Now THIS is just plain CRIMINAL!

From Human Events

CONGRESS WORKS TO REPEAL OBAMACARE… FOR THEMSELVES

Is anyone truly surprised by this news, outside of a few dead-end Obama voters? There’s no way Congress was going to be part of the “train wreck” it inflicted upon the rest of America, to borrow retiring Democrat senator (and ObamaCare author) Max Baucus’ memorable phrase. The most urgent item on the American agenda is the full repeal of ObamaCare, but the political class is more interested in repealing it for themselves, as reported by Politico:

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

As has been suggested here before, perhaps it really is time a bill was passed to start stringing these Capital Hill sleazeballs up from the lampposts! Unlike their predecessors of yore, these filthy creatures don’t give a damn about the country they have been elected to serve, not at all; These corrupt lowlifes are only in it for themselves, and to hell with we, the people.

The whole story is here.

From The Hill:

Secretary of State John Kerry had hoped to offer considerably more aid to Egypt than the $250 million he announced during his trip to Cairo but was blocked by Congress, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said.

“This is not the aid package that the administration wanted to announce,” Royce told The Hill. The administration wanted to release a “larger sum,” but bowed to the wishes of Royce’s committee as well as congressional appropriators, he said.
Royce wouldn’t say how much Kerry had hoped to announce, but the State Department has been pressing Congress to greenlight $450 million in direct aid since last fall.

“Our approach is not the full-throttle administration approach of delivering all the aid that they wanted to deliver, but rather a measured approach of tying tranches to results as it pertains to the peace treaty with Israel, to cooperation with respect to smuggling [into Gaza] and with respect to economic reforms to guarantee civil rights and the rule of law within Egypt,” he said. “That’s the pressure that we’re applying.”

Of course the Obama Administration wanted to give the farm to the anti-Israel, anti-U.S. (as we’ll have confirmed for us once the new Islamofascist-run Egyptian government has all they can get from us and then shows its true colors, just like the rest of Obama’s “Arab Spring” friends) Muslim Brotherhood. Luckily, some right thinkers in Congress are doing their job and preventing the “enemy of the state” at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from going whole hog.

The forme chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), and the chairwoman of the appropriations subpanel on foreign aid, Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), placed a hold on the money out of concern over the Muslim Brotherhood government’s democratic credentials and pro-U.S. stance. A Granger staffer said the chairwoman has been in continuous contact with the State Department over the funds and acquiesced to lifting her hold on the $190 million slice that Kerry announced.

…democratic credentials and pro-U.S. stance!???

Yeah, sure, of course…

Read the entire piece here.

This question occurs to me after first learning that the House Republicans actually blocked a vote on Americans’ security being threatened by a Chuck Hagel appointment to the post of Secretary of Defense, (Whew, talk about close calls), and then the House Republicans foiling Obama and the Democrats’ ridiculous attempt to gain pay raises for the mostly useless, overbearing bureaucracy comprising the U.S. Government.

The House voted Friday to freeze the pay of federal workers for the third year in a row over the objections of congressional Democrats and the Obama administration.
Members voted 261-154 in favor of the bill, which would also lock in a pay freeze for members of Congress. It exempts people serving in the military.
The bill won significant support from Democrats — 43 voted for it — while 10 Republicans voted against it.
The legislation is an attempt to override President Obama’s executive order in December that seeks to give federal workers a 0.5 percent pay hike in late March. That order incensed congressional Republicans, who criticized it as an attempt to seize control of an issue that has been left to Congress.

House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said the bill is needed to control the costs of the federal government where possible, in order to pursue other objectives.

“It is a small price to pay, consistent with the President’s previous pay freeze, to hold pay increases of federal employees for one more year,” Issa said during debate.

“We could do this today, or we could cut the National Institutes of Health. We could do this today, or we could park two or three of our aircraft carriers and lay off the crews.”

Outstanding way of putting things!

The Obama administration on Wednesday said it opposes the bill, and that its proposed pay hike would “help ensure that the government remains competitive in attracting and retaining the Nationˈs best and brightest individuals for public service.”

That statement did not go so far as saying Obama would veto the bill. Such a threat is most likely not needed, as the Senate is not expected to consider the House bill.

