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On Wednesday, the Texas State legislature, currently composed of 19 Republicans and 12 Democrats, unanimously passed Senate Bill 11, which mandates that every Texan applying for food assistance through the TANF (Texas Assistance for Needy Families) program, submit to an undefined "screening process" and possible drug test before receiving benefits if the screener finds "good cause" to even suspect that person is... or is likely to... abuse any "controlled substance" -- despite the fact that there is no evidence at all that people seeking assistance are more likely to do drugs.

According to the bill’s author, Sen. Jane Nelson (R-Flower Mound), the purpose of the bill:

“It ensures that TANF, formerly known as welfare, supports its core purpose of helping families to achieve self-sufficiency,” said Nelson, as she introduced the bill. “We found common ground to support a plan that makes sure state resources aren’t used to support a drug habit while at the same time making sure children receiving benefit in a productive environment.”

The state of Florida passed an almost identical testing procedure that ran from 1999 to 2001 and was reintroduced in July of 2011 that was struck down by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta the following month, citing the fact:

"there is nothing inherent to the condition of being impoverished that supports the conclusion that there is a `concrete danger' that impoverished individuals are prone to drug use."

The Tampa Tribune investigated the results of those July 2011 drug tests and found that "96 percent proved to be drug free", another 2 percent never bothering to complete the lengthy application process, and 2 percent actually failing drug testing. At an average cost of $30 per test, the state was hemorrhaging tax dollars at a rate of "$28,800-$43,200 monthly"... FAR out pacing the supposed "savings" from preventing drug-abusers from gaming the system to buy drugs.

(Another analysis of the Florida program also found it to be a costly & colossal failure.)

The Texas bill is a bit more insidious than the Florida program, leaving the decision whether or not to submit an applicant for the confiscation and testing of their bodily fluids up to an ambiguous "good cause" determination by an unspecified process.

Terri Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas, said she was shocked to see the measure pass unanimously when it clearly singles out poor Texans as more likely to abuse drugs when federal surveys find no difference in use across any income groups and given the clear experience of Florida that such measures cost more money than they save.

This is just further perpetuation of the stereotype that poor people are all lazy drug-abusing scam-artists, rather than just people that have fallen on hard times seeking assistance. The results of these programs is always the same. Legislators are "shocked" to discover that PEOPLE WITH NO MONEY CAN'T AFFORD TO BUY DRUGS. Pick up any tabloid or turn on the TV, and the biggest drug abusers are the rich & famous (see: Lindsay Lohan), star athletes and the rich spoiled children of corporate executives, not the Average Joe who lost his home after his multi-billion dollar bank got bailed out -- and he didn't.

Addendum: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) has proposed, not only taking this costly & ineffectual program national, but extending it to those seeking unemployment benefits as well.

With the backing of the the overwhelming consensus of legal scholars regarding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the United States Supreme Court on Thursday largely upheld President Obama's signature health care reform law. And with that stroke of a pen, Justice Roberts and the Court’s majority prevented the culmination of a decades-long conservative campaign to stop universal coverage at all costs.

For GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell the battle to "kill it and start over" wasn't merely about ensuring that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." For twenty years, Republicans have feared not that health care reform would fail the American people, but that it would succeed. To put it another way, the GOP was never really concerned about a "government takeover of health care", "rationing", "the doctor-patient relationship" or mythical "death panels," but that an American public grateful for access to health care could provide Democrats with an enduring majority for years to come.

But what Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called a "holy war" to block health care reform didn't start when Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, but instead when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. It was then that former Quayle chief of staff and Republican strategist William Kristol warned his GOP allies that a Clinton victory on health care could guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. "The Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party," Kristol wrote in his infamous December 3, 1993 memo titled "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal," adding:

"Its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."

And that, for Kristol, meant it had to be stopped at all costs:

"The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat."

As the American Prospect recalled, Kristol's war plan:

Darkly warned that a Democratic victory would save Clinton's political career, revive the politics of the welfare state, and ensure Democratic majorities far into the future. "Any Republican urge to negotiate a 'least bad' compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president 'do something' about health care, should be resisted," wrote Kristol. Republican pollster Bill McInturff advised Congressional Republicans that success in the 1994 midterm elections required "not having health care pass."

