Anyone who has ever driven in Washington DC during rush hour, especially when parkways take on a literal meaning, know they never want to drive there during rush hour again if they do not have to. Washington gridlock traffic, as bad as it is, is a metaphor for legislative bills trying to pass between the US House and Senate.
Tag Archive | 17th Amendment
Government Shut Down
As Congress gears up for another fight over funding the government, the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare, once again takes center stage. In the funding process, only the House of Representatives is authorized to originate bills raising revenue for the government and the House has approved a bill that would fund the general operations of the government, but not ObamaCare. For this bill to become law, the Senate must also pass it and the President must sign what was passed by both houses of Congress. So if the government were to experience another shut down whose fault is it?
US Senate’s Brain Hemorrhaging Clout
Adam Liptak, in his March 11, 2013 New York Times article, Smaller States Find Outsize Clout Growing in Senate, makes a logical argument, about smaller State’s having disproportionate electoral power in the Senate, based on false premises.
Are all Laws Necessary?
If anyone were to take the time to read the Federal Register of Laws, in which all laws passed by Congress are recorded since its first session in 1789, and they read an average of 700 pages per week, it would take them over 25,000 years to read them all. This number becomes even more daunting every two years, since Congress passes an average of 2,000 bills during each session. In light of this impossible task, the old adage “ignorance of the law is no excuse” is completely unreasonable. As a matter of fact, this quantity of laws makes unwitting lawbreakers out of every person living in America. Consequently, to claim all these laws are necessary is either a gross exaggeration or an outright lie, because in many cases Congress has exceeded their constitutional authority in passing them.