However, House Republicans will likely have another chance to keep federal pay frozen. Congress is expected to consider another continuing spending resolution for the rest of 2013 before late March, when the current resolution expires.
As they did earlier in the week, Democrats charged Republicans with forcing federal workers to shoulder the costs of deficit reduction.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said federal workers have “already contributed more than $100 billion towards reducing the deficit and funding unemployment benefits for millions of American workers.”

“No other group of Americans have contributed more to reducing the deficit,” he said.

Issa rejected that assessment by noting that the $100 billion price tag on the pay freeze is over 10 years, and that it was less than $10 billion in the first year of the freeze. “Many of those sacrifices won’t occur because people aren’t necessarily be here for all ten years,” he added.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said three years of a pay freeze is a “punishing cut in pay.”

“Federal employees have not asked for a pass,” she said. “But there is no way to justify singling them out as a solitary target, alone, repeatedly, picked out and picked on for cuts apart from the rest of the federal budget.”

But Issa rejected that as well, and criticized Democrats for calling “$274 a catastrophe for the federal workforce.” That’s the amount a worker earning about $55,000 a year would not be getting from the 0.5 percent pay hike if the bill became law.

Issa also argued that federal workers have seen pay increases, as they are given step increases within their pay grade, even though they have not been allowed to jump pay grades.

It’s funny that Democrats, who have historically been on the attack 24/7/365 against our security and intelligence services, hampering their very effort to do their jobs and slashing their budgets at very opportunity, now bring them up as though they were great supporters of said agencies.

Only two Republicans — Reps. Frank Wolf (Va.) and Frank LoBiondo (N.J.) — spoke against the bill during the debate. Both argued that FBI agents, CIA agents and other federal first responders should not have their pay frozen given that their work puts their lives at risk.

“I’ve talked to the CIA officers who are putting their lives on the line every single minute of every day,” LoBiondo said. “They don’t know when an attack is coming on them. They don’t know from which direction. And we are going to tell them that they should not get even a single dollar? Shame. That’s not what we should be about.”

And the surprising little detail is that the same Republicans who voted for the pay freeze are including themselves in it.

The legislation also freezes the pay of members of Congress. Democrats charged that Republicans included that language just to ensure support for the bill, and argued that there has been no threat to increasing the pay of members of Congress for the last few years.

Though, of course, the numbpeanut gallery weighs in…

On Thursday, however, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) argued that freezing the pay of members undermines the dignity of the job. “I think it’s necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded,” she said.

Undermines the “dignity” of the job, indeed…. Most federal employees’ compensation, combined pay and benefit packages, are significantly higher than those of private sector employees doing similar jobs that, unlike government employment, require such items as accountability and a lot more bang for the buck.

Pelosi is, as always, full of that stuff we try to avoid stepping in wherever possible.

But then, since they sold out America to the far left, the same doo doo has been served up by the Democrats — unbelievably, as one would think given that they are supposed to be intelligent people representing the will of the people — on a regular basis.

Thank you, GOP, for at least getting, as Seth likes to put it, up on your hind legs for once and doing more than just the usual saber rattling.

Chuck here. It’s been awhile, most of which found me cruising the coast of Mexico in my 52 foot maritime home.

So, while Seth expounded upon the primaries yesterday, I want to get in a few things as well, along with some links and quotes from same.

Personally, I was pretty pleased to see that voters of both the Democrat and Republican persuasions registered their discontent with the job too many Obama/Pelosi sector and lackluster GOP incumbents have been doing. It’s time to get on these peoples’ backs, big time, and, since they insist on paying scant attention to the will of the people, forcing unwanted bills down our throats, force some righteous voter indignation down their gullets.

Larry Elder writes

The storyline goes like this: Recent elections find voters in an angry, “anti-incumbent” mood.

TIME magazine wrote: “This is how it goes in 2010 at the ballot box: old orders are upended, political lions become roadkill, chosen successors get left behind and the outsider, riding a wave of discontent, becomes the new front runner.”

The Associated Press wrote: “It’s an anti-Washington, anti-establishment year. And candidates with ties to either better beware. Any doubt about just how toxic the political environment is for congressional incumbents and candidates hand-picked by national Republican and Democratic leaders disappeared late Tuesday.”