So, Republicans and their media water carriers followed Kristol's advice to the letter. In the Senate, long-time health care reform supporter Bob Dole adopted Kristol's mantra, declaring "Our country has health care problems, but no health care crisis." Long before she introduced the easily debunked "death panels" fraud, Betsy McCaughey almost single-handedly undid the Clinton health care reform effort with the false claim that "the law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better." In 1993, GOP Senators Hatch and Chuck Grassley, among those who would 16 years later call the ACA's individual mandate unconstitutional, joined 19 other Republican Senators in proposing their own bill that "would have required everyone to buy coverage, capped awards for medical malpractice lawsuits, established minimum benefit packages and invested in comparative effectiveness research." (As Hatch later justified his turnabout, "We were fighting Hillarycare at that time.")

The rest, as they say, was history. At least, that is, until history began repeating itself with the election of Barack Obama.

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Karma, as they say, is a bitch. After six incumbent terms, some senators start feeling a little ... shall we say entitled to their seat. Funny thing, though. That sense of entitlement doesn't sit well with the tea party, especially when you haven't spent any time cow-towing to their demands. And Orrin Hatch has attracted the ire of the tea party for allegedly showing "over and over that he is for expansive government and against economic freedom." So Dick Armey's little "grassroots" organization launched a massive campaign against Sen. Hatch. And they successfully prevented him from getting the 60 percent required (by just a single percentage point) to keep from having a run off in his primary with tea party candidate Dan Liljenquist.

Hatch is feeling a little miffed at these upstarts insinuating that he's not a real conservative (according to this site—whose methodology is a little obscure—he ranks at 77 percent conservative) and went to the conservatives' favorite outlet to complain about Freedomworks and the annoying requirement that he actually run for his seat:

Sen. Hatch joined Greta Van Susteren last night to discuss the potential, now realized, of a primary challenge against him, and Sen. Hatch had some nasty words for Freedomworks and its leader, Dick Armey.

“Freedomworks, the group of Dick Armey, is gunning for you,” Van Susteren informed Sen. Hatch, who seemed to mind only what he insisted were lies from the group. “They take a few dozen of my votes out of the better of 12,000 votes that I’ve cast, distort those votes and lie about them, direct lie about them.” He argued they were only trying to raise money. “They take someone like myself who everybody knows and they trash Orrin Hatch and they raise a lot of money from conservatives all over the country who think what they’re saying is true.” He concluded with a flourish, “they’re not people I have very much respect for. I don’t have any respect for them, in fact.”

Well, that makes a bunch of us, Senator. I can't name a liberal in this country that has any respect for Freedomworks either. Van Susteren looks dumbfounded that someone like Hatch could be considered not conservative enough for the people of Utah. Hatch makes the distinction that these are not conservatives but radical libertarians gunning for him. Ironically, as Think Progress points out, Dick Armey himself was not all that much more radical than Hatch when he was in office:

Prior to joining FreedomWorks in 2003, chairman Dick Armey served nine terms in Congress. Six of those debt-limit votes took place between the time Armey was elected to the House in 1984 and his retirement at the beginning of 2003. Armey voted for at least five of those six:

$179.9 billion in December 1985 (House roll call #454, 99th Congress)

$448 billion in September 1987 (House roll call #330, 100th Congress)

$600 billion in March 1996 (House roll call #102, 104th Congress)

$450 billion in July 1997 (House roll call #241, 105th Congress)

$450 billion in June 2002 (House roll call #279, 107th Congress)

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In May of 2009, as President Barack Obama prepared to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, he let something terrible slip--something that could threaten the very fabric of our civilization! He would try and pick a new judge for our highest court that possessed "empathy," or the ability to identify “with people’s hopes and struggles” when making decisions that would intimately affect their lives.

In other words, slightly different than how Justice Clarence Thomas does it, which generally involves applying lessons learned from all-expenses covered, first-class corporate speaking gigs and serial viewing of the wacky antics of Long Dong Silver.

Predictably, right wingers from Senator Orrin Hatch to former Republican National Committee Chair (and lobbyist for every destructive interest in existence) Ed Gillespie were just beside themselves, hissy-fitting at the outrageous notion that someone who actually cares about people might become a sitting justice on the High Court.

