An Explanation
There are a lot of good things in the Water Bill – Gulf Coast recovery money, levees for New Orleans and Lake Okeechobee, the Indian River Lagoon and Everglades restoration work – to name a few of local concern, but they should have been approved on their own. The problem is that anytime there is an appropriation that seems to benefit a particular area, it must be loaded down with garbage from other areas to get passed in Congress. This is wrong.
Each of the items I pointed out are, in fact, Federal issues, not local. They involve Federal lands, and in the case of the levees, Federal screw-ups. The Federal government injects itself into an area, allows things to get messed up, and then tells the local governments to clean up the mess. They won’t regulate, refuse to permit the states to regulate, and then disclaim any ownership of the problem. This is why they aren’t trusted in a lot of the country. Of course, a study would so that the GOP is generally in power at the “birth” of these disasters, and keeps claiming that it is government action that caused them without mentioning that they are responsible for those actions.
4 comments
It’s still an open question whether we will be allowed to fix the federal government by electing a new administration and candidates for congress, or whether the whole organization is so far beyond repair we will have to repudiate it and start over.
Unless these people start doing some real work, no one who is currently in the Congress may have an easy run for their seat.
My Mother… actually, no, my Founding Fathers… told me there would be days like this.
To an extent, they foresaw some of the problems and did their best to preempt them. None of them could foresee our King George, but they had their own to contend with, and I think that what we have experienced lately would not surprise them very much. They might, though, be aghast at the weakness of opposition leadership in its puny non-defense of basic American Constitutional principles.
whig, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the design that would not sustain a far better implementation than this one. If elections still work, I wouldn’t mind seeing a “throw all the bums out” election, a more or less fresh start under the same framework. If they don’t still work, or if we don’t succeed in an effective restart of constitutional government, we may have to retake ownership of that other founding document, the one that predates the Constitution by about 11 years or so.
(Now my head aches…)
Pelosi and Reid act like they are minority leaders and need to compromise. If they can’t act like they are in charge, they aren’t.