Contempt of Congress

The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, is moving ahead with plans to charge U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder with "contempt of Congress", for his refusal to cooperate in the Congressional investigation into the horribly mismanaged, criminally botched, gun-running program the Justice Department was running on the Mexican border.

That's what the papers are reporting.

But hey, if you want to charge someone with "contempt of Congress," then you're going to have to charge me too. The archives of Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters show just how much contempt I have for the currently seated Congress of the United States.

In fact, if the honorable Speaker is going to charge me and AG Holder with contempt, he might have to charge 240 million other Americans with the same offense. According to the latest polls, between 75 and 79 of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job right now, and it would be fair to say that most, if not all, of those 75 to 79 percent have nothing but contempt for today's U.S. Congress.

Here is a measure of our contempt:

Dear Senators and Representatives: have you stopped being idiots yet? How's that budget coming? How about that tax code rewrite? Social Security reform? Have you stopped messing with our schools? Have you stopped catering to the banks, the insurance firms and the other too-big-to-fail companies that do more favors for you than we, the average Americans, can do for you?

Are you still blindly voting the party line? Are you still spending money that isn't yours to spend? Are you still voting to give to the military, things that the military has said they don't want, and don't need? Are you still filling the pork barrel for your state, for your constituency, even to the point of making "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" deals with your colleagues who have their own pork barrels to fill?

Have you rewritten things so that your families and fortunes are subject to the same challenges and difficulties as the rest of America, or are you and yours still exempt from so many of the rules and regulations the rest of us have to live under?

Are you still quietly voting yourselves pay raises or other emoluments that the rest of us cannot get? Especially those of us who are still without a job, even though we voted to send you to Washington?

Do you feel even the slightest twinge of guilt after reading this, or do you instead feel as much contempt for the American people as they feel for you?

Dear Congressman: The Whole World is Watching, and They Know You're Going to Fail

I sat down this morning to write an article about the next budgetary challenge facing the Congress of the United States.  Once again, they have the chance to prove how fiscally irresponsible, and politically hopeless, they are.  The Supercommittee's first deadline, November 23, is only three weeks away, but five days before that, the Congress has to pass the 2012 budget.  You and I both know how that's going to turn out, right?

Anyway, I was going to give you an analysis of the situation, when I ran across an article online.  The article appeared on yahoo.com, and it was written by Jay Newton-Small, of Time.com.  Jay says exactly what I was going to say - even with my voice, right down to the "You gotta love" near the end.  It's as if I discovered a kindred spirit.  If I get the author's approval, I'll reprint the whole article here.  For now, here's the link to the article.

As Congress Squabbles, Another Shutdown Looms

Read and enjoy.

FEMA does Congress' job for them, this time

That emergency budget bill finally passed.  Here's how it all came out.  The emergency budget bill got stuck in the Senate, where it was trapped by more politicking and grandstanding.  Read some of the outrageous stuff the Senators were saying, at Yahoo! News.

If that article, and others on CNN and other websites, are accurate, then it looks like nobody standing at the podium in the Senate chamber cared one way or the other about the looming government shutdown, or the disaster victims in the northeastern U.S.  They only cared about winning.  In their eyes, this budget bill had nothing to do with the good of the country or the fate of the disaster victims.  It had everything to do with political power - winning and losing.

Nobody was going to compromise on this.  The elected officials only wanted to engage in posturing, stonewalling, and name-calling.  It was Business As Usual.

And what hung in the balance, other than the poor lady in Vermont whose house was nothing but a naked frame with the wind blowing through, was funding to keep the Federal Emergency Management Agency running.  If this bill didn't pass, the federal government would shut down, including FEMA - and that lady in Vermont was depending on FEMA to help her.

(We can save for another time the debate on the merits of FEMA, or whether hurricane and earthquake victims should depend on federal agencies to help them recover.  That's peripheral to the crisis happening in Washington DC right now.)

Once more, to make it clear:  the fiscal year ends on September 30.  The problem was that FEMA would run out of funds before the end of the fiscal year, and this budget bill was an emergency bill to keep FEMA, and other agencies, running until then.  You may think it's only 3 days, but a lot of money passes through Washington's hands in 3 days.  If the U.S. government shuts down for one day, that's a big enough problem.

In the end, a compromise was reached.  It wasn't the Democrats.  It wasn't the Republicans.  It wasn't the Senate.  It wasn't the House of Representatives.

It was FEMA.

