Posted on 08/05/2014 5:19:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Meet the Press featured a segment this Sunday that illustrates the planted liberal axioms that dominate our political culture. The topic was Congress’s failure to “get anything done” this term. NBC News’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd, set the stage:
New polling from NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, and Marist . . . shows that three out of four voters agree that Congress hasn’t done much this year . . . And guess what? The public’s right. Congress hasn’t been productive. In fact, this Congress . . . is on track to be the least productive in history.
Todd then cued the hoary Harry Truman clip about the “Do Nothing” Congress of 1948 before inviting the panel to discuss the “problem” of congressional inaction.
It’s fitting that MTP chose the Truman quote, because the liberal approach to government has not changed since then. More legislation is viewed as an obvious good, whereas failure to pass laws is something that requires explanation. President Obama expressed the same idea (a shock, I know) when he disdained Congress for failing to “do its job.”
That isn’t true — even accepting the government-centric assumptions of the Democrats and the press. Some 195 pieces of legislation have passed the Republican House of Representatives only to be buried in the Democratic Senate. Among those are at least 31 authored by Democrats.
The Senate, meanwhile, passed an immigration overhaul in 2013 that has not passed the House. Though the president characterizes this as gross negligence on the part of Republicans, it’s just possible that there’s a difference of opinion. Other presidents would have sought compromise, or attempted to bite off smaller pieces of their agenda and pass them sequentially. But Obama is impatient with the rule of law and has been threatening to “do things on my own.” Thus do we slide, every day of this administration, a little closer to banana-republic status.
On the subject of legislation generally, we badly need to rid ourselves of the idea that the nation is in need of more laws. We are straitjacketed with laws as it is. In fact, the best use of Congress’s time would be to review laws that are ineffective, wasteful, duplicative, or outmoded and repeal them. (We’d need to distribute smelling salts to the press first, of course.)
Actually, the Republican House did attempt as much last week with the immigration bill. The reform that passed would have overturned the 2008 law that had the unintended consequence of encouraging unaccompanied minors from Central America to attempt entry across the southern border. (Those fleeing persecution would still be eligible for asylum.)
Humans are fallible, and it should be taken as read that some laws will require revision or even outright repeal.
Our laws and particularly our criminal statutes have metastasized to the point that civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average American could be unwittingly committing “three felonies a day.” His book of that title cites examples like the parent charged with “obstruction of justice” for destroying drugs he found in his son’s bedroom, and a snowmobiler lost in a blizzard who was charged with violating the federal Wilderness Act.
Congress can contribute to the public welfare just by keeping tabs on federal officials who themselves violate the law — like IRS officials who revealed confidential taxpayer information to outsiders and harassed citizens on the basis of their political or religious views, and Veterans Administration officials who falsified records to cover up poor care. Or Congress can investigate the scandalous expansion of SWAT teams by government agencies including NASA and the Department of the Interior! (See Radley Balko’s book, Rise of the Warrior Cop.)
The truth is that government at all levels has been promiscuously legislating at a furious pace for decades. Laws are almost never repealed, but are simply layered over one another, like sedimentary rock — with about as much flexibility.
Steve Teles, in an essay for National Affairs, calls this process “kludgeocracy,” and while the word is funny, the results are not. Just complying with the dizzying complexity of the IRS code costs Americans an estimated $163 billion every year, along with 6.1 billion man-hours. Even more damaging is the opportunity all of this kludge offers for corruption. The more complicated and therefore opaque a legal regime is, the easier it is for special interests to manipulate. As it is, our system is putrid with rent seeking.
With rare exceptions, we need fewer, not more laws. Lift your glass to gridlock — while it remains legal.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute.
He really means they don't send him the bills that he demands.
Unfortunately he has the POTUS mic, and no one on the GOP side to rebut him.
I’ve often thought that Congress should be required to spend, say, a third of its time reviewing and repealing old laws. We should not have presidents and prosecutors ignoring large scale violation of certain laws under the cover of “prosecutorial discretion”, or just plain negligence in carrying out their duties.
Prosecutorial discretion has a place in law enforcement at times, but not as an excuse and cover for politicians to use to advance their personal agendas by refusing to enforce certain laws.
