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Senate Approves the ______Act Of____
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the Senate was in such a rush to get out of town that it forgot to name an 'important' bill that it passed, so the bill goes to the House as The ______Act of____. That's how it appears in the Congressional Record, though the Library of Congress has it listed as The XXXXXXAct ofXXXX. As for what's in the bill, well that appears to be as mysterious as the name. It was officially announced as a bill to tax bonuses to execs who received TARP money. But then someone simply deleted the entire bill and replaced it with text about aviation security. And then it was deleted again, and replaced with something having to do with education. However, because of these constant changes, many of the services that track the bill have the old details listed. On top of that, Nancy Pelosi called the House back for an emergency vote on this unnamed bill, and anyone trying to find out what it's about might be misled into thinking its about aviation security or something entirely unrelated to the actual bill. And people wonder why no one trusts Congress." It appears that the government's new martial law plans are being passed after all.
We are blessed with the most incompetent congress I can remember.
When the system for legislation gets so confusing that not even the people passing the bills can keep it straight, I think it shows that there is some fundamental flaw in the system, or it didn't scale well or something.
Do we have to go back to Schoolhouse Rock?
But they keep voting for them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
At this stage are there any objections to simply unseating every single encumbent? Certainly a large influx of "freshmen" to the halls of congress couldn't make matters any worse.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
More than likely an intern was getting the paperwork in, not trained, under paid, wanting to get out the to bar to meet the gang. Ah, government by the staff.
That this isn't one bill with a conspiracy theory behind it, but perhaps that that code is used more like a placeholder and constantly overwritten when a new unnamed bill comes along?
today is spelling optional day.
Disappearing ink is used for Ethic's rules.I heard it also is used with campaign promises and that check in the mail.
Congress has long been like this, they just haven't been so cavalier about it. When one party leads the Congress and the Presidency the American people will get the shaft. The real problem now is that instead of the press harping on every thing the Congress and Presidency did while under Republicans they have suddenly clammed up.
So the people are left with one choice, the ballot box. Hopefully most will make the choice to boot incumbents out. Because as we all know, Congress sucks but not my Congressman. This is the perception that allows these people to stay in power, that and writing laws making it near impossible for any challenge to Democratic or Republican parties
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Blame the thousands of lobbyists in Washington. They have many of the politicians in their pockets, both Republicans and Democrats. The lobbyists are their to protect the corporate exec's interests.
The real problem now is that instead of the press harping on every thing the Congress and Presidency did while under Republicans they have suddenly clammed up.
Well thank God Fox News is finally off the air... wait, what?
There is a war going on for your mind.
The world is ending, someone made a clerical error!
When one party leads the Congress and the Presidency the American people will get the shaft.
Agreed.
The real problem now is that instead of the press harping on every thing the Congress and Presidency did while under Republicans they have suddenly clammed up.
I guess that depends on what "press" you're listening to.
I was shocked and appalled at how much the Bush administration got away with. It didn't seem like anybody was holding them accountable. Sure, there was some noise about this or that... Primarily on the "liberal" channels like MSNBC... But nothing of any substance at all.
These days the "liberal" channels don't seem all that concerned about what Obama is doing. The "conservative" channels like Fox News, however, are plenty noisy. And you still get the occasional complaint out of someone on MSNBC that Obama isn't being "liberal" enough. But again it's still just noise with no substance at all.
Nobody is holding any of these folks accountable for their actions. It doesn't matter if there's a D or an R next to the name, they're all lying through their teeth and getting away with it.
Not even the usual campaign promise white lies either... Straight-up, stupidly blatant stuff like saying "I support this" on Monday, and then claiming on Tuesday that you never said you supported anything, even while the tape rolls on-screen. And nobody cares!
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
It works very much like public schools. People will bemoan the fact that schools are not doing well, except the school their child attends.
The same logic is used when voting for the incumbent. Congress is awful, but not my Congressman.
We won't get these guys out until our political process is open to everyone fairly. As it stands now it is near impossible to get a non Democratic or non Republican elected. They can redistrict that possibility out. If they cannot do that way they will make your source of campaign funding illegal, or you method of distributing your message.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
And nobody cares!
Honestly, the best reporting on this type of stupidity is "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It's a shame that a news program whose explicitly stated goal is humor is the only outlet reporting this stuff.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I've seen a lot of this "one party control" talking point recently, but the problem is not "One Party Control" it's "Two Party Control". Voting for a Republican "in order to bring some balance" is sidestepping the problem unless you really care about banning gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research. If you care more about defense, terrorism and its laws, Iraq, Afghanistan, rampant Federal spending, Federal regulation and de-regulation, increased federal power for immigration control, the war on drugs, and the slow erosion of Citizen and Non-Citizens' rights in general, then the two parties, for all intents and purposes, are identical. They'll pull the same stunts and make the same political hay in the media no matter who's in office, who's the majority leader, or who's the minority leader because it's still the same group of people in power, the same party leaders pulling the strings.
