Why Is Congress The Way It Is?

What’s wrong?

• Gas at the pump soaring!
• Food used as fuel – ethanol – adopted without an understanding of its impact – pushed by lobbyists!
• