Tag: Congress

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Quorum

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 30, 2020
8 Comments on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Quorum

Thomas Massie, Coronavirus, pandemic, virus, House of Representatives, Congress,

On Friday, the talking heads and Twitterati excoriating Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Kent.) were so scandalized that they couldn’t quite get to telling us what terrible thing he had done.

“GOP’s Massie outrages House,” screamed The Washington Post headline. The paper informed that “the Republican from northern Kentucky has frequently voted no on issues large and small, even against the wishes of GOP leaders.”

Wow, is that allowed?

With Congress poised to shovel $2.2 trillion to citizens and businesses by unanimous consent, i.e., without a recorded roll call vote, Mr. Massie balked, thereby requiring a quorum to physically come to the capitol to vote on the relief package.

“I came here to make sure our Republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber,” Massie declared on the House floor, “and I request a recorded vote.”

President Trump urged the “third rate Grandstander” be tossed out of the Grand Old Party. And former U.S. Senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry noted — of all things — his complete agreement with Trump, tweeting that “Massie has tested positive for being an a**hole. He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity.”

Rep. Max Rose (D‑N.Y.) offered that Massie was “disgusting” and “inhumane,” and that if the vote was pushed “back 24 hours there will be blood on [his] hands.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D‑Calif.) boasted of having asked the congressman, “Why don’t you just back off?”

Facing the biggest spending bill of all time, Massie’s notion of Congresspeople voting on the record? Hardly radical. But in the face of the COVID-19 threat, bringing legislators back to the capitol entailed real risk.

Yet come back they did. And just to show Massie how wrong he was in alleging a cover-up, they agreed to a roll-call vote so that there was full accountability.

Take THAT, Massie!

Wait … Congress didn’t go on the record?!

They came back and yet, as Massie pointed out, “they still refused to have a recorded vote.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: One spending item, which Massie had specifically complained about, was $25 million for the Kennedy Center. Then, mere hours after President Trump signed the legislation, the Kennedy Center honchos fired the National Symphony Orchestra, informing them “that paychecks would end this week.”

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Tags Congress, coronavirus, House of Representatives, pandemic, Quorum, Thomas Massie, virus, vote

Accountability insider corruption local leaders national politics & policies Voting

Bring the Bozos Home

telecommute, Rand Paul, Congress, Senate, Coronavirus, Corona Virus, computer, laptop,

“Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) announced Sunday he has covid-19,” The Washington Post reports, “and four other GOP senators are quarantined. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D‑Minn.) disclosed Monday that her husband, too, is infected with the virus.”

Social media was not uniformly brimming with support for the Kentucky senator, of course, and some folks noted, in earnest horror, that the Republican who had been shot at by a Bernie Bro and blindsided by his deranged Democrat neighbor had dared work six days in the Senate after being tested but before receiving his diagnosis.

He should have been sequestered!

To let the big “stimulus” packages sail through Congress?

But there are work-arounds.

“We should not be physically present on this floor at this moment,” argued Sen. Richard Durbin (D‑Ill.) yesterday, urging the Senate to facilitate social distancing by allowing remote voting. Asked about it at his Sunday news conference, President Trump gave thumbs up: “I would be totally in favor of it on a temporary basis.”

I say, let’s take this a step further: do it permanently.

Remote voting makes sense in an emergency. Sure. But it also makes sense all the time, because legislators voting from their home states and districts rather than within the Washington swamp would hear more from constituents than special interest lobbyists and, therefore, likely represent us better.

Plus, not tethered to life in Washington, or the confines of the capitol, we might reduce the size of congressional districts from over 700,000 people to more like 70,000 and see real representation return to our land.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Original photo by Manuel Bahamondez H

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ideological culture national politics & policies Popular

They Aren’t Lying Now?

“You lie!”

When U.S. Representative Joe Wilson (R‑SC) shouted this at President Barack Obama during 2009’s State of the Union — scandal!

How dare he?

At issue was whether federal tax dollars would aid illegal immigrants under Obamacare. Democrats denied that any such thing would happen. Indeed, the very idea constituted a calumny, a mere paranoid Tea Party delusion.

This came to a lot of people’s minds after last week’s televised Democratic Party presidential candidates’ debates.

On Thursday, all ten on-stage candidates assented, with hands held proudly high, to giving undocumented aliens free health care. And several from the previous night’s debate are also on record for the same thing, none of them more insistent than Senator Elizabeth Warren, who proclaims that health care is a right.

Democratic opinion leaders now eagerly assert what they took offense at a mere ten years ago.

There are two very basic things we can learn from this.

First, what politicians say about what they want changes over time.

A decade ago, Democrats took offense when called socialist; now they revel in the term. So what are we to make of Democrats’ current s‑word usage? Now they insist they don’t want to nationalize the means of production — but will they tomorrow?