If you want a change by all means vote out your incumbent congress-critter. But please acknowledge you're not going to get a change with someone who has a D or and R next to his or her name. Try something different with an L or a G or even an I.
I think this could set a new precedent of how things are done in Congress. A far more efficient way. Our reps and senators could get together to vote for an unnamed and unspecified bill. Various congressmen could stand up and speak to the issues that are most important to their constituency and party. Republicans can argue about how the bill is a hand-out sponsored by the democrats and that we all just need to have some personal responsibility. The democrats could argue about how this is required to protect the children/poor/minorities. Once all the grand standing is completed and the various pork riders attached, it will be voted on. Once approved it can then be forwarded to the various lobbyists to fill in the blanks. It would be something like a blank check but a more democratic version. The details never mattered anyways.
If only that was different than how they do things now. The depressing thing is that while I laughed through your post, I realized that your hypothetical anecdote is exactly the political status quo. Funny thing how we use laughter to cope with tragedy...
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
the Democrats in the House, Senate, and White House have radically changed the landscape, and not for anyone's long-term benefit.
If you accept that the massive influx of government spending is the proper response to a dead economy (I do), and that it is temporary (god I hope so), what specifically are you referring to? The healthcare bill got watered down to the point where all it did was set up a competitive price exchange for healthcare... sort of the Amazon.com of getting sick. They changed student loans to be a bit more fair, and expanded Pell grants for needy students. They passed an act where if your landlord gets foreclosed upon but you have a lease, your lease survives. And if you don't have a lease, you have 3 months to find a new place. They passed a few credit-card acts counteracting some of the more egregious offences, and giving business owners some rights. They passed a toothless wall-street reform act.
What bills, specifically, are you referring to? I'm not asking facetiously. I know we tend to filter news through our own perceptions, and I wonder what I missed.
And saying this is as bad as Bush II is going too far. We're not stuck in any new intractable wars, we haven't lost all of our allies, and we haven't had any new worldwide economic collapses.
The ______ Agenda
Intelligent folk should be above it. Both parties are broken, neither party aligns with your beliefs. Government isn't a sports game - the only real winners or losers are the people. The people of the US are giving up their independence and freedom to numbing mountains of laws and bureaucracy. They are ignorant of government spending and its resultant inflation and debt. The almighty dollar is the foundation we all stand upon and if you don't recognize the need for concern, you need to start paying attention to what our own accountants are saying - your Congressmen are not.
I'd say it's a problem when your satirical news has more substance and information than the real news... But it's so damn funny.
Humour is one of the safest ways to report the truth.
The comedians are the last ones to go before protest and news goes entirely underground.
Serious people aren't too hard to shut down. Those that appear unserious, are much harder. When they actually shut down the satire, your society is a few breaths away from actual insurrection.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
And nobody cares!
And there is the real problem.
It's hard to really blame the politician when the people just plain don't care or aren't interested enough to really find out what someone really stands for (if anything).
Not that I'll defend said politician, of course. Wrong behavior is wrong :)
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act”
~ George Orwell
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
As Nancy Pelosi said of Obamacare "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." What she means is that nobody could learn what was in the bill by reading it.
Here's the full quote:
But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.
It seems more likely to me that she meant that all of the nonsense spouted by the extreme right (death panels and whatnot) made it impossible to have a reasonable discussion on what the bill was about. And that once it was passed all of that FUD would probably stop dominating the news so that the real information wouldn't be obscured anymore.
Donate free food here
Granted, one can always find individual cases that demand outrage, but overall, the reporting on Congress is more alarmist than accurate. Put 600 people in a room and ask them to make a decision. Any 600 people, any decision. If you'd like, you can just put the people designing C++ or HTML in a room and ask them to come up with a spec. Now give reporters full access to everything they say and do. If, in one week's time, reporters can't make everyone on that random committee look like an idiot, then they aren't trying.
The point is that Congress is not supposed to look pretty. It never has been pretty. It never has been noble. It has always, regardless of who is in power, been preoccupied with petty squabbles and produced absurd compromises. It is, as many have pointed out, the worst system imaginable -- except for all the rest.
The right is now having fun shooting ducks in a barrel by making fun of Congress, just as the left has had fun maligning Congress when the right was in power. All this is very entertaining, but it is shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how government works. All this attention from the press just makes congressman grand stand, and promotes the silliest and most disruptive sound bites without promoting anything useful. The problem is not so much Congress, but the way Congress and the press interact.
