The wrong way to power

One episode of The Simpsons had Springfield's Mayor proposing a new law at a Town Meeting. He put it to a vote by saying "All in favor, say 'Aye'; all opposed, say 'I hate America'. Is hiding support for illegal aliens in a measure to support American heroes any different at all. How often is this rule...

De-pimped

Our country has a long history of acting on the wrong issue to pass the wrong law: We’ve passed drug laws out of fear that junkies might steal our television sets; we’ve passed still more laws out of sheer moral outrage after incidents like Columbine, when there were literally hundreds of local, state, and federal laws directly applicable and already on the books; we’ve passed laws for no reason at all except that politicians needed to show that they were “on the job”, actually doing something.

Until recently, it was possible to believe that the surfeit of unneeded and sometimes even crazy new laws passed every year was just greed or grandstanding or pork or even just plain stupidity (nowadays the politically correct term is “out of touch”, but the meaning is still the same). That may still be true in many cases, but now something new has been added that does not bode well for the future of our country.

The problem is “earmarks”; not just for the reason that John McCain has attacked them – because they are a wasteful and corrupt way for politicians to gain re-election favor from their local electorate by “bringing home the bacon” – but for a new reason, entirely.

The practice of “earmarking” bills – appending a law on some utterly unrelated subject to a law about something completely different – has been around for as long as there have been politicians who needed to buy support for their own pet project by supporting somebody else’s. It can be done with an actual “earmark” or it can be done more subtly, by just burying unrelated measures – “incidental additions” — in what may be thousands of pages of another bill. Regardless of the mechanism, the result is always the same.

As the practice was originally done, finding a section on “washing machines” in a law about “egg salad sandwiches” meant nothing more than that some mutual back scratching had been done to get a bill passed. It was confusing, and maybe even a little silly-seeming, but it got the job done, and the fact that washing machines had been added to egg salad sandwiches meant nothing more sinister than that the egg salad sandwich bill had been around to be used as the vehicle for the politicians’ quid pro quo.

What seems to be happening now is completely different: The “incidental” addition may now be the main purpose of the bill, with all the rest as just camouflage or “apple pie”, to ensure a positive vote on a potentially negative subject.

Does the Obama administration want a “slush fund” to pay for things it wants, without having to go to Congress for approval? Easy, just bury it as a self-renewing discretionary fund for “bailouts” (or whatever else the administrator may choose) in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.
Does the administration want health insurance for illegal aliens? Make it a part of a healthcare fund for 9/11 “first responders.”

Is there anything at all that the administration wants to do but it knows the American people will oppose? Why run the risk of open debate, when all they ever have to do is to just bury it in any two thousand page bill that no one – not even the Congress – will ever read and present it in such a manner that, if it’s ever discovered, they can attack its opponents as evil, inhumane, vicious, Republican, or maybe even racist Tea Partiers!

One episode of The Simpsons had Springfield’s Mayor proposing a new law at a Town Meeting. He put it to a voice vote by saying “All in favor, say ‘Aye’; all opposed, say ‘I hate America’. Is hiding support for illegal aliens in a measure to support American heroes any different at all?

How often is this rule by deception being practiced? How often is the Congress or the Administration pushing for passage of the “wrong” bill for no reason other than that it’s a good place to conceal the “right” one – the unpopular measure that they really want to pass but, for some reason, they can’t slip through by their normal means: Doing it under cover of darkness; in a late-night weekend session; by a parliamentary trick like “deeming”, for example, or “reconciliation”; or, because not even all Democrats will stoop that low all the time, by just flexing their muscles and bullying it through to passage by virtue of their overwhelming numerical majorities in both Houses?

What Obama’s “Hope and Change” is really all about is power, and, with the American public wising-up to his agenda, you can expect more and more of Obama’s power grabs to be done by hiding them under the wrong issue:

That’s the “Wrong way to Power”

Keep your eyes and ears open, and don’t let him get away with it. Your country is at stake!

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