No. Voters said: “It’s not the incumbents, stupid. It’s how they voted. It’s what they stand for.” No incumbent who voted against the Bush/Obama bank bailouts, the “stimulus” package, and ObamaCare lost his or her job.

Voters hate the bank bailouts. They hate the government takeover of car companies. They do not believe that the $800-billion stimulus package stimulated anything but bigger government. They reject ObamaCare and think it’s costly and likely to worsen healthcare. Incumbents who voted for these things now face the music.

There’s no way anyone can say that the American people aren’t exercising our right to express our discontent at the polls, that’s for damn sure!

Voters see this administration as a bunch of leftist, redistribute-the-wealth, we-know-better-how-to-spend-your-money-and-run-your-lives-and-manage-your-businesses, smug busybodies. They see an administration that raised the debt and deficit in a year and a half to European-like levels that threaten present and future prosperity. They see an administration that believes fighting global warming takes precedence over jobs and productivity.

Tax revenues have plummeted, while government continues to grow. Banks and other companies that made bad bets or failed to effectively compete are propped up through bailouts that encourage future risky behavior.

People have been out of work for long periods of time. Homeowners are paying on homes worth less than their mortgages. There is a lot of hurt and pain and fear in the streets.

Bring it on home, Larry!

We Are All Socialists Now,” said Newsweek in a cover story last year. “No,” say the voters. “We are not.”

From the Washington Times

With voters across the country embracing “outsiders” — from “tea party” candidate Rand Paul in Kentucky on the right to Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak on the left — incumbents in both parties face a long, hot summer of trying to save their jobs.

From Sen. John McCain of Arizona to Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York, high-profile lawmakers in both parties are girding to fend off the anti-establishment anger voters displayed in Tuesday’s hotly contested primaries.

The rest of this one here.

If only these bastions of self centered careerism would stop and think back to the days when politicians thought as much about the wellbeing of the American people as they now do about their precious careers, we’d be voting for, as Seth puts it, “The best candidate for the job, instead of the lesser of two or more evils”.

If only these tin-pot whores of politics would dredge up some distant memories of the Constitution and how it applies to the performance of their duties as elected representatives of the people.

If only We, the People could somehow be brought together to vote out all the trash that now profligates on Capital Hill and usher in a crop of politicians who’ll agree to pass an amendment limiting Congress to a single six year term, do away with that stupid retirement plan they voted for themselves sometime back and restrict themselves to the same health care plans they have imposed upon the rest of us.

Yeah, yeah, fat chance. I guess it takes the lowliest of whores to provide a pool for political candidates. Unfortunately, they’re the only ones we’ve got.

So we’ve gotta keep at ‘em, keep voting out the excrementally afflicted, first diluting the Democrat majority to the point that they no longer feel the need to “improve upon” the rules and regs established by the founding fathers, instead sticking by them, and force them under the weight of our each and every vote to do as We, their Employers tell them.

Last, argumentative and very not least, here’s Ann Coulter’s two cents on the subject of the primaries.

Chuck out.

“America competes“, what a novel idea!

I can recall a time, many years back, when the Democrats were still playing on Team America, when they hadn’t yet sold their souls to far left liberals and begun monkeying around with the marketplace and the education system, that America was Numbah One, Numero Uno, Ichiban, da bee’z kneez. So what changed all that? Certainly not conservatives who maintain a deep respect for the Constitution and abhor big government and big government spending, government interference in private sector business practices, tax-and-spend policies that generate still higher taxes and promote massive foreign debt…

Now, we need to be able to compete, or so says Representative from Tennessee Bart Gordon, a Democrat who is reminiscent of a lean, unctuous version of Tommy Lee Jones playing a bad snake oil salesman.

So we have HR 5116, which would “invest in innovation through research and development, to improve the competitiveness of the United States”.

I watched the debates on C-Span yesterday, and it was plain to see that The Wicked Witch of the West Nancy Pelosi does indeed know how to deploy a Democrat majority, committee by committee, to advantage.

It wasn’t much of a debate, but then, to today’s Democrats, a debate is already over before it starts, so what we C-Span viewers got to see was a series of sales pitches by Democrats with an occasional break for a Republican point of view.

“The gentleman from Texas…”

Rep. Ralph Hall (R): “I reserve the balance of my time.”

