Category: Accountability

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Accountability government transparency

Cuz You Constituents Work for Me!

This summer, many congressmen held town-hall meetings about health care and other hot political topics.

Sometimes they were not entirely statesmanlike. Clips of their more embarrassing moments now reside on YouTube. For instance, you can watch Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee chat on a cellphone while a constituent is asking her a question — taking rudeness to congressional levels.

Congressman Baron Hill was determined to avoid this sort of thing. He wasn’t going to be on YouTube in any “compromising position,” not him. So he actually tried to ban any videotaping of his event. I kid you not. The evidence is on, uh, YouTube:

Constituent: “—why can’t I film this? Isn’t this my right?”

Hill: “Well, this is my town-hall meeting, and I set the rules, and I’ve had these rules—

“Let me repeat that one more time! This is my town-hall meeting for you. And you’re not going to tell me how to run my congressional office! Now, the reasons why I don’t allow filming is because usually the films that are done end up on YouTube in a compromising position.”

Oh, those pesky constituents!

Anyway, sir, too late. The technology is out there. The genie won’t go back in the bottle. Every audience you ever face will include folks who can record your words. With that in mind, you might want to, uh, watch your words from here on out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability local leaders national politics & policies

Mysteriously Missing Politicians

I almost feel sorry for politicians so afraid of angry freedom-loving constituents that they couldn’t even hold a townhall meeting this summer to spout reassuring lies about the Democrats’ medical reform proposals.

I say, “almost feel sorry” . . . well, not quite “almost” — Okay, I don’t feel sorry for them at all.

Neither does blogger Leslie Eastman. Recently, Leslie and 300 other nefariously well-dressed California citizens visited the local offices of U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. They merely wished for these office-holders — who until now have strenuously abstained from conducting public meetings to defend their plans for more government intervention in medical care — to emerge from their hidey-holes and defend their notions. Live and in person.

No luck.

In fact, an office supervisor admitted that Senator Boxer had not graced her San Diego office with her presence in over two years. Says Leslie, “I think there was a revolution [once] because of taxation without representation, but I digress.”

Maybe we can help Leslie find the missing politicians. Another blogger, Ed Morrisey over at hotair.com, is hot on the trail, being very helpful with a post entitled “Who Are Your Milk Carton Politicians?” During the August recess, many politicians across the nation headed for the hills, unwilling to squarely face constituents and defend their pro-government takeover of American medicine.

Is your congressman on the list?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

The Rush to Non-Judgment

Politicians often don’t read the bills they pass. And what they do read they often don’t trouble themselves to actually understand.

There’s plenty of evidence for these claims in the cap-and-trade and healthcare debates. Lawmakers have been much more concerned about hurtling to the finish line than with making sure they can understand and explain what they’re foisting on the rest of us.

Some say they gotta rush because, otherwise, the economy would fall over the cliff. But what if what’s in these Tolstoy-novel-sized bills is what pushes the economy over the cliff?

Well, if lawmakers don’t read the murky and complicated, important bills, do they pause over the simple, unimportant ones? Heck no. Yet you can tuck poison into any bit of legislation. No matter how seemingly trivial.

Back in the ’70s, a Texas lawmaker named Tom Moore decided to play an April Fool’s joke on his colleagues. He sponsored a resolution to commend one Albert de Salvo for his impact on community and country.

The resolution talked about how DeSalvo’s “devotion to his work has enabled the weak and the lonely . . . [to] achieve and maintain a new degree of concern for their future.” How the state of Massachusetts had “officially recognized” DeSalvo’s unconventional “population control techniques.” The lawmakers passed the resolution unanimously.

Just one problem. DeSalvo was the serial killer otherwise known as the Boston Strangler.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability

My Favorite Fix

California is going bankrupt. Behind its economic trouble lies serious political dysfunction.

What to do?

To hear some Golden State legislators and experts talk, the problem can be blamed squarely on the people and their lawmaking power through the state’s initiative process.

While initiatives like Prop 13 and term limits may bedevil the Sacramento insiders, they remain popular among voting Californians. Voters don’t see handing over all power to the politicians as a magic solution.

Others suggest California is so ungovernable that it should be split into two, a North and a South California. Why? To make the insolvent state start completely anew. And to reduce the massive scale of decision-making in what is by far our country’s most populous state.

I have a better solution, which more and more folks from across the political spectrum seem to be considering. I suggest doubling the size of California’s legislature. Or tripling. Or more.

California’s legislative districts are huge, dwarfing those in other states. The ratio of voters to Assembly reps is 455,000 to one. The ratio of state senators to constituents is 900,000 to one.

The balance of interests between citizens and their representatives is all out of whack. When constituencies grow too large, politicians feel answerable to no one.

Smaller districts give voters more relative power — and legislators relatively less. Now that sounds like the right track.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Stress Test for the Fed?

A bill proposed by Congressman Ron Paul would shine a light on the mysterious goings-on at the Federal Reserve.

The Fed has been sopping up many billions in toxic assets, creating money hocus-pocus, loaning vast fortunes to central banks in other countries, and in general behaving as if its actions cannot have bad consequences.

HR 1207, introduced in February, would authorize the GAO to audit the Fed’s various funding facilities, used with such abandon over the last year. Look under the hood, see what’s going on in nitty-gritty detail.

Doesn’t sound very radical. But the Fed is accustomed to being “independent,” i.e., unaccountable. Yet as Jim Grant, editor of a publication that monitors interest rates, has observed, if the Fed had to accept the auditing it requires of others, it would be regarded as insolvent.

Except, of course, for that whole create-money-out-of-thin-air thing.

President Obama, a.k.a. Mr. Transparency, has said zilch to support the bill. Still, with over 150 Republicans and over 50 Democrats cosponsoring the legislation, it now has enough votes to pass if congressional leadership allows a vote.

An audit with a negative outcome would not force the Fed to shut down.

But it would provide more ammo for those interested in slowing or stopping fiscal insanity.

And that, too, should be bipartisan. Transpartisan. Universal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability too much government

So Let It Be Read

It’s a laugh a minute on Capitol Hill, where folks who supposedly represent us fritter away our freedom with giddy abandon. And without a glance at the fine print.

Well, it’s all fine print when you’ve got a cap-and-trade bill 900-plus pages long. This bill would tax businesses that need to produce more “greenhouse gases” than the new law would allow according to a formula so congested that, well, it takes 932 pages to spell it out. If the bill passes, it’s another punch to the gut of the American economy.

For a while, it seemed that Republicans on the energy committee might obstruct things, might insist that the bill be read. Aloud!

So the Democrats hired a speed reader. No reading was ever demanded. But since the guy had been hired, he was asked to zip through just a bit of the bill. His incredible machine-gun delivery cracked everybody up.

Well, DownsizeDC.org isn’t laughing. The activist group notes that the cap-capitalism bill was rushed through committee so fast that it could not possibly have been read, publicly or privately.

The group supports a Read the Bills Act to require every bill to be read in full before the House and Senate . . . and require all lawmakers to sign an affidavit affirming that they have read any bill they vote on. A sensible rule, long overdue. Seriously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets too much government U.S. Constitution

Stop Unconstitutional Stomping

Here’s an idea about how to help businesses survive in this troubled economic climate: Stop allowing an unaccountable regulatory board — unclad by even a fig leaf of constitutionality — to ride roughshod over public companies.

In the wake of the Enron scam and other financial scandals several years ago, Congress enacted a packet of onerous new regulations. This Sarbanes-Oxley legislation created a regulatory board, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, to issue arbitrary edicts, impose arbitrary penalties, etc.

