Well, the new Congress has been seated, and they’re off! As Glenn Reynolds stated it, “400 bills on first day of new Congress. Hope and Change!” The only tool in the Congressional toolbox is legislation, so they’re gonna legislate! The oft-quoted Rev. Sensing gets cited again:
A long time ago Steven Den Beste observed in an essay, “The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to themselves, they will regulate everything they can.” Celebrated author Robert Heinlein wrote, “In any advanced society, ‘civil servant’ is a euphemism for ‘civil master.’” Both quotes are not exact, but they’re pretty close. And they’re both exactly right. Big government is itself apolitical. It cares not whose party is in power. It simply continues to grow. Its nourishment is that the people’s money. Its excrement is more and more regulations and laws. Like the Terminator, “that’s what it does, that’s all it does.”
And here they are doing it some more, this year to the tune (projected, almost certain to be exceeded) of $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars!) $1,200,000,000,000 ($1.2 trillion) $1,600,000,000,000 ($1.6 trillion) of deficit spending. (Thanks, DJ!)
The Gross Domestic Product of the U.S. in 2007 was about $13.8 trillion.
More to the point, from that same Sensing piece comes the other rationale for so many bills:
More than anything else, big-government activism is the New Deal’s legacy, and IMO, has come to define the governing philosophy of both parties today. The rising tide of big government has swamped us, held only temporarily at bay by the levees of the Reagan years. (And not really even then, since non-defense spending rose during the Reagan administration.)
Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:
America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed.
“It didn’t work last time, but the philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again, only HARDER!“
BOHICA!