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Anatomy of How Congress Works (or Doesn't Work)
Posted by Pile
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 Rolling Stone has produced an epic outline of the behind-the-scenes deals involved in getting bills passed in the U.S. Government and the story is informative and downright frightening. When one discovers the handouts their tax dollars are paying for, such as $100,000 for a single street light, and the unbridaled cronyism and corporate control in government, you may never look at Congress the same again.
...When Rep. Chris Smith complained about Bush's policy toward veterans, he was relieved of his seat as the Veterans' Committee chairman. When Joel Hefley locked horns with Dennis Hastert during the Tom DeLay ethics flap, Hefley lost his spot as the House Ethics Committee chairman.
...The Rules Committee is supposed to wait out a three-day period before sending the bill to the House, ostensibly in order to give the members a chance to read the bill. The three-day period is only supposed to be waived in case of emergency. However, the Rules Committee of DeLay and Dreier waives the three-day period as a matter of routine. This forces members of Congress to essentially cast blind yes-or-no votes to bills whose contents are likely to be an absolute mystery to them.
...The Export-Import bank loan was a policy so dumb and violently opposed to American interests that lawmakers who voted for it had serious trouble coming up with a plausible excuse for approving it. In essence, the U.S. was giving $5 billion to a state-subsidized British utility (Westinghouse is a subsidiary of British Nuclear Fuels) to build up the infrastructure of our biggest trade competitor (CHINA), along the way sharing advanced nuclear technology with a Chinese conglomerate that had, in the past, shared nuclear know-how with Iran and Pakistan.
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It was a fairy-tale political season for George W. Bush, and it seemed like no one in the world noticed. Amid bombs in London, bloodshed in Iraq, a missing blonde in Aruba and a scandal curling up on the doorstep of Karl Rove, Bush's Republican Party quietly celebrated a massacre on Capitol Hill. Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Washington Insiders Club -- an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill -- breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time.
Bush's summer bills were extraordinary pieces of legislation, broad in scope, transparently brazen and audaciously indulgent. They gave an energy industry drowning in the most obscene profits in its history billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks, including $2.9 billion for the coal industry. The highway bill set new standards for monstrous and indefensibly wasteful spending, with Congress allocating $100,000 for a single traffic light in Canoga Park, California, and $223 million for the construction of a bridge linking the mainland an Alaskan island with a population of just fifty.
It was a veritable bonfire of public money, and it raged with all the brilliance of an Alabama book-burning. And what fueled it all were the little details you never heard about. The energy bill alone was 1,724 pages long. By the time the newspapers reduced this Tolstoyan monster to the size of a single headline announcing its passage, only a very few Americans understood that it was an ambitious giveaway to energy interests. But the drama of the legislative process is never in the broad strokes but in the bloody skirmishes and power plays that happen behind the scenes.
To understand the breadth of Bush's summer sweep, you had to watch the hand-fighting at close range. You had to watch opposition gambits die slow deaths in afternoon committee hearings, listen as members fell on their swords in exchange for favors and be there to see hordes of lobbyists rush in to reverse key votes at the last minute. All of these things I did -- with the help of a tour guide.
Nobody knows how this place is run," says Rep. Bernie Sanders. "If they did, they'd go nuts."
...Every time Congress is ordered to clean up its lobbyist culture, its responses come off like leprechaun tricks. For instance, when the Lobby Disclosure Act of 1995 ordered the House and the Senate to create an electronic lobbyist registry system, so that the public could use the latest technology to keep track of Washington's 34,000-plus lobbyists and whom they work for, the two houses only half-complied.
The secretary of the Senate created an electronic database, all right, but what a database: The system was little more than a giant computerized pile of downloadable scanned images of all the individual registration forms and semiannual reports. The Senate system, however, was a significant improvement over the House system. The House responded to the 1995 law by entirely ignoring it.
All of Washington seems to be in on the lobbyist leprechaun game. News even leaked that corporations had managed to convince the local sports teams, the Wizards and the Capitals, to create special courtside and/or rinkside tickets. The tickets would not be available to the general public but would have an official list price of $49.50 and could be purchased by corporate customers. Why the low list price? Because congressional rules prohibit gifts to congressmen with a cost above fifty dollars. |
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Posted by anon on 2005-08-15 15:40:38 | BSAlert - you're as ignorant as Matt ... you need a BS Alert for your blog...
Ay caramba! The ignorance about basis civics just boggles ... Matt Taibbi's story for Rolling Stone on how Congress works, concludes:
"Taken all together, the whole thing is an ingenious system for inhibiting progress and the popular will. The deck is stacked just enough to make sure that nothing ever changes. But just enough is left to chance to make sure that hope never completely dies out. And who knows, maybe it evolved that way for a reason."
"nothing ever changes", which is why we still have slavery, right Matt? ...
Congress didn't "evolve" that way. Congress was "designed" that way. Matt, did you take high school civics or American history?. Did your editor? Have you ever read the U.S. Constitution? Is your story what passes for informed commentary about how Congress works?
http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#A1Sec7
U.S. Constitution, Article I., Section 7, Revenue Bills, Legislative Process, Presidential Veto
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_62.html
The Federalist Papers, No. 62: "...a senate, as a second branch of the legislative assembly, distinct from, and dividing the power with, a first, must be in all cases a salutary check on the government. It doubles the security to the people, by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy, where the ambition or corruption of one would otherwise be sufficient."
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_73.html
The Federalist Papers, No. 72: "The propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights, and to absorb the powers, of the other departments, has been already suggested and repeated; the insufficiency of a mere parchment delineation of the boundaries of each, has also been remarked upon; and the necessity of furnishing each with constitutional arms for its own defense, has been inferred and proved. From these clear and indubitable principles results the propriety of a negative, either absolute or qualified, in the Executive, upon the acts of the legislative branches. Without the one or the other, the former would be absolutely unable to defend himself against the depredations of the latter. He might gradually be stripped of his authorities by successive resolutions, or annihilated by a single vote. And in the one mode or the other, the legislative and executive powers might speedily come to be blended in the same hands. If even no propensity had ever discovered itself in the legislative body to invade the rights of the Executive, the rules of just reasoning and theoretic propriety would of themselves teach us, that the one ought not to be left to the mercy of the other, but ought to possess a constitutional and effectual power of self defense.
But the power in question has a further use. It not only serves as a shield to the Executive, but it furnishes an additional security against the enaction of improper laws. It establishes a salutary check upon the legislative body, calculated to guard the community against the effects of faction, precipitancy, or of any impulse unfriendly to the public good, which may happen to influence a majority of that body."
http://www.congresslink.org/print_expert_virtualcongress.htm
"'Virtual Congress' Woudl Weaken Deliberative Process," by Rep. David Drier (R-CA), Roll Call, December 20, 2001: "The founding fathers purposefully conceived Congress as a slow-moving, inefficient institution. Congress is not meant to react to the public emotions and demands of the moment. Indeed, by its very design, it serves to check the popular passions and develop legislation through a deliberative, consensus-building process." |
cut-and-paste vs cut-and-paste
Posted by Pile on 2005-08-16 03:31:51 | | Why are you calling anyone here "Matt?" Some kind of Drudge reference? I just reported on the Rolling Stone story and found it fascinating. Congrats! You can point out a few laws that get through Congress. That doesn't disprove the contention that the system has many flaws. Your stupid logic notwithstanding. |
| Posted by Demosthenes on 2005-08-18 18:32:06 | | i believe hes talking too his friend of the rolling stone, the magazine, or something, it doesnt make a whole lot of sense |
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