There are more ways to waste taxpayer money than people think

 

Sometimes it can be frustrating to be the "adult in the room." Here we see the sea gull on the right making the occasional bleating call that identifies it as a juvenile bird asking for attention from the adult bird, at one point sitting and waiting for the parent to come feed it. The adult bird mostly ignores its entreaties, because it needs to learn to survive on its own, and pay its own way in life.

 

We might wish others would “pay their own way” instead of living off taxpayer money. People complain about the poor, but some others seem to wallow in taxpayer money merely for self-gratification. Take Lauren Boebert of the extreme-right Freedom-To-Be-An-Ass Caucus for example. Boebert barely survived a recount in her last election and current polling in her district showing 50+ percent of voters have an unfavorable view of her, yet she insists on being an embarrassment to those fool enough to have voted for her. After a catfight between Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene over accusations of “plagiarism” of the other's articles of impeachment against Joe Biden,  the Freedom Caucus decided that Boebert was the crazier of the two and booted Greene out of the caucus.

Now Boebert is proposing to use an obscure measure called the Holman Rule to eliminate the salaries of Biden administration officials whose policies she doesn’t like. For example, they wish to force out by these means DHS’s Alejandro Mayorkas, as if it is his “fault” that there are migrants escaping U.S.-bred violence when, as John Oliver pointed out a few months ago, the Biden’s immigration and asylum policy is just as racist and inhuman as Trump’s, having cowardly allowed himself to be gaslit by xenophobes and nativists. 

This is what Boebert is doing to justify  her salary, “punishing” the poor, asylum seekers trying to escape U.S.-bred violence which this country refuses to take ownership for, and anyone who opposes she and her cohorts destructive impulses? She should be paying for rental space on the House floor.

But at least Boebert is for “something”; that cannot be said for Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, elected mostly for his “fame” as a former football coach. Tuberville is currently in the news for blocking hundreds of military appointments—including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—for the reason that he opposes the military paying the travel expenses of female soldiers going to abortion clinics. 

Frankly I question such an “allowance,” but I’ll keep that in the realm of opinion. What is annoying about Tuberville’s stance is that he expects the military to announce a policy change—any “change,” apparently—because he has refused to advance a “plan” of his own; he is simply stalling for stalling’s sake, like a juvenile who just wants to play childish games.

Although the Alabama Media Group (AL.com) is judged to be in the “middle” on the partisanship scale by independent media watchdogs, this is apparently akin to “socialism” by the usual standards of the state. Tuberville has been under relentless fire from AL.com for being “arrogant and ignorant”; it has apparently upset the typical Alabaman by declaring that the state would be better off electing a “cabbage” to the Senate, because at least a cabbage keeps its “ignorant mouth shut.” 

Tuberville is an “emperor with no clothes,” the people who voted for him playing along with the illusion that he is not walking about completely naked of morality, ethics or even that he has done anything justifying his paycheck other than being an obstruction to progress. Tuberville’s own  brother, Charles Tuberville, a successful musician dating from the 1970s, has had enough of him:

Due to recent statements by him promoting racial stereotypes, white nationalism and other various controversial topics, I feel compelled to distance myself from his ignorant, hateful rants. What I’m trying to say is that, I DO NOT agree with any of the vile rhetoric coming out of his mouth. Please don’t confuse my brother with me.

Unfortunately there is little one can do than tell such people to just shut-up, as Rep. Steve Cohen—the only Tennessee Democrat in Congress after Nashville’s vote was split three-ways into deep-red rural counties—tried to shame Republicans on Jim Jordan’s sham “government weaponization” hearings which even attacked FBI director Christopher Wray, himself a member of the far-right Federalist Society. According to The Hill, after sustained personal attacks  on the FTC Chairperson, Lina Khan

Tensions boiled over during the House Judiciary Committee’s contentious Federal Trade Commission (FTC) oversight hearing Thursday morning. Rep. Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.) called out the “hypocrisy” and “the lack of integrity” of some Republican lawmakers who questioned FBI Director Christopher Wray’s judgment in a Wednesday hearing and were now interrogating FTC Chair Lina Khan.

He alleged that these GOP lawmakers weaponized the government Jan. 6 to overthrow the government in contradiction of their oath of office. “Is the gentleman accusing us of a lack of integrity?” one Republican lawmaker interrupted.“Mr. Chairman, if you would ask whoever it is to shut up?” Cohen shot back.

Jordan wasn’t present at the time, but when he returned he hypocritically called for “civility,” when he has been by far the worst offender. He was called a “legislative terrorist” by former House Speaker John Boehner, and as the leader of the “Freedom Caucus,” he owes any power he has to using the caucus to threaten and intimidate. Boehner noted in an interview that  "I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart ― never building anything, never putting anything together." Jordan’s so-called congressional hearings are a case in point, as he seeks to defund the FBI and Department of Justice. He won’t succeed, but it is indicative of the fact that he is not interested in doing anything “constructive.”