One problem with this star chamber is that its officers are neither appointed by the executive branch nor approved by Congress, as required by the Constitution.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Free Enterprise Fund want this practice to end. CEI explains that if the president were obliged to appoint and dismiss members of this board, as required by the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, “he will be on the hook for their policy failures, and thus have an interest in making them develop sound policies. . . . He won’t be able to blame the red tape on an unaccountable agency. . . .”

But the two organizations are not merely publishing op-eds and issuing press releases. They have filed suit, taking their case against the oversight board to the courts. And now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

At last, this oversight board gets some much-needed oversight.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability free trade & free markets too much government

Barney’s Bubble Babbling

To hear Congressman Barney Frank tell it, he was a lone voices of fiscal reason when the surge of ill-considered mortgage debt fueled the now-popped housing bubble.

Unfortunately for Frank, this is the age of the Internet. Bloggers have proved more than willing to collate inconvenient evidence.

Thanks to Ed Morrissey on HotAir.com, then, we have two testimonies of Frank-ish speechifying. Here’s Frank in 2009:

People haven’t fully understood. One of the causes of the terrible crisis we had over the last few years . . . it came from people being pushed into buying houses, taking out loans that they couldn’t afford. Part of that was a conservative view that rental housing was a bad thing. . . . People were pushing home ownership [for] people who shouldn’t have been there.

“People in power” pushed this, eh? Which people? The irresponsible conservatives. But here’s this same sir, Barney Frank, in a clip from 2005:

We have, I think, an excessive degree of concern right now about home ownership and its role in the economy. . . . This is not the dot-com situation. . . . [Y]ou’re not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. And so, those of us on our committee in particular, will continue to push for home ownership.

Oh dear. Barney, just be honest already and admit you helped destroy the economy, okay?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Transparently Faster

If a promise is important, clear, specific — and keeping it would be honorable — well then, it’s bad to break it.

Alas, political candidates make and break such promises all the time. They make the promises to get votes, then break them from political expediency.

Usually, politicians don’t admit this. Usually, if they note the lapse at all, they plead some fictitious but awesome and unexpected impediment.

So, for example, candidate Obama’s promise that final legislation going to the president’s desk would be accessible online in every detail for a full five days before he signed it — well, that quickly went by the wayside. So has the idea of tracking every particular of so-called “stimulus” spending. Technical difficulties, they say.

Who knew the web-savvy Obama campaign would have so much trouble with “the Internets thing” once they got into power?

For some reason, however, a private company — unburdened by the rush to sign us all into permanent debt bondage — is doing much better when it comes to reporting the runaway spending. The Washington Times tells us that a firm called Onvia is tracking federal expenditures “down to the local level . . . in real-time speed.” Onvia has free software that people can use to follow the dollars.

Sounds like time for a little outsourcing.

Oh, wait, I forgot. The Obama administration is opposed to outsourcing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies too much government

Enough at Tea Time

On April 15, more than 2,000 Tea Parties were held across the country, many with thousands in attendance. These weren’t dainty luncheon ceremonies. They were protests, named after our revolutionary Boston Tea Party.

In Washington, D.C., it rained like the dickens, but people still came out to say “Enough.” Regular folks sounded off. They work hard, and they’ve had enough of paying the bills for politicians and favored political interests.

Some big media personalities and major political figures showed up. Governor Rick Perry of Texas spoke at the Austin, Texas event. He’s called the federal government “oppressive.” In South Carolina, Governor Mark Sanford told folks that “Real change begins in the hearts and minds of people who are willing to stand . . . against an ever-encroaching government.”

Meanwhile, much of television news media behaved badly, trying to marginalize or even demonize the protests as “anti-government.” CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen was particularly argumentative, suggesting to one guy that he should be grateful for the $50 billion President Obama was sending to his state.

When a woman protester accused Roesgen of slanted coverage, she asked the woman why she was there. “We’re here,” the woman responded, “because we are sick and tired of the government taking our money and spending it in ways that we have no say in. We have no say whatsoever.”

And that’s what has to change. The people must be heard. Not just on one day, but every day.

This is Common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.