During 2009-2010, PAYGO was a nice thought, but we'll just make this one exception.. er, two exceptions... er, nevermind, we'll just exempt PAYGO on all spending bills we really REALLY want to shovel down the public throat.
Wait a second, that link is for a Frank speech in 2003, from a hearing on an administration proposal to change the CRA. It says so in the first sentence!
So, in 2003, you are claiming that Bush objected to a Bush administration proposal?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"What's funny is that the mortgage industry and derivative trading schemes that caused the implosion were mostly passed by a Republican congress and Democratic president... "
"The idea that Clinton somehow brought on the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to lend to poor people is simply ludicrous."
The financial crisis brought about by mortgage fraud and securities manipulation was brought on by the cumulative actions of several Administrations and Congresses. It is not a simple as CRA, but fundamentally goes back to repealing Glass-Steagell and the S&L scandals.
To try and pin it on one party or President is misguided, and misses the salient points; that our government permitted unsound and failing financial regulation to be enacted, that the financial industry saw th opportunity to profit from it without concern for their inevitable failure, and that much of that process was driven by a huge segment of the financial industry that sponsored or committed criminal fruad on several different levels, and has not yet faced judgment. Indeed, they played the gambit that we would bail them out, if the problem got too big, and we did.
Until we see many (thousands) of financiers, analysts, executives, brokers, and other agents do the perp walk, we are not done fully undestanding the cause and prevention of this sort of problem. CRA was just a part of this. Glass-Steagell was the precipitator of this chain of events. The S&L scandals predated and predicted this, and another attempt to do the same favor for the credit unions should be expected. The NCUA has so far been able to refuse the Congress' largesse.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When the system for legislation gets so confusing that not even the people passing the bills can keep it straight, I think it shows that there is some fundamental flaw in the system, or it didn't scale well or something.
Do we have to go back to Schoolhouse Rock?
I've been looking at the constitutions of other countries, past and present, and ironically, I think the best solution to this was actually included in the Confederate constitution during the Civil War. They banned the practice of sneaking in pet projects on the back of a bigger ones:
"Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title."
Keeping legislation to one topic both simplifies the process and eliminates logrolling, at least outright. If we were to vote on a new round of amendments to the Constitution, this would be near the top of my list. I'm so tired of reading about a slew of pet projects on the back of a bill completely unrelated to the subject... things like grants for local agencies tucked into a defense bill.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
What do they collect it from and so on? While the tax might be fixed, with regards to the economy, the specifics would be highly fluid.
So Evil Fascist Republican A gets elected, puts his people in the IRS. He tells them "No taxing business at all, I want this all taken from income, and it has to be at a fixed rate." So the poorer people end up getting hit hard, they have a 20% tax, or whatever, same as everyone else. Businesses get hit with no taxes of any kind.
Then Loony Commie Democrat B gets elected and his people go in the IRS. He says "No taxes on the poor or middle class at all, everything has to be paid by the rich and business." So suddenly the rich's tax burden balloons to massive levels, 80% of their income gets taken. Businesses get hit with huge taxes they never had to pay in the past.
Because the only thing tax law specified was that you could collect not more than 20% (and of course the government would always collect the max) it means it is 100% up to the administrative law as to how that is done. That is of course determined by the agency responsible, and that agency is run by the executive branch.
So maybe you say "Ok, we need more checks in the law, to prevent that from happening, we'll specific more limits, more ways that taxes must be collected and so on." Good, but notice what you are now doing is making the law more complex.
Like I said, I'm not opposed to simplification of the law, but you have to be realistic about how simple it can be. The world is a complex place, you cannot expect an extremely simple set of laws to effectively govern it.
The reason for this is that our country, during the course of the last 18 years or so, has been falling deeper and deeper into what I'll call a "strong presidency" structure.
Congress is nothing short of a glorified presidential sock puppet now. The House are a bunch of feckless weaklings and the Senate are a bunch of self serving check writers. They do his bidding. They might throw a few curve balls with confirmations, but overall, they serve at the leisure of the president. He says jump, and they do so with reckless abandon so long as the money keeps flowing.
If Congress doesn't fall in line, we call them obstructionists to progress. If SCOTUS steps out of bounds, we say they're legislating from the bench. People need to radically shift how they think about government and what role the president was supposed to have, as envisioned by our founding fathers. They didn't want a strong president, or even a strong federal government for that matter.
While this may seem impractical in light of our global military and financial dominance, it is to the detriment of our country that the federal government is so powerful. Sadly, the average citizen doesn't understand enough about government structure to even understand that a charismatic leader isn't good for us. We need a highly intelligent ho-hum leader and we need a senate with balls to make the country better.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.