While Boebert, Tuberville and Jordan are “busy” living off taxpayer money to fund their nothingness, individuals are not merely outliers; whole organizations can be doing it. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—once regarded as a bastion of “liberal” philosophy, has “flipped” thanks to Trump, and has frustrated those who thought they could trust the court to frustrate the far-right’s policy moves. The court recently ruled that ICE’s private prison system—now almost exclusively for the use of detention of mostly immigrants whose only “crime” is being undocumented—is not subject to state mandates on prison conditions or even if they should exist at all.

Before Trump took office, 1 percent of immigrants were held in private prisons; that number rose to 80 percent and hasn’t changed. The Biden administration’s DOJ has been allowed to close private prisons for non-immigration detention, but as the ACLU points out, Biden is merely continuing the Trump policy by filling now vacant private prison space with non-criminal migrants, with the ICE continuing to be allowed to sign contracts with private companies and even major banks seeking big profits off the misery of inmates.

Of course it is taxpayers who are on the hook for this “profit.” The GAO criticized the ICE for using taxpayer funding far in excess for what it is paying for prisoner upkeep, keeping immigrants—three-quarters of them with no criminal records—for years simply as a body count to keep receiving funding despite a history of abuse, medical neglect and lack of nutrition.

I have discuss the many ways that immigration policy was deliberately broken leading to the problems we see today, but as Migration Policy Institute noted, the Clinton administration and the second Bush presidency both created a situation where asylum seekers from south of the border were treated as no more than “terrorists” rather than human beings escaping first U.S.-funded right-wing murder regimes in opposition to populist sentiment (“communism”) and then deporting U.S.-bred gangs to terrorize the population:

Congress intensified its focus on mandatory detention following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) defined additional crimes as aggravated felonies for the purposes of immigration, including some nonviolent misdemeanors, and reduced the minimum potential prison sentence to be instantly deportable from five years to one year. In addition to removing many of the legal hurdles that had reprieved noncitizens from expedited deportation, AEDPA and IIRIRA curtailed judicial review and due process in immigration cases and restricted grants of relief for immigrants with family ties in the United States. Detention rates quickly rose as a result: The average daily detainee population nearly tripled compared to 1995, reaching 20,500 in FY 2001.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks cemented the securitization of immigration enforcement and policy. In 2002, the Homeland Security Act abolished the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), situating its functions within a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formed from the merger of 22 separate federal agencies. Three DHS components were created to oversee immigration: ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In addition to broadening the use of nationality-based screening and enforcement programs, Congress further widened the category of people subject to mandatory detention. By doing so, it enabled criminal prosecution of immigration offenses and propelled the dramatic expansion of and investment in immigration detention.

Thus after the Department of Homeland Security had simply run out of Muslim “terrorists” to find—and thus no longer justifying its taxpayer cost, is was simply allowed to “absorb” other agencies, expand the definition of “terrorist” to anyone who wasn’t the right “nationality”—particularly anyone from Latin America—and forcing formerly independent agencies to abide by a new “thought process” that incorporated the DHS’s overall systemic inhumanity. As John Oliver noted a few months ago, even the Biden administration—despite Republican attacks on the current head of the DHS—is hardly more “human” than the Trump administration in its racist asylum policies concerning who it lets through the door.

So why not just let the “people” decide based on justice and experience? That is something that was supposed to happen with the local King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s Continuum of Care Board, which according to the NPR affiliate KUOW, was “supposed to mean convening people who have experienced homelessness to help make decisions about one of King County’s biggest issues — the growing homeless population. But things have not been going smoothly.”

To be honest, a lot of people questioned whether this was a wise idea, since many homeless people don’t mind being homeless, unless they can get their own room for free. Board meetings tend to be punctuated by loud arguments about nothing: “And while last month's meeting received more attention than normal, dysfunction and derailment is not unusual for the board.” Board members are “unsure what they're meant to be doing, what their mandate is, or what they have the authority to change…A lot of board members said that most meetings were derailed, most meetings were taken over by rants or complaints that weren't necessarily on the agenda."

The board “oversee a federal funding process that brings in more than $50 million in homelessness funding to the Regional Homelessness Authority,” although its members claim they are just there to rubberstamp the decisions of others, and to make “recommendations” based on their own experiences.  However, the agency has been under scrutiny for its “performance, or lack thereof” according to critics, who note that board members receive six-digit salaries for doing little except “stacking papers” while the number of homeless on the streets doesn’t seem to be decreasing.

Politicians, agencies or “do-gooders”—it doesn't matter what the "thought" was that brought them into being if their existence is a waste of money, while most of us are just trying to stay alive no thanks to them. Like that young sea gull, some of the useless should “pay their own way.”