It is this degradation of American culture since the Reagan Years--on steroids in our current Citizens United Era as corporations have become people (and were almost granted zygote status in Mississippi!)--that says the only healthy emotions are the ones that highlight one's personal greed and lack of compassion for others. This is the cultural sickness that has been on full display for all its misanthropy this past week.

The most egregious example occurred in University Park, Pennsylvania, with the growing and nausea-inducing scandal engulfing Penn State University. No, our culture didn't create the pedophilia of former Penn State Defensive Coordinator Jerry Sandusky. Sadly, this has been with us since the dawn of time.

But the greed of a big college football program and the fortune and fame it creates allowed it to go on for years. This certainly played a defining role to decisions made by everyone from an assistant coach who witnessed Sandusky's anally raping a 10-year old in the shower to the lack of action by the university's president to the post-2002 Rick-Perry-memory hole of the sainted (now) former coach Joe Paterno.

All of them spent at least a decade, perhaps closer to 15 years, covering up the behavior of a serial-child rapist. One who used their reputations and facilities to both locate his victims and commit his crimes.

For these men in positions of power, "greed was good," a lesson learned by the lunkheaded Penn State students who chose to "riot" Wednesday evening upon news of Paterno's firing by the Penn State University Board by turning over a car, breaking windows and performing other acts of mass stupidity. For them, being able to party hardy post-victory and continue the cult of Paterno was more important than the lives of potential peers violently victimized by a beast.

The personal responsibility touted by these protectors, and in particular Joe Paterno--rock-ribbed Republican friend of the Bushs and former Pennsylvania Senator turned presidential candidate Rick Santorum--was no match for the avarice their politics and personal-belief system would seem to espouse. The Pennsvlvania right winger, who sponsored the Republican-registered Sandusky for the Congressional Angels in Adoption" award, based on the non-profit he founded to provide care for foster children (see: target them), was still defending Paterno, last we heard.

So in case you're scoring at home, to Santorum being gay is terrible, because homosexuality is just like "pedophilia." But if the person performing or covering up child rape is a friend, pedophilia's a-ok. So does that mean Santorum supports gay rights--as long as the non-straight in question is a friend of his?

This has been a another edition of Deep Thoughts with Rick Santorum.

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There you go. Orrin Hatch has sent the signal: If we want a jobs plan, we'll have to give up any right to access our current health care system.

Of course, he buries the threat inside a rant about the individual mandate, because that's unpopular with many, not just those on the right. So now we have Republicans saying "Want a job? Die."

These people make me sick. Oops. Guess that's their goal.

Update: Eric Cantor has taken up the hostage-taking on behalf of the House. Washington Post:

But by putting the disaster aid funding on a separate piece of legislation that’s required to keep the government running, House leaders seem to be calculating that the Senate will have no choice but to go along or risk a partial government shutdown.

Oh, and this:

Besides being about half the overall size of the Senate’s disaster aid measure, the House bill ties cuts to an Obama-backed loan program to encourage the production of fuel efficient vehicles to pay for the $1 billion in immediate aid for 2011. Typically disaster aid is added to the budget as an emergency expense, and the insistence by Republicans on so-called offsets has Democrats fuming.

Click here for larger image.

Judging from the furious reaction of some of the gilded-class crowd and their Republican protectors, billionaire Warren Buffett struck a nerve with his plea to Congress to "stop coddling the super-rich." Former American Express CEO, Harvey Golub and tea party sugar daddy Charles Koch were quick to protest respectively "the unfair way taxes are collected" and that "my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington." Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attacked President Obama's "efforts to incite class warfare."

Of course, a truism of American politics is that the side decrying the class war is the one winning it. And at a time when the federal tax burden is at its lowest in 60 years and income inequality at its highest level in 80, Republicans would still rather wave the unbloodied shirt of class warfare than ask what America's rich and famous can do for their country.

