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| A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress | | Date Created: Aug 13, 2005, 10:21 AM |
A sister-in-law emailed me an article from the Rolling Stone magazine website called, Four Amendments & a Funeral -- A month inside the house of horrors that is Congress.
She thought I might have seen it because I subscribed to Rolling Stone for over thirty years. I gave it up when it became too much of a far-left political rag and too little good coverage of music. And the article is typical leftist biased stuff, but I thought there were some redeeming factors in it worth of comment.
"...Bush's summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in scope, transparently brazen and audaciously indulgent. They gave an energy industry drowning in the most obscene profits in its history billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, including $2.9 billion for the coal industry. The highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefensibly wasteful spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the construction of a bridge linking the mainland an Alaskan island with a population of just fifty.
It was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the brilliance of an Alabama book-burning. And what fueled it all were the little details you never heard about. The energy bill alone was 1,724 pages long. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan monster to the size of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very few Americans understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests. But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.
To understand the breadth of Bush's summer sweep, you had to watch the hand-fighting at close range. You had to watch opposition gambits die slow deaths in afternoon committee hearings, listen as members fell on their swords in exchange for favors and be there to see hordes of lobbyists rush in to reverse key votes at the last minute. All of these things I did -- with the help of a tour guide...
Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But just enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. And who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a reason."
Some thoughts:
The idea of actually going to Congress and seeing how it works is a good one. A good journalist should do something like that. This journalist, like most, is heavily liberal biased without realizing it and he picks up on a lot of the bad things about the federal government but draws the wrong conclusions.
I have at least indirect contact with someone in Congress. I've read quite a bit about the federal government and how it works. I've also seen how politics works as small as the local homeowners association. I avoided political science in college and I'm glad I did. It's one of those subjects that follow the aphorism: if you have to put "science" in the title, it isn't. One doesn't have to follow a Congressperson around to gain an understanding of how things operate, but it's a reasonable idea to go spend some time there before writing an article damning Congress.
Recently, a guy who was in our local Rotary Club and started the local bank that I'm still with got elected to Congress from a gerrymandered district near us. He's now running for the NOMINATION for Republican candidate for governor. He sent me a note inviting me to a luncheon or some such political event. The cost? $1000, And he's only running for the nomination at this point. He knows if he remembers, how much of a struggle it is to get people to donate $1000 to be a Paul Harris Fellow in Rotary. It usually takes years and they give you a medal, pins, plaques... That money might be well spent, but $1000 for a guy running for a nomination of a party for governor of a state? What's that money go for? Now apply that answer to the federal level...
I agree with this Rolling Stone author about the "veritable bonfire of public money" and the "drama of the legislative process...happens behind the scenes". Theft usually does. The recent Energy Bill is a prime example. An energy bill can't be anything but a central government trying to run the economy and deciding what's best for you and me. It's just another example of trying to solve perceived problems with money. And it inevitably favors the politically connected of whoever's in power to dole out taxpayer's money. That's just the way it goes when the government has too much money and too much power to play with.
The problem with the article is revealed at the end where he concludes it's "an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will". The implication all along the article is that it's the fault of the Republicans and if the Democrats could only overcome them then we'd see real change and progress and get the money, waste, and industry influence out of the process.
Sadly, that's liberal bias delusion. The Democrats are actually worse than the Republicans because liberals have no principles when it comes to telling people what they should do and redistributing their wealth. Conservatives at least talk the talk of limited government. Although the Republicans have sure learned some Democratic politicians tricks when they got control of the White House and Congress.
There is no "progress" in politics. There is no "popular will". It doesn't exist. It's only in the mind of those who think that what they want or what should be is correct and the other guys are the enemy obstructing them. The problem is the government is too big and powerful, not who's running it. The system would be the same if the parties were reversed. The answer is that decisions about energy or anything else need to be left up to the individual and free markets under rule of law, property rights, and equal opportunities, not politicians and lawsuits.
We're only relatively safe when Congress isn't in session. Having a President of one party and a Congress of the other was the only good reason I could think of to vote for John Kerry. It shouldn't matter who's President except for, perhaps, foreign policy if the government weren't trying to "run" the country (or act like it).
I note also that Mr. Taibbi, in typical naive form, confuses representative democratic federal government with democracy (the idealized but nonexistent form of big government). So it ends up another political screed on how evil Congress is, this time from a leftist journalist, and no clue what the problem really is, let alone how to fix it.
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