The Return of the Swamp … uh … Congress Thing

Hide the women and children! Better yet, hide your money and your liberty; Congress is back. Yes, that Disaster on the Potomac is ready for a repeat engagement.

Unfortunately, on Tuesday, September 8, Congress returned to Capital Hill. That is music to the ears of liberal Democrat members of Congress. They have not had a pleasant August break. They had envisioned going out among the ignorant, docile masses and making Obamacare sound so wonderful that the people would beg them to implement it immediately. Instead, the people they met at the town halls were intelligent, informed and incensed and proceeded to tear Obamacare and these members of Congress apart. So they look forward to returning to Washington where they are referred to as "distinguished colleague" and not what they truly are.

Personally, I've had a great August watching all this. I don't know when I've been prouder of the American people. But it was difficult not to have a bit of sympathy for these Congress members at the town halls with their mouths agape and a deer-in-the-headlights look on their face.

One sad note, however, over the August break, the "liberal lion of the Senate" Ted Kennedy passed. Now, I don't wish to speak ill of the dead but I feel I must correct some of the pundits who have suggested that Kennedy was a great legislator because of his forty-seven years of service and the fact that over twenty-five hundred pieces of legislation bear his name. His length of time in the Senate is not something to be celebrated. In fact, we need see what can be done to insure that it doesn't happen again. What has he accomplished other than hold office or run for office? (Oh yea, now I remember. Chappaquiddick.) There should be no place in our republic for the professional politician because at some point in time the purpose moves from serving their state to serving themselves. In addition, lots of legislation is no indication of a great legislator, only a busy one. In general, congressional legislation causes people to lose liberty or property or both. Show me a legislator who has been instrumental in the repeal of twenty-five hundred pieces of legislation and returning that power to the states or the people and I'll show you a great legislator. As the great patriot Thomas Paine noted, "That government is best which governs least."

Congress has been out for a month and even the President took a "vacation" for a week and what happened? Not much. The sun came up every morning, the wind blew, the birds sang and the grass grew. We all (well, most of us) got up every morning and went to work, did our job and went home in the evening. The police and firemen were still on duty, water still flowed and the garbage was collected. Fuel stations still had gasoline, the malls were open and the grocery store shelves remained stocked. Heck, I even went to the doctor during the congressional break, and without Obamacare! In other words, our lives went on normally even without these crackpots in Congress. During a winter storm you often hear the radio or television announcer say, "All non-essential government personnel should not report to work." Think about that statement. That means there are government employees that we can get along without. Does that include members of Congress? It must; we just got along for an entire month without them. That's about as non-essential as it gets.

Am I saying we should do away with Congress? No. However, our Founding Fathers put together a "grand experiment in self-government," meaning that the people who govern us should be us or just like us. They should be people with the same hopes and dreams and concerns and fears as we have. Is that what we have today? For the most part, we have elite politicians who were either born into politics or trained their whole lives to be a politician and they have come to think the world revolves around them. Either that or they have been there so long that they have lost sight of the America outside the beltway. I'm not just picking on the Democrats; it's true on both sides of the aisle. So, what I am suggesting we do away with are these self-important, self-aggrandizing nanny tyrants who think they know what is better for us than we do.