It's time for Congress to start doing what they were elected to do: Write laws themselves, read them before voting on them, and represent the people who elected them.
Somehow the idea of representing the electorate has gone the way of the dinosaur and has become as "quaint" as the Geneve Conventions. It certainly looks as if We the People no longer elect Them -- the People who are supposed to represent Us. It appears more and more as if they are bought and paid for by the Deep-pocked People, and We are no more than a convenient excuse for Their existence.
It's getting more than wearisome -- no, it's down right disgusting -- to hear any representative or senator say: Gee, I didn't know that item was in the legislation I voted for.
They didn't know? Didn't they ever hear that 'ignorance of the law is no excuse'? Ignorance of the law before voting on the law should be a felony.
What are they using their law degrees for? The proverbial toiled paper? What the hell are they doing in a legislative branch of government if they don't know what's in the laws they supposedly write and then vote on?
What are we paying them to do? Raise funds to swell their coffers? Be social butterflies and cast their votes for which cocktail party to attend? Surround themselves with incompetent staffers who don't thoroughly vet proposed legislation for their edification?
Their staffers are probably too busy setting their social calendars, and arranging fund raisers to bother with the nasty little details of laws that can drastically change our lives.
It seems as though we send them to Washington to not to write or read legislation that's up for a vote, not use their law degrees, but to have others write legislation for them, and be influenced -- not by those who elected them -- but "buy" those who bought their offices for them.
Three cases in point: The idiocy of extending Daylight Savings Time, which saves neither daylight nor time. The first extension was at the behest of the charcoal industry. Like if we wanted to barbecue after sunset we couldn't flip on the patio light for a few minutes.
The second extension on the canard of saving energy...not! It doesn't save energy and screws up everybodies body clock. If they'd done their homework, they would have realized that the "energy saving" nonsense was based on a thirty-year-old, out of date report.
Case Two: The Prescription Drug Bill. Written, bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical companies. We know how well that turned out.
Case Three: The Patriot Act. Congress was in such a rush to prove how patriotic they were and vote on it that they didn't bother to read it. They naively and foolishly took the White House's word that this extremely bad thing was a good thing. It led to illegal wire taps and snooping on all Americans; and subsequent secretive tinkering with it led to the present Alberto Gonsalze/U.S. Attorney scandal.
Those are just three examples. Two extremely serious and one that just ticks me off, because after a week of Daylight Savings Time, I and my computer clock are still on regular, normal, nature-given time.
Here's my concise Amendment XXVII, Keep It Simple, Stupid (2007).
Article I: No law will be more than two type-written pages long.
Article II: All laws will be written by elected representatives.
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