WASHINGTON—Let us stipulate at the outset that any institution that has tolerated the likes of Steve King and Louie Gohmert for as long as it has, and that cheered Vice President Dick Cheney when he told Pat Leahy to fuck off in the Senate chamber, let alone any political party that has lined up uniformly behind El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and his pussy-grabbing ways, has no credibility when it attacks one rookie Democratic congresswoman for saying "motherfucker," or another for asking the question that Democratic politicians should have been asking for decades now.

That is: Why not roll back the Reagan tax-cuts, and the plutocratic policies they encouraged, since that's where most of our current economic disasters began? The notion of Not Talking About Scary Stuff should have died in November.

Such was the first day of the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. There are those who see these things as a problem for new Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is not one of those people. "A lot of new energy, a lot of new vision, I think the country needs that, and that the country would welcome that," Kaptur said. "This is a kaleidoscope, right? And people come in with that new energy, and it gets blended into the committees that we work on and all that is ahead. They have to make their voices heard through legislation."

House Democratic women pose for a portrait in front of the U.S. Capitol, January 04, 2019. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

It was a day for shiny objects, certainly. On Thursday night, in front of an enthusiastic crowd at a reception sponsored by MoveOn.org, freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib told a story about a conversation she had with her son in the wake of her re-election.

“When your son looks at you and said ‘Mamma, look, you won—bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby they don’t, because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!’”

And the stampede to the fainting couches was deafening. The mock horror centered mostly on Tlaib's having broken the "motherfucker" barrier for public congressional vocabulary. Much of this came from people who have proven quite blasé about the actual obscenity of ripping children away from their families at our southern border.

But the gut-level terror had most to do with her having used the I-word in public. Why this would be the case is beyond me. It certainly is a popular notion among liberal Democrats, who made up the audience in front of which she said it, and it's gaining general popularity, as well. Somebody had to be the first person to say it out loud, and if Congresswoman Tlaib is the harbinger of a Democratic Party that will say what it means without being concerned with how the crumbling maniac in the White House might use it to gin up the rubes, that's all to the good, I say.

Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., right, and Gwen Moore, D-Wis., leave a meeting of the House Democratic Caucus. Tom Williams Getty Images

The other "shocker" of the morning came when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose dancing in a college video helped a lot of conservatives make towering fools of themselves over the last couple days, told Anderson Cooper of 60 Minutes that countering climate change is going to cost us a lot of money, and that most of that money properly should come from the people who have the most of it, the people who have had the sweetest deal since Saint Ronnie promulgated the Gospel According to Laffer back in 1979. From CNN:

"There's an element where, yeah, people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes," the freshman New York lawmaker said in an interview with Anderson Cooper that's slated to air Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes." In a clip of the interview that was released on Friday, Cooper asked Ocasio-Cortez about the specifics of the "Green New Deal," a plan that calls for reducing carbon emissions to zero and moving the country off of fossil fuels in 10 years.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (L) performs a ceremonial swearing-in for US House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. SAUL LOEB Getty Images

"Once you get to the tippie-tops, on your $10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60% or 70%. That doesn't mean all $10 million dollars are taxed at an extremely high rate. But it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more," Ocasio-Cortez said. She also acknowledged that her goal is "ambitious." "It's going to require a lot of rapid change that we don't even conceive as possible right now," she told Cooper. "What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?"

Bluff called. This country had the most booming economy and created the most middle-class wealth when the top tax rate was 90 percent. (I Like Ike!). John F. Kennedy sought to cut that to 65 percent. Reagan dropped it to 50 percent, and it currently stands at 37 percent, which is absurdly low and which has deformed the entire economy. (The next time your Fox-watching uncle talks about how JFK "believed in tax cuts," ask him if he'll swing for a 65 percent top rate.) If we're going to address fully the climate crisis, somebody's going to have to foot the bill, and the longer we wait, the more expensive that's going to be.

"We're running out of time," said one Democratic colleague of AOC's, who's not entirely on-board with the Green New Deal, but understands the imminence of the crisis. "If we don't do something soon, we're going to run out of money, too." So why wouldn't a Democratic member of Congress—even a rookie—put this on the table for discussion? Because she danced on a rooftop once? Conservatives are losing what's left of their minds.

I suppose these kind of things cause Pelosi some headaches, but I don't think she's exactly made of spun cotton. (And, this week, she herself went further on the subject of the president*'s vulnerability to criminal prosecution than she ever did before.) She can handle newcomers with new ideas. And, as for what the president* may do with those ideas, well, pigs gotta wallow.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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