President Barack Obama promised change . . . including in the way Congress did things. As a senator, he sponsored a transparency bill that — if Congress could only have stuck with after passing — would have publicized all proposed pork.
And there’s the rub. Congress is constitutionally in charge of change, really. You might say “change” is Congress’s job: New things for government are supposed to come from Congress in the form of legislation. Not from the president.
So how has Congress helped? Well, as I’ve reported before, the new Congress has indicated pretty clearly what kind of change it wants: A stronger stranglehold on power and a narrow purview of options to be considered.
None of this represent the kind of change Americans want . . . or Obama promised.
The most interesting procedural proposals come, these days, from the minority Republicans.
Opposing the developing Democrat bailout package (that spends more trillions we don’t have), House Minority Leader John Boehner asked that no so such bill be “brought to the floor of the House unless there have been public hearings in the appropriate committees, the entire text has been available online for the American people to review for at least one week, and it includes no special-interest earmarks.”
Veteran Washington reporter Cokie Roberts called Boehner’s proposal “delightful.”
Delightful it is, and in Obama’s spirit, too, but it’s up to Congress to deliver.
So far, no good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.