Social Contract Broken

It’s tax day, the worst day of the year for Republicans, since they’ve shown over and over that what they really care about the most of any other thing is the amount of tax they pay. In the old days, anchors on the 6 o’clock news would be narrating B-roll of people posting their returns at the last minute. I don’t know what the cliche hack story is today, but I know it won’t be the fact that Trump has stripped away the representation that is supposed to accompany taxation.

Despite the political media’s habitual treatment of the President as a king, we have this little co-equal branch of government called “Congress”. You may have heard of it — it’s the branch that’s mentioned every so often between press conferences in the Oval Office. And, our representatives in that branch of government are supposed to determine how the tax money we send to DC is spent — not the king or his courtiers.

Yet, here we are. Our representatives voted and passed acts to fund the Department of Education, USAID and all the other agencies that a bunch of coding bootcamp incels led by a foreign-born oligarch are currently dismantling. The press corpse hardly ever reports the clear, obvious fact that this is illegal. They seem to think it requires a court ruling for them to declare that what Musk’s little shits are doing is in clear contravention of laws that Congress has passed.

A party and media machine that ginned up a movement named after a tax protest, the Tea Party movement, is doing exactly what they were supposedly protesting. I mean, shit, I’m sure every person in the press thinks that this little ditty isn’t how things “really” work, but it’s how things are really supposed to work:

I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking angry and I think it would be telling if some of us showed up to the next protest in tricorn hats with teabags attached, as stupid as that was, because it’s real now. Every accusation is a confession, every single one.