The Kindergarten Congress

By Alan Caruba

The Founders in their genius created a Constitution that was intended to slow down the process of legislation precisely because they wanted the new nation to avoid being destroyed by the passions and trends of the day.

So what do we have today, a month away from the largest transfer of power in Congress since 1946?

We have a Senate being asked to vote on whether, not when, to extend the tax rates that have been in existence for the past nine years.

We have no indication of a resolution to continue funding the operation of government.

We have extraneous issues such as whether Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should be imposed on a military, a large portion of which do not want to have openly gay members in their midst.

We have seen a vote allegedly on food safety that will destroy yet another segment of the economy, the small, usually family-owned farm.

The majority leader of the Senate wants a “Dream Act” amnesty program that would fund the college education of the children of illegal immigrants. And while this is being contemplated, since January 2000 census data shows that 13.1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, have arrived in the nation. In 2008 and 2009, 2.4 million new immigrants settled in the United States at the same time that 8.2 million jobs were lost.

Across our southern border Mexico is in a state of anarchy that threatens States from Texas to California, but the present administration is suing Arizona for taking action to respond to the threat.

We have seen the White House push for approval of a critical nuclear weapons treaty that clearly needs to be subjected to further thought before we allow the Russians to decide how many such weapons we can have.

We have an Environmental Protection Agency threatening to ignore Congress and initiate an authority it does not have, the imposition of regulatory control over carbon dioxide emissions. This would give it control over all energy use and thus control over our lives and the future of our economy.

The present Congress, until December 31, is filled with defeated Representatives and Senators, or those about to retire. It should be enacting only such legislation as will maintain the government until a newly-elected Congress takes office in 2011.

And we have a President who sat down this week with the present and future leaders of Congress for two hours in the White House and resolved absolutely NOTHING.

If we replaced the Democrats in Congress with randomly selected kindergarten children, we could do no worse than the ones who forced so-called Medicare reform, Obamacare, on a majority of Americans who expressed their opposition in “town hall” meetings and mass marches.

We have a government-owned automobile company producing obscenely priced electric cars that can barely travel beyond forty miles despite a massive infrastructure that will ensure that gasoline powered automobiles can transport Americans anywhere they want to go.

We have a Congress and administration that, in two years, inflated the nation’s debt beyond that of every previous combined Congress in the nation’s history.

Beyond our borders there are U.S. carrier groups in the Yellow Sea of China and the Gulf of Persia because we have never resolved to take action against a criminal cartel called North Korea and we lack the will to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities even though the entire Middle East would support the action.

Meanwhile, millions of homes in America are over-valued, forcing foreclosures when a rational reevaluation is called for. We have an official 9.6 unemployment rate that is in reality close to twenty million unemployed. Two million of them will lose unemployment compensation that has been provided for two years with which to find employment.

There cannot, however, be renewed employment until the income tax issue is resolved by the simple action of extending present rates.

We have a government that told us that the last Recession ended in 2009! By any rational definition, the U.S. is in a Depression.

Billions squandered. Trillions borrowed. It is a national death spiral that must be set right, but which is imperiled by a succession of potential presidential vetoes.

© Alan Caruba, 2010