Catastrophe - Dick Morris [1]
Let’s face it: his policies are a catastrophe, and we need to stop him.
It’s also time to take our country back from the Democratic Congress, which has undergone an embarrassing transformation from a do-nothing body into a rubber-stamp annex of the Obama White House: 535 elected officials who didn’t even bother to read the details before they authorized almost a trillion dollars in stimulus spending that their constituents will have to pay for. A Democratic Congress that, in the middle of the gravest financial disaster since the Great Depression, bargained for billions in additional outrageous earmark spending programs to please their contributors and lobbyist friends, without a look back at the needs of their constituents. Just to whet your appetite (or, should we say, spoil it), here are a few of the worst expenditures of taxpayer money contained in that stimulus bill:
$200,000 to fund a tattoo removal clinic in California2
$190,000 for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Wyoming3
$2,192,000 for the Center for Grape Genetics in Geneva, NY4
$1,791,000 to fund Swine Odor & Manure Management Research in Iowa5
The malfeasance of the Congress is in itself a catastrophe. We need to clean house (and Senate) and replace the self-serving automatons with elected officials who genuinely understand that their job—their only purpose—is to serve the people who elect them, not the people who pay for their campaigns. People who understand that they, too, will be thrown out if we see more of the same. It’s about time we had representatives in Washington who root for the people back home, instead of conspiring against them with their generous lobbyist pals.
On a recent episode of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, an organizer of a tea party protest in St. Louis indicated that members of Congress had been invited to the event in order to give them a chance to meet with their “board of directors”—the voters who elected them and who should be able to advise them about the needs of the district. She had it right. That’s how it should be, and it’s a good way to think about Congress: we hire them, we pay them, and they should be accountable to us. Unfortunately, most of them don’t think that way at all. The only boards of directors that our representatives routinely meet with are the corporate ones, who decide who their political action committees will contribute to.
We desperately need to take back Congress and make it accountable to us, the voters—not the banks, credit card companies, defense contractors, and other special interests that have been running the show for way too long.
Can we do it? Well, to quote our president: Yes, we can!
There’s a lot more we can do to make Congress more accountable and more constituent-friendly. One important step would be to work hard to keep the political dynasties from taking up space in Congress. It’s not just that it’s usually their family name recognition that gets them elected; it’s that the dynastic politicians come with a special kind of baggage: generations of hangers-on, people who have been given favors and jobs over the years who watch out for them and make it difficult for insurgents to take them on successfully at the polls. You know the names we’re talking about: Kennedy, Dodd, Clinton, Dole, to name a few.
While we’re at it, we should look at the growing number of spouses of members of the House and Senate who are invited to sit on corporate boards—and paid very well for doing so. Is