Congress being Congress

Waterbury Republican-American ^ | May 20, 2008 | Editorial

[Graybeard58]

The Mulligan stew Congress is cooking up in the name of funding military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into next spring is a textbook example of why, as Will Rogers observed, "Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even."

This measure has it all, including a favorite of Democrats: "the millionaires' tax" (more accurately, a tax surcharge; more accurately, on 325,000 "millionaires" making $500,000 a year or more). Beyond $163 billion for the war, the House version would provide:

$15.6 billion in deficit spending — so much for the Democrats' "pay-as-you-go" promise — to extend unemployment benefits to discourage the jobless from trying to find work.

$51.8 billion for veterans education, financed by the $54 billion surcharge on half-millionaires' taxes.

$5.8 billion to rebuild levees in Greater New Orleans so the next Category 4 hurricane will have something to destroy.

$4.6 billion for child-care centers, hospitals and military construction projects.

$1.9 billion for international aid.

Unspecified sums to cover non-military budget deficits.

The bill also would block new rules that would cut federal Medicaid spending by $13 billion over the next five years. And no appropriations bill would be complete without The White Flag, a clause requiring the Pentagon to begin troop withdrawals from Iraq within 30 days.

We know larding up a bill the president wants in hopes he will hold his nose and sign it so he gets what he wants is just Congress being Congress. But multiply this by the 20 or more regular and special appropriations bills lawmakers consider every year, and it's easy to see why the government is tens of trillions in debt and can't stop hemorrhaging money.

Your money.

[Graybeard58]

Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.

If you want on or off this list, let me know.

[rellimpank]

--and I see on Drudge that our congressional geniuses are now authorizing "suing" OPEC---bet that will do lots of good---

--you can't make this stuff up---

[Amendment10]

The main problem with Congress's spending actually isn't Congress. The real problem is the people. The problem with the people is that ignorance of the Constitution and its history is epidemic. Widespread constitutional ignorance is evidenced by the following links.

http://tinyurl.com/npt6t
http://tinyurl.com/hehr8

One consequence of widespread constitutional ignorance is that the people are impotent to order members of Congress, who are as constitutionally ignorant as the people who voted them into office, to stop spending the taxpayer's money on constitutionally unauthorized projects.

This post (<-click), while addressing taxes, helps to explain why government "leaders" like Obama are actually in contempt of the Constitution that they have sworn to defend, foolishly following in the footsteps of FDR's dirty federal spending politics.

In fact, the article referenced below shows that Obama is the #1 federal spending proposer in the Senate for '08; Clinton is #2.

Obama, a big-shot federal spender

Take the $4.6 billion for child-care centers and hospitals, for example. Thomas Jefferson, when discussing the Founder's division of federal and state government powers, noted that the Founders had trusted the states, not the federal government, with the care of people.

"Our citizens have wisely formed themselves into one nation as to others and several States as among themselves. To the united nation belong our external and mutual relations; to each State, severally, the care of our persons, (emphasized by Amendment10) our property, our reputation and religious freedom." --Thomas Jefferson: To Rhode Island Assembly, 1801. ME 10:262 http://tinyurl.com/onx4j

The people need to reconnect with the Founder's division of federal and state government powers. The people then need to wise up to the major problem that, since the days of FDR's dirty politics, Congress has not been operating with the restraints of the federal Constitution as evidenced by Congress's history of unauthorized federal spending.

The bottom line is that the people need to get in the faces of big-shot, Constitution-ignoring members of Congress, demanding a stop to constitutionally unauthorized federal spending while appropriately lowering federal taxes - or get out of DC.

Lincoln put it this way.

"We the People are the rightful master of both congress and the courts - not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution." --Abraham Lincoln, Political debates between Lincoln and Douglas, 1858.