OPINION:
Democrats in Washington are back to preaching another of their strange religions.
It’s not their global warming cult this time. Or their newest gender religion — complete with child sacrifices and genital mutilation, a practice they vehemently opposed just a few years ago.
No, this is their oldest religion. This is the one where they take money from people who work — at the point of a gun and under the threat of jail time — and burn it in the furnaces of the federal government.
And when even that is not enough, they steal from their own children and saddle generations to come with massive amounts of immoral debt.
They claim to do this in the name of the poor — but the poor just keep getting poorer and poorer the more and more Democrats seize power across the country. Drive through any city in America where Democrats have complete control, and you see herds of dead-eyed zombies bowed over on the sidewalk, knuckles dragging the ground.
Apparently, injecting yourself with horse tranquilizer and Chinese fentanyl is better than living in the poverty and squalor of a Democratic utopia.
So, here we are at a time when working families are struggling under the highest (government-caused) inflation in nearly half a century and the most bloated federal government in human history. And the high priests in the Democratic Party have just one answer: more money for the federal government.
Tax-paying businesses are laying off workers and slashing costs. Working families huddle to find ways to make the same paycheck pay all the bills. They have no wiggle room. They make sacrifices.
Along come Washington Democrats with their voodoo spending and militant taxation. They proudly boast how they hired 87,000 more IRS agents to come after you.
You think you should keep the money you earned? You are Satan, says Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Democratic high priestess from Massachusetts.
“The Republicans continue to govern in a way that is clueless, callous and with great contempt, and I would say godless — because faith without works is dead,” she said.
Like the devil himself, Ms. Pressley can quote the Bible. But when it comes to showing her “works,” she sends an army of 87,000 IRS agents to your house to collect.
Her latest crazed sermon came in this debate about raising the federal “debt ceiling.”
“Raising the debt ceiling” is just a bureaucratic term for taking out yet another credit card to avoid bankruptcy because politicians like Ms. Pressley have blown through more than $30 trillion of your money they did not have and had no authority to spend. Taking out a new credit card is of such pressing urgency, she says, that it is a sin to even discuss cutting spending while applying for the new credit card in order to pay for her supposed good deeds.
“Republicans want us to make an impossible choice,” said the Kojak of reckless spending. “Extreme, drastic cuts to lifesaving programs or a catastrophic default on our debt, both of which would impact our most vulnerable.”
Our most vulnerable?
You mean, like, people will start taking horse tranquilizer and Chinese fentanyl and live under a broken shopping cart on the sidewalk? They already do that in your squalid cities.
Such is their zeal to take more of your money to burn in their government furnaces that they always put it in highly moral terms.
“Stop playing with people’s lives!” Ms. Pressley screeched. “This is not a game. Pass a clean debt ceiling increase!”
Democrats are so committed to protecting their addiction to spending that they even begged President Biden to scrap the Constitution and eliminate Congress from the entire federal spending process.
Much to the credit of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he was able to use his narrowest of Republican majorities to prevent Democrats from their smash-and-grab spending plans or further prostituting the Constitution to cement their power over taxpayers.
While even by Mr. McCarthy’s accounting this is a temporary and short-term fix, there is no salvaging the souls of people like Ms. Pressley whose only good works come on the backs of others’ hard work.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.