After America - Mark Steyn [37]
Charlie Rangel has been there since 1970. Even his car has been there a long time. Apparently in Congress you’re not meant to keep a vehicle in the House parking garage for more than six weeks without moving it. Rangel parked his Mercedes in one of the most “highly coveted” spaces in 2003, put a tarp on it, and left it there for six years.70 If only we could have done that with him and the rest of the legislative class. The chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, Rangel was the man who wrote the nation’s tax laws yet did not consider himself bound by them. So, for example, he had a rental property in the Dominican Republic but did not declare the income he received from it. Good for him. Would you like to have a rental property in a foreign jurisdiction and keep all the dough to yourself? Too bad. If you were to do it, there wouldn’t be enough money to maintain our rulers in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. Rangel isn’t rich by congressional standards, but he is in the happy position of so many people one encounters in “public service” who rarely if ever have cause to write a personal check. After the congressman’s grotesque selfpitying ululations on the House floor for the injustice of being “censured” for his conduct, Kerry Picket of the Washington Times invited him to imagine what punishment the “average American citizen” would have received had he done what Rangel did. “Please,” the congressman told her. “I don’t deal in average American citizens.”71
If only. Pete Stark has been in the House of Representatives since 1973. For all those decades, he has sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. What’s in there? Let Pete explain it. In 2010, running for his nineteenth term in Congress, Stark was asked about the constitutionality of ObamaCare. He replied: “I think there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.”72
His lady questioner wanted to be sure she’d understood: “Is your answer that they can do anything?”
Stark responded: “The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.”
He’s right. If the Commerce Clause can be stretched to require you to make arrangements for your health care that meet the approval of the national government, then the republic is dead.
What’s the very least that we’re entitled to expect of our legislators? That they know what they’re legislating. John Conyers has been in the House of Representatives since 1965. Like most representatives, he didn’t bother reading the 3,000-page health-care bill he voted for, because, as he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” sighed Congressman Conyers. “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”73
Okay, so it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. He’s got wall-to-wall aides to do that for him. When you’re rejiggering more than one-sixth of the economy and incurring massive future debt, that’s the sort of minor task you can outsource to a flunkey. It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Representative Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit.74 Perhaps if the ObamaCare bill had had a centerfold of Kathleen Sebelius on page 1,872, or maybe a “Girls of the Health & Human Services Death Panel” pictorial ...
Two-thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the