Sam Smith
The death of the super junta at least momentarily suspends one major weapon in a covert coup. Although lawyers can argue reasonably from a legal standpoint that the super junta was not unconstitutional, the fact is that the law has become increasingly dependent on perceptions developed not at law school but through propaganda, poor reporting and instant mythology.
The fact that nothing the super junta did could have constitutionally bound a future Congress from carrying out its will, or that there is no way one Congress can pass an immutable ten year budget, this doesn't prevent everyone from thinking so.
With the help of politicians and an ignorant and deeply prostituted press, most who care about the matter easily think otherwise. In fact the idea that one president and one Congress can constitutionally determine how we spend for the next decade has become so broadly accepted that the media hardly bothers to report what is irreversibly happening - a decision about the next year's budget and the next year's budget only. That's why you see the word trillion so much these days. It's meant to scare the hell out of you which, in fact, it clearly does.
If the media was reporting Congress' legal limit, as it used to until a few years ago, it would say tell us what was going to happen in 2012, not in 2022. But notice how little you hear about this.
The worst problem now is that having created this grotesque fiscal fiction, the Congress has no reasonable next step other than a mindless, indiscriminate cutting of the budget. It is if, because of an arm injury, your doctor proceeds to cut all four limbs.
And so the collapse of our land continues. . . .
