GRIFF JENKINS, FOX CORRESPONDENT: If it's August, it's town hall season, and some brave members of Congress actually held them in 2013.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When is this government going to come clean with the American people and tell us what this secret law says, how it's being secretly interpreted, how it's being secretly implemented, and what it means to every person in this room!
REP. ANDY HARRIS (R), MARYLAND: I am very, very worried about what the NSA is doing.
We're going to find out that the NSA was not complying with the law. I don't know about you, but I'm offended by the government knowing the record of every person, of having access to every person I call.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... now they have all these embassies closed, and they still don't know what's going to happen there!
HARRIS: You have not seen the end of Benghazi. You have definitely not seen the end of the IRS investigation. There's no question you're not seeing the end of that.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Innocent people, if you will, are getting slammed by partisan politics.
HARRIS: Let me ask you a question...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: People are going to be losing (INAUDIBLE)
HARRIS: I think we heard some discontent with what's going on, with not taking care of the problems in this country. And I think you heard a lot of criticism of the president here tonight. You heard some criticism of Congress. You heard about the issues that people are worried about. People are frustrated. They're seeing an economy that's not recovering. They're seeing a president that is sitting on the sidelines, literally playing golf, literally fiddling while Rome is burning.
EUGENE CRAIG iii, MARYLAND RESIDENT: We do not feel that John Boehner effectively represents us. I mean, as the voice of the House of Representatives, I think John Boehner could do a much better job.
ED HUNTER, MARYLAND RESIDENT: I want Boehner up there defying this guy and saying, We're going to [file for] impeachment with you if you do not start obeying the laws!
(CROSSTALK)
HUNTER: Listen, we're dying out here because you guys are being nice guys! This is not a Boy Scout meeting!
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's not! And you're acting like Boy Scouts! You've got to fight!
HUNTER: Because we're losing the country! I want to see more defiance!
We've seen this dozens of times, where Boehner will not -- will not fight or McConnell will not fight, where Paul Ryan and the debate with Joe Biden sit there and sat there and took it from him! And we're -- the American people are putting our hopes on these people to defend us, and we get nothing!
Via: FoxNation (thanks to BB).
Why we collectively tolerate the GOP leadership on AT ALL is a fact very damning on all of us. We'll collectively get what we collectively deserve.
ReplyDeleteWho would give a dime to the GOP, other than the Democrat national committee?
Town Halls are great in theory, but- they're really about asking for MORE of something. The assumption of town halls is "government gives to you what you demand", and for THAT, government has to be big enough to do the giving.
ReplyDeleteSimply put, we citizens cannot expect even the best-intentioned Senator or Congressman, or any given group of them, to be able to whittle our federal bureaucracy down to a manageable size. We've got the whole Civil Service apparatus; we've got more alphabet-soup regulatory agencies than we can name; we've got the Cabinet Departments (there are 15 of them according to Google); we've got Medicare and Social Security and now Healthcare controlled by the Federal Government.
Remember that government is organized power. Power seeks to expand and extend itself. Power does NOT act against its own interests. (That's just one of the "givens" of this world.)
Give up the idea of "electing better people". By the time a newbie has done enough glad-handing and speechifying and networking to have some influence; after he's cheerfully done his party's grunt work long enough that he gets appointed to some
committee where he can start to make his voice heard; ... you'll find he's been swayed by his "build bridges not fences" "go along to get along" "one hand washes the other" colleagues.
People adapt to their local culture, and after a couple of years of Bright-Lights, Big-City, Important-People, the folks back home in Podunk County are no longer "my people" (despite the noble pretense our "duly-elected"s make during their Town Halls).
The short version is: it's too late. We need another New World to go to, where we can start over with our Glorious Experiment (with a few modifications, now that we have learned some of the things that can go wrong in two hundred years of a free, open, and tolerant society).
Absent a New World, we have to wait for the current power structure to implode.
That's not so far-fetched: When the debt dominoes start falling over in Europe, we'll crash here as well.
So, be ready with your ideas for Continental Congress 2.0. We may get the chance to rewrite the Constitution sooner than you think.
@Nonny -
ReplyDeleteMark Levin's new book "The Liberty Amendments" appears to fit the bill.
The first chapter is available on line and is well worth checking out.
Let me know what you think.
Andy Harris is actually one of the good guys. He consistently votes as a Constitutional Fiscal Conservative
ReplyDelete