Yes indeed... following the repeal of the 18th Amendment should be a like effort to repeal the 17th and 16th.
Shouldn't we now Monsieur le Ghost de Woodrow Wilson?
I’m a firm believer that if you implement one you should eliminate 10.
Note: “Just complying with the dizzying complexity of the IRS code costs Americans an estimated $163 billion every year, along with 6.1 billion man-hours”
This translates to roughly 3 million man-years (52 weeks, 40 hours/week) which in a population of 300 million (census page has 316 million today) is 10% of the populations output - and still people wonder why we’re spinning. WE’RE DOING PAPERWORK FOR THE GOVT!
Hopefully the next congress will be the “undo” congress, that will begin a giant purge of useless government, crippling regulations, federal overreach, and bountiful and unconstitutional largess at the expense of future prosperity.
On top of that, if we can possibly elect a conservative president to replace “no face” in the White House, then the ball will really get rolling to end a hundred years of destructive progressivism.
I coulden’t agree more, the man has hit the subject on the head.
The last thing we need is more laws, we are indeed streighjacked with laws already.
Indeed If I could propose 1 amendment to the Federal Constitution it would be this:
“No act shall have an expiration date of less than 10 years of the day it went into effect.”
All acts of congress should automatically expire on the basis of congressional inaction (IE inability to consent to them)
I say this not just because we have a huge problem but because as Thomas Jefferson said no generation has the right to rule anther.
Also it would be rather nice if Congress spent most of its time debating the continued merits of existing law rather than passing new ones. We will of course be hard pressed to get any intelligent socialist to support this because Socialism is built upon the foundation of the State.
Their useful idiots on the other hand are a different story all together.
“Hopefully the next congress will be the “undo” congress, that will begin a giant purge of useless government, crippling regulations, federal overreach, and bountiful and unconstitutional largess at the expense of future prosperity.”
Don’t bet on it, never in the history of our republic have we had a truely “undo” congress.
The reason seems to be that every act, every tax, every program, every regulation has in it a built in defense mechanism that takes the form of those who benefit from it, and those in congress who seem themselves empowered by it.
It is 10 times easier to pass a new law than to repeal an old one. Passing laws are destructive acts upon liberty in their very nature. It has always been easier to distory than to liberate.
In past I have noted that one thing the constitution lacked was a permanent pruning mechanism against government overgrowth.
While the idea of the senate, as representatives of the states, would do this, the 17th Amendment killed that possibility dead. And the senators themselves would never vote to repeal it, as they much prefer to be “free agents”.
So I proposed the idea of a Second Court of the United States, not a federal court, but a body of 100 state judges appointed solely by a majority vote of their state legislature, on terms concurrent with their two senators.
Since it would not be a federal court, it is not involved with determining the constitutionality of the law, but the jurisdiction of the law. Its other purpose would be to have original jurisdiction over all lawsuits between the states and the federal government.
This would be a pruning mechanism in two ways. First of all, it would be for the states to decide if federal actions are constitutional or not, including longstanding ones. If a simple majority voted that the federal government did not have the authority, their decision could still be appealed to the SCOTUS. But if 2/3rds of the state judges agreed, their decision would be final.
The second way they would prune would be to hear the 8,000 or so cases that are appealed from the district courts to the SCOTUS each year. They would hear all the arguments made to that point, then decide jurisdiction: “Is this a federal matter, or should it be resolved in its state of origin?” That is, taken from the federal courts as “not a constitutional matter, not your business.”
I agree with the indispensability of taking Federal Constitutional conflicts out of the hands of people appointed directly Washington.
The Fact that the Federal Employees in Black robes have successful asserted this power has been disastrous to the Federal nature of the Federal Constitution, as well as the concept of a written constitution in itself.
Hand Picked Federal employees who are ratified by yet more self-serving federal employees in the Senate have no interest in preserving a Constitutionally defined Government.
The Federal Constitution itself is at best for them a tool to have their hand picked employees do unpopular things for them. As the current house attempts to sue the president for not enforcing its laws, demonstrates they ain’t even all that interested in using the Federal Constitution to enforce barrios between themselves. What they have is a legacy structure that has been progressively transforming to arbitrary power of the president.
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