Second, the debate over immigration is not really between restrictionists and open borders supporters. It is between proponents of restricted immigration, on the one hand, and those who demand subsidized immigration, on the other.

A true open borders policy could look very different from what Democrats now push.

Less socialistic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Biden, Congress, debate, Democratic, Obama, Pelosi, president, speech, you lie

national politics & policies Popular term limits

Dousing the Dumpster Fire

“Congress is less popular than traffic jams, root canals, and hemorrhoids,” U.S. Term Limits Executive Director Nick Tomboulides explained yesterday at a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution hearing.

“You’re beating head lice,” he added, “but the lice have asked for a recount.”

Mr. Tomboulides and U.S. Term Limits support Senate Joint Resolution 1, introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R‑Texas), which calls for a three-term, six-year House limit and a two-term, 12-year Senate limit.

“Governing is incredibly hard,” argued R Street Institute Senior Fellow and term limits opponent Casey Burgat earlier on C‑Span’s Washington Journal. “There is no school for this.”

The real world, perchance?

“Right now, we have the most experienced, professionalized, careerist Congress in American history,” Tomboulides countered, “and the results are a dumpster fire.”

“When I came to Congress, I supported term limits in theory,” former U.S. Representative and Senator Jim DeMint (R‑South Carolina) testified. “Now I support it after seeing what really happens here.”

“Over 80 percent of Americans want term limits to happen,” Tomboulides offered. “Donald Trump and Barack Obama want it.”

“The only impediment,” as Sen. Cruz pointed out, “is the United States Congress.”

That’s why U.S. Term Limits is working to convince 34 state legislatures to bypass Congress by passing bills for a convention under Article V of the Constitution, which can consider and propose an amendment for congressional term limits.

It’s the people’s path to putting out the dumpster fire.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies

Salty Tears of the Guilty

crying smiley, Congress, Independent Counsel, Willam Barr, The Mueller Report,

The Mueller report has not calmed the partisan enmity roiling Washington.

Many in Congress complain about Mueller not reaching a prosecutorial decision on the issue of obstruction of justice, thus leaving Attorney General William Barr to determine that actions by President Trump did not reach a criminal threshold.

But who wrote the rules for such investigations?

“If Congress does not like the decision, because it was made by the attorney general,” explained Jacob Frenkel, an attorney who formerly worked in the independent counsel’s office, “Congress has only itself to blame for not renewing the independent counsel statute.”

“Analysts noted that lawmakers, in effect, gave Barr authority over Mueller when they let the independent counsel law expire in 1999,” reports The Washington Post. “That law created a prosecutor position with even more autonomy than Mueller, who was appointed under more restrictive special counsel regulations.”

Of course, in 1999, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Had they a crystal ball to see 20 years into the future, for partisan reasons they might celebrate that they allowed that law to lapse.

Then again, Democrats have controlled both houses since then, even sporting a filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2009. Yet did nothing to legislate a solution to the problem they see today.

My point isn’t to bemoan the special counsel or independent counsel statute, about which good people might disagree. Instead, let us acknowledge the essential role our system reserves for Congress. Yes, again and again, from tariff policy to foreign policy to these current issues, Congress punts its power away to the executive and judiciary branches.

And then cries about it.

Well, wipe your eyes, solons: it’s We the People who feel the pain.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies Popular

A Congress-Proof Wall?

NEA, 1976, National Emergenncy Act, Congress, standards,

When members of Congress run for the Presidency, they often talk a good game about acting within the boundaries set by the Constitution … but maybe we should roll our eyes, at least a bit, when senators like Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker complain about President Trump’s Executive Order plan for building his infamous Wall.

A workaround like that seems like an overstepping of constitutional bounds, sure. But, as Peter J. Wallison wrote for the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, congressional protest suffers from a rather big problem.

Congress enacted the National Emergency Act in 1976. Since then, presidents have declared 57 emergencies … with nary a peep from Congress. And, since “Congress has provided no standard to judge whether an actual emergency exists,” congressional carpers have hardly a constitutional leg to stand upon.

But it gets worse.

Congress doesn’t even have much leverage in the “power of the purse” — for it has given much of that away, too.

For example, when “a Democratic Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010,” writes Wallison, “it provided that the agency would be funded entirely by the Federal Reserve, not through annual appropriations from Congress.”

This interests me, especially, since I quoted Senator Elizabeth Warren ballyhooing her support for this very program at Townhall last weekend. She thinks she did something smart in supporting that regulatory body.

But like so much other ultra-clever legislative conniving, she placed it outside of congressional control.

With genius moves like this, congressional Democrats may have great difficulty restraining President Trump.

Serves them right, of course. But not us — it does not serve the people at all.

We need constitutional limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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