On the COVER of the Rolling Stone!!!!!! part 2

[donheld]

There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."



http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12055360/cover_story_time_to_go_inside_the_worst_congress_ever
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/18/the-worst-congress-ever/

[Atman]

1. I have that issue on my desk

GREAT article! And it isn't ALL republicans on the Top Ten Worst Congressmen list, either...William Jefferson made the list, too, although the description of his 100,000 bribe and commandeering of a Coast Guard helicopter during Katrina, while pretty disgusting behavior, pales in comparison to most of the others on the list. I had never even heard of a couple of them, but the shit they're doing is un-fucking-believable. If you think you know how bad it is, you're probably only half right. There is some seriously effed up wheeling, dealing, strongarming, bribery and outright unmitigated extortion these guys are doing as part of their regular business modus operandi, and no one says or does a damned thing!

This is one of the best RS "exposés" in a long time!

.

[blondeatlast]

2. Still doubting why you should vote straight ticket Dem in national races?

If you read NOTHING else prior to election day, read this:

It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show them up, pee in their faces. Washington was once a chummy fraternity in which members of both parties golfed together, played in the same pickup basketball games, probably even shared the same mistresses. Now it is a one-party town -- and congressional business is conducted accordingly, as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply does not exist.

American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule by consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show, human pieces of stagecraft -- a fact the Republicans don't even bother to conceal.

The entire article is required reading. It outlines well how Congress is SUPPOSED to work and has thrown a rod since being hijacked by the RRR.

K&R!

[SammyWinstonJack]

4. knr

[tanyev]

3. K & R

[ima_sinnic]

5. k&r

[durrrty libby]

6. K &R

[blondeatlast]

7. KICKETY-KICK-KICK-KICK, AND DAMMIT, E-MAIL IT

TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW AND EVEN SOME YOU DON'T.

(Pardon the shouting, it's just that this should be required reading for every voter on both sides of the fence).

[donheld]

8. Kick

You must read this