That became abundantly clear during the debt ceiling crisis Republicans manufactured. Weeks before Cantor's Sunday op-ed in the Washington Post accused President Obama of class warfare and a desire to "make it harder to create jobs," his GOP colleagues were already singing from the same hymnal. Senators Dan Coats (R-IN) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) quickly called a proposed $4 trillion debt reduction deal 17 percent of which came from new revenues "class warfare." Utah's Orrin Hatch wasn't content to lament "the usual class warfare the Democrats always wage." The poor, Hatch insisted, "need to share some of the responsibility." As for a Senate resolution asking the same of millionaires, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions said that was "rather pathetic."

Of course, what is really pathetic is the declining tax burden on the small slice of Americans now taking an ever-larger piece of the economic pie.

Even after extorting in December a two-year extension to the upper-income Bush tax cuts and steep reductions in the estate tax impacting only 0.25 percent of families, Republicans refused to countenance a dime of new tax revenue as the debt ceiling debate began. First Eric Cantor and then John Boehner walked out of the debt compromise discussions with President Obama for the same reason. As Boehner put it in his national address in July, "I know those tax increases will destroy jobs."

Back in May, John Boehner explained to CBS News who Republicans would be trying to protect during the debt ceiling negotiations with President Obama:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet after the tax cuts of George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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(Click here for larger image.)

If nothing else, the debt ceiling crisis provided what Barack Obama is so fond of calling a "teachable moment." Hopefully, that extends to the President himself. After seeing his nominees blocked, his legislation filibustered and popular upper-income tax increases delayed by Republicans who withheld their support from his watered down stimulus and health care programs, President Obama nevertheless continued to seek common ground with those whose only goal remains his political destruction. The result was as painful as it was predictable.

As for the rest of us, here are 25 things we learned during the debt crisis.

(1) We learned that Republicans really care about the national debt, but only when a Democrat is in the White House. As Dick Cheney put it, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

(2) We learned that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan, forcing him to raise the debt ceiling 17 times. Overwhelmed by the torrents of red ink unleashed by his supply-side tax cuts of 1981, Reagan raised taxes eleven times while in office. (His deficit reduction initiatives of 1982, 1984 and 1987 relied on over 75% in new tax revenue.) It's no wonder Reagan called the mountain of debt he bequeathed to America his greatest regret.

(3) We learned that George W. Bush nearly doubled the national debt, leaving Barack Obama a $1.2 trillion annual deficit and almost $11 trillion in debt on January 20, 2009.

(4) We learned that the Bush tax cuts were the single biggest factor in erasing the projected surpluses Dubya inherited from Bill Clinton. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 accounted for almost half of the red ink during his tenure, and if made permanent, would contribute more to the debt over the next decade than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, the stimulus and TARP combined.

(5) We learned that tax cuts don't "pay for themselves" or "always increase revenues." Only in 2005 did federal tax revenue reach the pre-Bush tax cut levels of 2000.

(6) We learned that the Republicans' so-called job creators don't create jobs when their taxes are low. In fact, the data show that the far more jobs were created and the economy grew much more quickly when the top 1% of income earners paid higher - even much higher - taxes.

(7) We learned that for John Boehner, some "spending binges" are more equal than others. While spending under Barack Obama rose by about 10% from George W. Bush's last budget in FY 2009, federal outlays almost doubled between 2001 and 2009. As it turns out, the two unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 (the first war-time tax cut in modern U.S. history) and the Medicare prescription drug program drained the U.S. Treasury. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Eric Cantor voted for all of it.

(8) We learned that Republicans have short memories. When Eric Cantor complained recently that "what I don't think the White House understands is how difficult it is for fiscal conservatives to say they're going to vote for a debt ceiling increase," he apparently forgot that Republican majorities voted seven times to raise the debt limit under President Bush. Along with John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, Cantor and the current GOP leadership team voted a combined 19 times to increase George W. Bush's borrowing authority by $4 trillion. (That vote tally included a "clean" debt ceiling increase in 2004, backed by 98 current House Republicans and 31 sitting GOP Senators.)

(9) We learned that Republicans are bad at genetics, too. Last Friday, Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling claimed that for Republicans, raising the debt ceiling is "contrary to our DNA."

(10) We learned that in rare moments of candor, Republicans can speak the truth. In January, Speaker Boehner acknowledged that failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause "financial disaster." And Utah Senator Orrin Hatch explained that when President Bush was in the White House, for Republicans "it was standard practice not to pay for things."

