The Poor Man brings us this:
The answer was a big cosmic mystery to President Bush and Dick Cheney in the last debates, but the Boston Globe has done a bit of reporting, and it seems like it might have something to do with the way Republicans have weilded political power. This might also explain why we are running up huge deficits paying for jacked-up federal programs that don't really work. It's a three-part series, well worth reading in its entirety, but here is a summary of the major findings:The House Rules Committee, which is meant to tweak the language in bills that come out of committee, sometimes rewrites key passages of legislation approved by other committees, then forbids members from changing the bills on the floor.
The Rules Committee commonly holds sessions late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, earning the nickname "the Dracula Congress" by critical Democrats and keeping some lawmakers quite literally in the dark about the legislation put before them.
Congressional conference committees added a record 3,407 "pork barrel" projects to appropriations bills for this year's federal budget, items that were never debated or voted on beforehand by the House and Senate and whose congressional patrons are kept secret.
Bills are increasingly crafted behind closed doors, and on two major pieces of legislation -- the Medicare and energy bills -- few Democrats were allowed into the critical conference committee meetings, sessions that historically have been bipartisan.
The amount of time spent openly debating bills has dropped dramatically, and lawmakers are further hamstrung by an abbreviated schedule that gives them little time to fully examine a bill before voting on it.
The dearth of debate and open dealing in the House has given a crucial advantage to a select group of industry lobbyists who are personally close to decision-makers in Congress.
This kind of cronyism and partisanship is very bad news for everyone. It wouldn't matter if the party engaging in it was the Dems, the Greenies or the Naderites: it's bad practice that is designed to give the ruling class their power while doing nothing for the people they're (at least ostensibly) elected to represent. Increasingly, however, we're not showing up at the polls, and those who get elected by the sometime minority of us who do treat their victory like it's their fast track to fame and fortune,
their due. We pay them and corporations and special interest groups
really pay them. Then we let them leave Congress and become lobbyists or Halliburton execs.
We really need to raise the bar on who gets to Washington and then cut off the venues by which they can screw us over on their way to becoming overnight millionaires. Washington shouldn't be all about power and money unless that's all we want to represent. Is it?
Yes, there will be less people interested in becoming Congress people if the system is no longer weighted to make not-exceptionally-bright bug exterminators from Sugarland, Texas into one of the most powerful men in the country who continues his evil deeds despite the number of times his corruption and impropriety have been documented and sanctioned. Only Tom DeLay could take money for childrens' charities, spend it on caviar and his daughter's hot tub to promote his own agenda, and still sit there reminding us he
is the government.
Or, as a Texas associate jokes, "Down here we like to say Tom couldn't have been a very good bug exterminator because he's still crawlin' around."
But perhaps the people who go to Washington should represent our interests' more as the people who pay them than they do the corporations who pay them so the corps don't have to pay taxes and can use the U.S. military like their own private security force. If you want an abuse of the military, there's one right there. But it also abuses the system that we can use soldiers to protect the factories built by American companies who took their jobs to third world countries who then get tax breaks from Congress for doing.
That corporate tax bailout yesterday - with a huge subsidy provided for a manufacturer in Denny Hastert's hometown but with other huge subsidies for tobacco, for fish and tackle manufacturers, for companies that cut jobs here and send them overseas - disguised as "business growth incentive" to improve employment was patently obscene. It reeks of Tom, Denny, Bill Frist and most certainly of Bush desperation.