“The gentleman from Tennessee…”

Rep. Bart Gordon (D): “I yield one and a half minutes to…”

And then, for ninety seconds, a Democrat representative would wax Utopian on the America Competes Act.

Then Hall yielded five minutes to California Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher, who spoke of the additional massive debt our country would have to accrue in order to support HD 5116, and let on as to how he opposed the bill, in part because it would further put the burden of paying the tab on futuire generations.

Then another ninety second yield by Gordon for another Democrat, and for several rounds, Ralph Hall, gentleman from Texas, reserved his time so that one Democrat after another, on Gordon’s dime, had the floor yielded a minute and a half at a time.

They managed to work in, between them, grants, loans, benefits for disabled veterans, what, exactly, they weren’t clear on, manufacturing jobs, jobs and more jobs, even “green” jobs, education, technology and even, I kid you not, local fire codes.

Somewhere in there, Rep. Hall yielded another five minutes, this time to California Republican Rep. Brian Bilbray, who expressed concern that among other things, the bill didn’t feature any realistic safeguards against monies evidently to come from HR 5116 being used to finance employment of illegal aliens.

Then more ninety second yields by Gordon and more pitching by Democrats.

Maybe a dozen of them had their minutes and a half, from Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin, New Mexico, New York, Illinois, Ohio and a couple from California.

To listen to them talk, all of America’s ills will be miraculously cured with the passage of HR 5116, there will be a permanent rainbow, birds will sing in the trees and all will be right with every American.

What I actually heard was a typical Democrat cram session — take a basic bill and invite every Democrat on the committee, in this case the Science and Technology Committee, to stick in whatever his or her Lah Dee Dah cause of the moment happens to be, until it’s impossible to figure out what the purpose of the legislation was to begin with.

I will heartily admit that I’d have gotten a lot more information out of watching Lucy reruns on another channel than I did out of the “debate”, as I came away having very little idea what the Democrats were talking about during the entire time; It sounded a lot to me like sales pitches rather than statesmanly/stateswomanly advancement of principled and considered thought.

Rest assured, whatever they finally pass and Obama signs will be yet another left wing blitz in their assault on our Constitution, on America and all our great nation stands for.

We hear more and more about the pushing of the Value Added Tax by the kommies in our midst, who thing every working (or spending) American is a mere cash sponge to be wrung out without mercy in order to finance the ever-increasing monetary demands of a socialist country.

Recently, progressives have made noise about introducing a value-added tax (VAT) in the United States. The VAT is an indirect tax — that is, Americans wouldn’t pay the tax directly to government, but would pay it to businesses as part of the retail price of things we buy, and businesses would then remit the tax to Uncle Sam.

A VAT is set at a fixed rate — say, 10 or 15 percent — added to the price of a good at every step of production, with a deduction allowed for the amount of VAT paid during earlier stages of production. The more steps there are in transforming raw materials into complex consumer goods, the higher the resulting consumer price as a result of those multiple layers of taxation.

Many countries have VATs, including Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. One might say that a VAT is an emblem signifying that a country’s government consumes a large percentage of its GDP, for VATs seem to go hand-in-hand with big-budget nanny states.

The reason for this phenomenon is simple: Any government that seeks to be all things to all people, and therefore seeks to spend ubiquitously, must inevitably seek to tax ubiquitously. Such governments have insatiable appetites for revenue. Because VATs are cash cows, diverting huge sums of money from consumers to government, they are favorites of big-spending governments.

Unfortunately, though, VATs have significant negative economic consequences.

Because they inflate consumer prices, quantities demanded fall. Most often, the marginal buyers who can no longer afford to pay the higher price are poorer citizens. When government policy raises
prices, the first victims are poor people.

The second victims of a VAT are the workers who will lose their jobs as a result of falling demand for the newly higher-priced goods.

Many affluent Americans may not curtail their consumption, but because more of their money is diverted to the government treasury, their savings must correspondingly decline. This results in decreased capital accumulation, which, in turn, slows business expansion, development, and formation. It also slows the growth rate of labor productivity, hence retarding economic progress for workers.

Read on.

These leftists, who have no respect for the Constitution nor for the intentions of our founding fathers, and who certainly despise the very principles that define the United States of America, would love to watch our nation come apart, sinking into an abyss of socialism…

…and as a bit of lagniappe, let’s finish with an excellent and unrelated column by Wesley Pruden.

