Buying all those Lexus hybrid patrol cars for the Beverly Hills cops last year was awfully generous of you. You didn’t know you did that? Odds are neither did your congressman when he voted on it.
The Beverly Hills cops get to cruise around in luxury sedans thanks to an obscure provision buried in the 1,000-plus-page energy bill passed last year by Congress. It was just one of many such provisions lurking in that bill.
A week later, an exasperated North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx offered this observation: “We were given the energy bill 15 hours before we voted on it, a 1,000-plus page bill, and it had all kinds of problems with it. Buying Lexus hybrids for the Beverly Hills police, many, many things in there that the American people would not approve of. …”
The stark truth is our senators and representatives routinely vote on monster bills about which they don’t have a clue because they never read them. Day in and day out, they vote blindly to raise our taxes, waste our hard-earned money and subsidize special interests.
They’re not alone, of course, since typically nobody else has read the bills, either. That includes those swarms of legislative aides and the talking-head journalists pronouncing authoritatively on measures they have only read parts of, if at all. It’s just another way official Washington cons the people beyond the Potomac who pay for everything here.
There are hundreds of behind-the-scenes operators, however, who know very well what is contained in those bills. These are the legions of K Street lobbyists, nonprofit activists and other political insiders who frequently help congressional staffers write legislation.
Examiner Columnist Timothy P. Carney recently exposed a blatant, but all-too-familiar example of this phenomenon when he reported that key provisions of that multibillion-dollar mortgage industry bailout bill were written by Bank of America lobbyists. Bank of America bought Countrywide Financial before the mortgage crisis heated up and so stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars from the bailout.
I’m sure it’s purely coincidental that Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., has been receiving $1,000 per week in campaign contributions from Bank of America’s executives and political action committee since taking over the panel.
Given these facts, nobody should be surprised that year in and year out, Congress approves thousands of earmarks and other provisions that may well benefit family members, former staffers, political contributors and favored special interests. Bad things happen in government when nobody is watching.
Rafael DeGennaro of the Citizen Century Institute points out that this is a bipartisan problem going back several decades and is exemplified by those massive continuing resolutions Congress routinely approves at the last minute in order to keep the government operating.
Such measures are always bursting with legislative mischief. DeGennaro offers the reasonable suggestion that Congress delay voting until the public has at least 72 hours to examine the fine print of every proposed law.
Admittedly, nobody wants to pore over 1,000-plus pages of legislative mumbo jumbo that makes sense only to those who wrote it. But shrewdly conniving lobbyists and ideological paladins are only symptoms of the root problem here.
Big Government is the problem. We get 1,000-plus pages of legislation that nobody reads because there is no corner of American life that is exempt from suffocation by bureaucracy, litigation and regulation.
It never ceases to amaze me to hear my liberal friends bewailing the supposedly evil influence of K Street and money in politics. What on earth did they expect when they made government power so pervasive that virtually nothing in America can be designed, manufactured, marketed, bought, sold, occupied, consumed, returned or disposed of without prior permission, approval or supervision from Washington?
Government is so pervasive that we can’t even go to the bathroom without using a federally approved toilet!
So, even if they did read the bills before voting on them, Congress can’t accomplish much because it has far too much to do to keep Leviathan going. It’s like fast food and heart disease — demands for ever more government services and programs are the cholesterol that is creating sclerosis in the political heart of America.
As with the human body, heart disease left untreated can be fatal to the body politic.