FEMA, not wanting to shut down (obviously), had a look at their accounts and figured out a way they could legally shuffle things so that they could make it through Friday.  Once they figured it out, they told the Senate leaders, who must have looked a bit confused and said, "Oh, okay then."  Shortly afterwards, the Senate voted 79-12 to approve it.  Now, according to Yahoo, it goes back to the House for a final rubber stamp.  Let's hope they can manage that.

Just so you know where I stand on this:  Our elected legislators in Washington DC have proven for the third time this year that when the chips are down, they can't legislate their way out of a wet paper bag.  If they can't complete a task this (relatively) simple, we cannot depend on them to achieve anything really, seriously important.  This Congress is totally dysfunctional, and anything they try to do is doomed to failure.

Dear Congressman: You did it again! Good grief, how stupid ARE you?

To all members of the Congress of the United States:

On Wednesday, September 21, the House of Representatives voted that all 435 of its members are idiots.  We're waiting to see if the Senate comes up with something similar.

Once again, a serious deadline looms:  the federal government will be out of money - operating funds, that is - on October 1, little more than a week from now.  Another emergency budget bill was presented for a vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday.  Forty-eight Tea Party Republicans voted against the bill because it didn't cut taxes.  (That's not what it was intended to do!  Idiots!)  Almost all Democrats voted against the bill because it didn't spend enough money.  (Haven't you learned?  That's the last thing we need to be doing right now: spending more money.  How do you think we got into this problem in the first place?  Idiots!)

And you, the empty-headed, drooling, mouth-breathing, slope-headed, beetle-browed, lawyers and millionaires, whom We The People naively elected to "represent" us in the Congress of the United States, you are back to Business as Usual.

Party politics.  Brinksmanship.  Obstructionism. Ultimatums.  Tantrums.  Narrowmindedness.  Selling of favors.  Catering to special interests.  Everything except the cooperation and compromise that we expect of you.  Didn't you MORONS learn ANYTHING from the debt-ceiling debacle?

It was a simple thing!  All you had to do was pass a bill!  You couldn't even do that!

Once again, you are going to wait until just before midnight on September 30 to do something that you are perfectly capable of doing right now, because you're too stubborn, too immature, and too fond of power.

Listen to me carefully.  I want you to remember these words.  The American people have lost all confidence in their Senators and their Representatives.  (This time, it's the Representatives' fault.  Senators, I'm sure your turn is coming.)  This November, and in the next five Novembers, We The People are going to show you what you can do with that power which you think you possess.  We are going to kick all of you out of Washington, D.C. and send you back home, where you won't cause any more trouble.  We will replace you with people who know what it's like to try to survive and keep a family together in these times, who know how to get something done.

You obviously don't know, and you apparently don't care.  And for that reason alone, you are unworthy to hold office.  You're all fired.

UPDATE, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23:  The House of Representatives stayed up past midnight, and finally got a version of the bill passed.  The vote went right down party lines, revealing that, even though they were able to pass the bill, all 435 members of the House of Representatives are still idiots.  Stupid.  Morons.  Mental disasters.  Buck-toothed jackasses, braying and kicking and blocking the trail.

The bill does contain a compromise:  $1 billion of a requested $3.6 billion spending increase for disaster aid now, and another $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2012, which starts October 1.  See, that wasn't so hard, was it?  And they even threw in some spending cuts to appease the Tea Partiers.

Today, the bill goes to the Senate, where the Senate is expected to vote to reject it.  As in the House, the vote will go right down party lines.  Like I said at the beginning of this post, today the United States Senate is going to vote that all 100 of its members are flaming idiots, just like their counterparts down the hall.  Here's why.  An unnamed aide to a Democratic Senator gives this hypocritical, two-faced, self-serving comment in a CNN article:

On Thursday night, senior Senate Democratic leadership aide said the party's caucus is united against Republican-tailored versions of the measure.  "We are looking for a real attempt to compromise, not just an attempt to appease their own people," the aide said.

Nobody in the Senate - on either side of the aisle - is interested in compromise, as they have made clear.  For either party to suggest that they are is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.  This is a do-nothing Congress.  All they can do is talk and talk, and they do way too much of that.  We The People want deeds, not words.

Once again, to all members of the Congress of the United States:  Today, the Senate will vote on whether or not you are idiots.  And the money's riding on a "yes" vote.

With the screeching sound of the Eurozone crashing and burning in the background, the whole world is watching you, the Congress of the United States.  Nobody is watching Europe.  They're all focused on Washington, and wondering whether a nation so gridlocked, and so mismanaged, can long endure.