…there are so many things to criticize, at least unless one is a mega-leftist wingnut, that is, where the tragedy/travesty that is today’s presidential administration and congressional majority are concerned, that there’s a veritable smorgasbord of subject material to choose from.

For example, a great post at Red State.

Yesterday the White House went bonkers when several large corporations announced via their SEC filings that they were taking about $1.5 Billion in losses this quarter because of one provision in the health care takeover bill Obama signed into law last week. The Wall Street Journal estimates Obamacare will cost the Fortune 500 some $14 Billion in this single provision.

They trotted out the hapless Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, to deny basic laws of economics and according to some reports White House aides were directly calling and berating company executives who were complying with federal law.

Henry Waxman took a brief hiatus from braiding his nose hair to announce that he would hold hearings to determine why these imbeciles had fraudulently declared Obamacare would cost them money when everyone knows it is the key to balancing the budget and retiring the national debt. According to him:

The new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs, so your assertions are a matter of concern. They also appear to conflict with independent analyses.

In fact, Waxman asserts that the losses run counter to a report prepared by the Business Roundtable predicting the health care takeover would reduce health insurance costs to businesses by $3,000 per person…

Read the entire post here.

The lies, misrepresentations, fabricated math and general duplicity employed by Obama and the Pelosified marxist Congress followed by a flabbergasted, “I don’t believe it! We’ll convene an investigation at once!” reaction when the bullshirt gives way to reality is almost laughable until one remembers that at the bottom line lies the future, or lack thereof, of our beloved republic.

Moving right along, as they (whoever they are) say, I just thought I’d paste in a copy of Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. Give it a read, then match it up against anything Barack Hussein Obama and/or the House and Senate have thusfar passed or are preparing to legislate, remembering that the following is what you might call the Employee Handbook of U.S. Governance. If something is not included in the list below, Congress can’t (without committong a felony, as far as I’m concerned) do it:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings; And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

…what if there was a revolution? I mean, what if Americans flatly refused to acknowledge laws stemming from the ObamaCare debacle and started cleaning their weapons, so to speak?

How could anyone call it treason, or otherwise condemn it, when all that these rebels would be doing was emulating our nation’s founders?

The American Revolution was fought, after all, to gain freedom from a kind of tyranny that, in truth, was not much different from what we are experiencing now under the Obama regime — yes, I said regime, not administration.

We, The People, are being ruled by officials elected, according to the Constitution, to govern according to the will of the people, not the other way around.

Yet here we are, having come full circle, so in the spirit of America, it seems to me that if there were a revolution, it should ideally be a short one — it would be an act of treason, in my opinion, for any U.S. serviceman, Law Enforcement officer or other American citizen in a position to do so to take up arms against the people if we got it into our heads to do exactly as our founding fathers did in the 1770s, taking our country away from those who would tax us into oblivion and dictate to us.

These politicians have violated the Constitution which is, given their oaths of office and the nature of their jobs, a federal crime in itself.

So, the Obama Administration and the Democrats in the House and Senate, those who voted for the “HealthCare” bill, are technically all felons, no matter what they and their sycophantic arse creepers of the lefty media say about it.

Doesn’t that make the President and his congressional majority a “renegade” criminal government, anyway, and certainly even less valid than that of the late King George?

…of the ObamaCare vote, which at this point seems to be one of the few things that stand between what America was founded and then succeeded as, and its tragic transformation into a socialist state, I ran across this article by Robert F. Turner.

As a scholar who has studied and revered the Constitution for more than four decades, watching the behavior of our Congress in recent years has been all too often a depressing experience. One wonders whether some legislators have even bothered to read the Constitution, or if the problem is they simply don’t care about the oath they took to support it.

While doing research for my doctoral dissertation many years ago, I had the pleasure of reading extensively from the Annals of Congress, notes from Cabinet meetings of early presidents, and a great deal of other historical material while seeking to understand portions of our Constitution. In the process, I found myself marveling both at how remarkably well-read the Framers were - encountering frequent references to the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Vattel, and other prominent 17th- and 18th-century thinkers - and also at the high principles repeatedly expressed by members of both political branches of our government when novel issues surfaced.

The pedigree of people we elect to Congress has evidently changed.

