Getting half of a political wish?

[unixronin]

CNN carries a report of a provision that was found buried in the small print of the omnibus spending bill now before Congress that would have allowed the chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees, or their agents, to examine the tax returns of any American.  The buried language was reportedly found by Democratic staffers in the Senate after the House passed the bill.  The Senate has removed the language and has declared it will not pass the bill until the House has time to pass a similar fix; in the meantime, a stopgap funding measure good through December 3 has been passed.

Now, remember a little while back I mentioned that what America really needed was a true moderate ticket?  Specifically, I wished it were possible to get John McCain and Bill Bradley on a Presidential ticket together.  Well, if memory serves, Bill Bradley quit politics in disgust.  But take a look at what John McCain had to say about this (emphasis mine):

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said in a written statement that "The Republicans' lack of transparency and willingness to abuse their power is undermining democracy.  It should be of grave concern to all Americans that their privacy could be invaded by such an outrageous provision."

Sen. John McCain said Sunday that the episode points up the problems created when Congress passes gigantic spending bills at the end of a session, before anyone has time to read them.

"If there is ever a graphic example of the broken system that we now have, that certainly has to be it," the Arizona Republican said on NBC's "Meet The Press."  "How many other provisions didn't we find in that 1,000-page bill?"

Yeah, quite the contrast, huh?  Nancy Pelosi jumps right into an accusatory slam against the Republicans, before anyone even knows who inserted the language; John McCain goes directly to the problem and openly acknowledges that the whole system is broken and needs to be fixed.

I now observe, as a final note, that NPR was mentioning the other day that John McCain is rumored to be a strong contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.

Now there's a Presidential nomination I can get behind ... 2008 may be the first time in 20 years that America doesn't have to choose between two evils.

Comments

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Fixing this properly is hard.

One easy fix: remove the limit of 435 members in the House. More eyes means more scrutiny, one hopes.

The obvious fixes of "bills on one subject" or "limited length" both have problems.

Some law needs to be long, in order to be grindingly precise.

And drawing circles around a subject is hard and arbitrary. It'll just change the parameters for log rolling (http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/logrolling.html), but not the practice.

In the end, the Congress, as a political class, has decided to operate things this way, and unless and until We The People object by throwing the bastards out, it'll stay that way.

Worse, the problem is always talked about in terms of Congress as a whole, "but my representative is OK." This is why CA voters enacted term limits, and yet they keep on re-electing incumbents. It's not clear to me that change has helped yet: need to wait at least three cycles after the bastards who it was enacted to flush get flushed.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. (http://www.bartleby.com/73/424.html)

off topic

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

yay photo! :-) And finally figured one way you found unixronin. tague who I've only met once and that was by accident at the Weird Al Yankovic concert almost 6 years ago now.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. Thomas Babington, Lord Macauley.

"...From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship.

"The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith, from faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency, from complacency to selfishness, from selfishness to apathy, from apathy to dependency, and from dependency back again into bondage. (http://www.babcom.com/alaric/quotations.html#macauley)

I know it well.... and yes, you've hit the nail on the head. As long as people keep re-electing the crooks, they'll be governed by crooks.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Apropos of that quote file and your ending comment, here's a bit of dialog from Married to the Mob (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6301216229/102-4009501-5402526?v=glance&vi=quotes-trivia)

Angela de Marco: God, you people work just like the mob! There's no difference!

FBI Regional Director Franklin: Oh, there's a big difference, Mrs. de Marco. The mob is run by murdering, thieving, lying, cheating psychopaths. We work for the President of the United States of America.

That got a roar from the crowd when I saw it in the theatre.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Oh, one more thing. I got the Tytler quote from here (http://www.clock.org/~fair/opinion/taxes.html).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

How interesting. We have a conflict of attribution. Bartleby says "attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee"; I've always seen it attributed to Thomas Babington, Lord Macauley.