A lot of people are celebrating the end of 2010 with no small measure of hope: All across the land, spirits are buoyed by November’s elections and the hopes that a new year and a new Congress will turn back the egregious curtailments of our liberty perpetrated by Barack Obama and his parliamentary co-conspirators.
Allow me to throw a dash of cold water on those hopes, if I may, with a prediction: The new Congress will ride into Washington amidst much fanfare, dispensing many promises and proclamations. The new, Tea Party-supported members will soon be hampered by their inexperience and by their ignorance of the byzantine ways of Congress, and will have circles run around them by the Democratic leadership and the remaining GOP establishment types.
Some number of new hopefuls will fall into the corrupt Washington business-as-usual, unable to resist the siren song of pork and earmarks and the promises of future lucrative lobbying jobs, and will soon happily go about enriching their districts and themselves at the taxpayers’ expense. Those who don’t fall to the dark side will quickly grow sick of the D.C. cesspool, and have either short or ineffectual legislative careers.
Obamacare will not be repealed.
Some portions thereof may – may – be stricken down by some brave court; Republicans may – may – have the courage to defund it (I am not holding my breath). But in the main the law will remain on the books, accumulating the strength of precedent and bureaucratic inertia all the while. The Republic will continue to groan under the weight of unsustainable debt – everyday the robbery of future generations’ liberty and prosperity will proceed apace. Promises and laws made in the 1930’s and 1960’s will continue to crush us now.
So I won’t be celebrating this New Year’s Eve. I will instead mourn the passing of a great nation whose people traded away their freedoms for chimerical comforts, and will soon reap the rewards of such a faustian bargain.
Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator and a contributor to Proud To Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation (HarperCollins, 2010). His email is [email protected].