Sadly, the latest parliamentary shenanigans in the House, to pretend that the Senate health care bill has already been signed into law so that the (non)law can be “amended” immediately to secure enough House votes for passage, is but par for the course. It is no better than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attempt to use Congress’ rule-making power to deny future Congresses their constitutional right to repeal or amend a previous law by majority vote. Section 3403 of the bill passed by the Senate provides: “It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The Constitution can’t be changed by statute, and it certainly can’t be changed by amending House or Senate rules.

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution sets forth detailed requirements for the making or amending of a law, specifying that “Every order, resolution, or vote to which the concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary” shall be presented to and approved by the president (or enacted over his veto) - so as to prevent unprincipled legislators from bypassing the procedural necessities by the kind of semantical chicanery currently being contemplated by House leaders.

Mr. Turner finishes the column in spot-on fashion.

At some point, if we are to have any chance of preserving our magnificent Constitution, the American people are going to have to start saying “no” and holding legislators accountable at the polls for violating their oaths of office. The senators and representatives we elect were intended to be servants of the people, not a special class of aristocrats empowered to rule our lives while remaining aloof from the very laws they enact. Writing in Federalist No. 57, James Madison assured the American people that one of the checks against legislative abuse of power was that Congress could “make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.” One can only wonder what the Obamacare vote would be if it applied to members of Congress and their staffs.

After nearly four decades of watching our elected representatives flout their solemn duty and evade the burdens they impose upon the rest of us, I have finally concluded that the time has come to start voting against incumbents who behave as if they are the rulers rather than the servants of the American people.

Me, I’d vote ‘em all out, Left, Right and Independent and elect all Senators and Representatives from among candidates who have never held political office before and impose term limits — one single 6 year term, thus eliminating any ambitions for reelection, leaving them focused solely on their duties as representatives of the will of their constituents, the folks who put them in office.

We haven’t posted for a month, but between Wolf’s current activities, Chuck’s maritime indulgences and my own incumbent issues, well… My apologies, and hopes that these intervals between posts are able to return to pre 2008 levels really soon…

…The course on the front burner today is obviously the ObamaCare debacle, which is summed up pretty well by Wesley Pruden.

Being me, I’ve gotten into debates of sorts with a number of people who have been either undecided (not unusual, considering that the very template upon which the entire government-run healthcare equation is based is a virtual labyrinth of contradictions and blank checks interwoven with the seeds of stealth legislation, promoted as “good for us” by a media which is as ignorant about the technical details of the whole thing as most of us) or sort of decided.

My way of talking about the issue is, I think, pretty simple.

The vast majority of Americans would rather have small government and keep more of their hard earned money. They want quality medical care and the choice of where to obtain it.

Passing ObamaCare, or any federally managed health care legislation, would be the equivalent of uploading software into your computer that contains a few dangerous and irradicable viruses.

It would install a permanent, ever-growing chain of bureaucracies inside our government, scoring an instant and lasting victory for the tax-and-spend socialists on the far left, essentially transforming the United States of America into a socialist country.

Obama, Pelosi and their ilk are willing to sacrifice the careers of a score or more Democrats on the Hill, decimate their own party for the next decade or so, just to force this single bill on us because it will, if enacted, provide that “change” Barack Hussein promised during his campaigning days — a 180 degree change, as a matter of fact, one that would make America as we know it disappear for all time.

I’m serious, folks. Even a “far right” majority would be stuck with the system — unable to reverse the legislation, they’d be tasked with maintaining it, feeding it, expanding it to keep it alive while it sucked the blood from the U.S. taxpayer and destroyed a successful private sector run healthcare industry that only a marxist with a political agenda could call “a failure” with a straight face.

The only response by Republicans in Congress to government run healthcare should be NO! NO NEGOTIATION, NO CONSIDERATION, NO GOVERNMENT RUN HEALTHCARE, PERIOD! MOVE ON!

But no, the GOP still address the issue as a valid topic of discussion, which it is not — remember, we are governed by The Constitution, and therefore government run healthcare is not, legally, even supposed to be on the board.

Now, we even find, the lefties are seeking ways to get around the rules in order to get their agenda passed.

If the GOP allows this legislation to pass in any way, shape or form, they will have failed not only every conservative in the nation, but every American.