Huge article, so I'll stick with excerpts. No registration for any of it.
There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.
To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.
But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.
"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."
The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury, frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal government in a private auction. It all happened before our very eyes. In case you missed it, here's how they did it -- in five easy steps:
This section runs down the change from the relatively bipartisan and certainly laidback atmosphere of Congresscritters to the one-party rule's most ridiculous events.. Committee's meeting without the Democrats knowing where, leaving them to wander the halls looking, Democrats simply being told to piss off, since they weren't in a 'Coalition of the willing', and the infamous taking your gavel home and not playing.STEP ONE
RULE BY CABAL
Shows that while the days worked by Congress has gone down since the seventies.. The latest has been even more pathetic. 93 days of work.. Some of them measured in minutes under the clock.. in the last year.STEP TWO
WORK AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE -- AND SCREW UP WHAT LITTLE YOU DO
It also discusses the outright blowing off of appropriations bills. Since they aren't passed, 'Continuing Resolutions' are.. And they can't exceed the last years spending. As population increases and inflation does too, this means everything gets underfunded.
No surprise in that title. One thing touched on here is the responsibility of oversight. From the 1950s to 1995, no Democratic committee issued a subpeona without minority consent or a committee vote.STEP THREE
LET THE PRESIDENT DO WHATEVER HE WANTS
This of course vanished with the Republican majority: In Clinton's tenure, they issued 1,000 after chucking that tradition. Then, as President Bush entered office, the subpeonas stopped. Cold. There hasn't been once since Bush became President.
Some oversight. It also comments on some Republicans privately being concerned by the rollback of civil liberties.. But of course, when it's time to vote, they robotically obey their Lord and Master.
A rundown of the massive, out of control spending, the debt it incurs, and the out of control earmarks. How bad? 2000's count is 6,073. 2005? Try 15,877.STEP FOUR
SPEND, SPEND, SPEND
The scariest of this section is this blurb..
In other words.. They don't know where the money went, and they can't find out where.In 2003, the inspector general of the Defense Department reported to Congress that the military's financial-management systems did not comply with "generally accepted accounting principles" and that the department "cannot currently provide adequate evidence supporting various material amounts on the financial statements."
"It essentially can't be audited," says Wheeler, the former congressional staffer. "And nobody did anything about it. That's the job of Congress, but they don't care anymore."
Ah, the true goal of most politicians.STEP FIVE
LINE YOUR OWN POCKETS
In this, we get the verbatim of convicted Duke Cunningham's letter to a reporter.
I'm not even sure all those are words."Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life," Cunningham wrote. "I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I made some decissions [sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life."
...
"As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of the Year...hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security, Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill...and every time you wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About how I died."
But that's the kind of critter skittering through Congress now, it seems. Bonus: Tom Delay referred to, I swear, as a 'Fuckhead'.