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The national debt of the United States tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under George W. Bush. Bush and the GOP Congress cut taxes during wartime, a first in modern American history. During his presidency, Republicans voted seven times to increase the debt ceiling. As Utah Senator Orrin Hatch in 2009 described Republican orthodoxy under Republican presidents, "It was standard practice not to pay for things."

But that was then and this is now. And now with a Democrat in the White House, Hatch and his Republican colleagues are demanding passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment as a condition of raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling. Whether that blackmail is paid or not, either way the result would be a catastrophe for the United States.

The Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) gambit is just the latest chapter in the Republican saga of "America Held Hostage." Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that "not a single one of the 47 Republicans will vote to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes with it some credible effort to do something about our debt." McConnell then upped the ante:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned on Friday that GOP senators will not vote to increase the government's borrowing limit unless President Barack Obama agrees to rein in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, laying down a high-stakes marker just weeks before the debt ceiling is reached.

Now, as Human Events and Politico reported Friday, America's Republican captors are threatening the shut down the government and undermine the full faith and credit of the United States if their demands for a "Starve the Beast" amendment are not met:

The Senate Republicans are preparing to tell President Obama that they want a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to the Constitution passed in Congress in exchange for raising the statuary debt ceiling above $14.2 trillion.

"My hope is that we would force a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment as a condition to voting on the debt ceiling," Sen. John Cornyn (R.-Tex.) told HUMAN EVENTS. "By next week, or shortly thereafter, we will have all 47 Republicans unified behind the effort, and then begin to reach out to our Democratic colleagues."

A BBA would force the federal government to balance the federal spending to incoming revenue each year and cap spending at 18% of the gross domestic product (GDP). For the current Fiscal Year (FY 2011), the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that government spending will be $1.4 trillion more than revenue and account for almost 25% of the GDP.

Of course, the GOP BBA is a recipe for disaster. If codified, Republican grandstanding on the budget would not only mean draconian cuts in government services. The fragile U.S. recovery would be stopped dead in its tracks.

As a matter of simple math, balancing President Obama's proposed FY 2012 budget would mean slashing $1.6 trillion from a $3.7 trillion spending request. That inevitably would devastate federal programs across the board. As this now-dated diagram of the 2011 budget below illustrates, you simply can't get there from here without raising taxes. Taking interest on the debt and defense spending off the table (as most Republicans insist) means cutting over half of everything else the federal government does. And that includes Social Security and Medicare.

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Cable news is obsessed with the Tea Party. It's not unique to Fox News, either. Chris Matthews did an hour-long special on them. CNN hires them as commentators, despite their ugly daily behavior online. and now Greta Van Susteren has gotten in on the Tea Party gravy train with an hour-long love song to them last night.

There are some revealing moments mixed in with the usual nonsense from the likes of Dick Armey and Sarah Palin about how the tea parties are all organic and populist. Humbug and idiocy, that. But two segments in particular are worth watching, both from Utah Senators.

Orrin Hatch looks like a deer caught in the headlights. He's being squeezed hard by the Tea Party and moves farther right with each passing day, but this interview tells me he isn't very happy about it. It's interesting to hear him repeat several times in the beginning, middle and end of this segment how he believes most of them are good people who are 'just fed up'. Here's the revealer though:

They're good people. You always have the radicals in any organization, but the vast majority of them are honest, decent people who are sick and tired of what's happening in our country.

That disclaimer about radicals in any organization was an interesting one for him to make. I think Hatch knows he's a goner in 2012 but will hang on as long as possible in the hopes of moving the Republican party back toward reason because he knows the truth: the majority of them are radicals with a few honest and decent angry folks on the fringe edges.

Former Senator Robert Bennett is a very interesting man. There's no question that he was (and is) very frustrated with how the Tea Party swept through the 2010 primaries in Utah leaving him high and dry.

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Politics Plus: GOP supports banksters who starve children.

Black Magpie Theory: Why the grudge against Sharron Angle is personal.

Empty Wheel: A curious way to celebrate Independence Day

MadKane: Orrin Hatch is why Elena Kagan has no judicial experience.

Pruning Shears: Why Looking Back Matters

Guest round up by Blue Gal. Send tips to bluegalsblog AT gmail.