorter summary). Like the House bill, the Senate version is premised on the moronic notion that you can cut taxes by $4 trillion and make it up by throwing a bunch of people off Medicaid. President Donald Trump says he believes this, and I’m inclined to believe that he believes this because he is—well, you know.

But the Senate is supposed to know better. George Washington reputedly said that the Senate, being less responsive to popular passions than the House, was like the saucer into which one pours coffee to cool it before drinking (that’s apparently something people used to do). But not a lot of cooling takes place in the Senate budget bill.