April 2, 2009

Dear Congress ­

How dare you!

How dare you pretend to pretend to represent anyone in this country, let alone your constituents. How dare you cite the Constitution while you eviscerate its most important protections. How dare you claim fiscal restraint or economic wisdom when you collectively have shown the patience and judgment of a 3-year old alone in a chocolate shop.

This is addressed to the entire Congress. Both sides of both aisles in both houses. All of you. You have shown yourselves to be as arrogant as we feared, and as unworthy of our trust at a level that we only once joked about. As a group, you have taken the reputation of one of the greatest deliberative bodies ever created and cheapened it to that of a poorly run bordello.

Over the last decade and a half, with no regard as to the party in the leadership of either house, we have seen you pass laws without hearing or review, use the power of the Congress to conduct tribunals and witch hunts, shirk ethics as if they were meaningless and mismanage even the most basic task.

In that 15 years, you have graced the American people with the impeachment of a president (who, ironically is still more popular than any of you), repeated assaults on the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. You have passed - as an emergency - some of the worst legislation in the history of paper:

• Gramm/Leach/Bliley which removed the laws that prevented the "too big to fail" bank problem.
  
  
• Burying FEMA in the Homeland Security Department, which left it powerless to deal with natural disasters like Katrina.
  
  
• McCain/Feingold campaign reform, which, while well intentioned, is unconstitutional and riddled with loopholes like the 527 groups.
  
  
• The Transportation Safety Act which created a huge agency overnight with almost no operating parameters, but massive impact on the airline industry and a blatant abrogation of individual rights.
  
  
• TARP, passed in a matter of days. This grew from a poorly thought out 3 page memo to a 1,000 page monster, yet remained totally ineffective and contained no safeguards on our $700 billion, zero transparency, all the specifics of a rainstorm and had no direction or requirement as to the use of the money while granting almost plenipotentiary power to the Secretary of the Treasury.
  
  
• The Economic Recovery Act just this year. Passed on a deadline that sounded more like a dare than a realistic schedule and with no single member actually reading it before voting.
  
  
• Even now, as I write, you are fast tracking the largest budget ever proposed. While I am not an expert on federal budgets, I do know one thing: when the price tag is 3.7 trillion dollars, at least take a look at the fine print.
  

And the endless hearings with no apparent point. 7 minute questions and no opportunity to answer. Public berating of "witnesses" who are only there by subpoena. Preening for the cameras while the business of a nation goes undone. Looking for the villain where there likely is none. Trying to be the big hero when all we want is the stalwart public servant.

You shredded the heads of the US auto industry and not undeservedly in some cases, but you gave an almost free pass to the heads of the largest banks who have thus far taken over 9 trillion dollars in bailouts and guarantees from the Treasury and Federal Reserves. The same bankers that you blame for this mess, and you basically offered to validate their parking.

There is no reason to choose parties in the House. Without the lapel pins, it is hard to tell the difference. No sooner do you regain the majority than you immediately do exactly what you ran against. Purely partisan action with no thought of the minority party. Every tactic you decried when you were the minority, you immediately deployed. And most of what little you did pass was the very stuff you promised to stop.

To the minority party, there is another word than no. Try it.

You promised to work across the aisle and find agreement. Well, you did manage to increase your pay and office budgets with huge bipartisan support. I will give you that.

Let's not forget that wildly unconstitutional penalty tax you passed as a knee jerk reaction to the AIG bonuses. Bonuses you might have known about had you read the legislation you passed last year enabling them. Oh, no time to read this. And the whole Bill of Attainder and Ex Post Facto thing? Mere details. The media has cameras out front! Makeup, hair, legislate!

Now you pass something called the 'Pay for Performance Act' giving the Treasury the power to set compensation at firms taking taxpayer money. That is simply laughable. This from the gang that can't balance a budget? The folks that set their pay raises to automatically happen? The ones that paid their staff bonuses while screaming about bonuses? Based on that law, you people owe us money for the use of the office space. You have never performed to the job description and you have consistently operated at a loss.

And the Senate. Well, why bother even distinguishing between the parties? It really doesn't seem to matter. The minority party filibusters and the majority party calls a foul for following the rules that neither side seems wont to change. The majority invokes reconciliation and the minority yells that it is unfair. Even better, you seem to have all set up your own little fiefdoms over there. Little personal power bases with which to influence the departments of government inappropriately.

To the minority party in the Senate, same message as in the House. There is another word than no.

However, you recently managed to blatantly violate Article 1 of the Constitution using a minor procedural stunt. I speak of the TARP package last fall. The one the House defeated. What you in the Senate did was to gut a dead House bill for the title and amend the entire TARP package as rejected by the House.

Let me save your staff the research. Article 1 states that all bills related to money must originate in the House of Representatives. There is no room for any manipulation of that statement. Yet you used a procedural technicality to pass a money bill the House clearly rejected. To make it worse, none of you read the law you passed.

You debate whether or not to accept a rightfully appointed Senator because you don't like the governor doing the appointing. You strut around like little bosses while basically doing as little as possible, but pontificating endlessly about it.

If you were a student body council and I the dean, I would tell you to stop shouting and sit down and talk. Sadly, you are rumored to be adults. And nobody can tell you to do anything except your leadership, which has failed. They have failed you and they have failed usthe people.

Do America a favor. Take a week or two off. Go somewhere nice. Sit around the pool and talk to each other. Have frilly cocktails with umbrellas in them. Maybe find something you agree on. Maybe even get some good done. But at the very least you won't be doing any more harm.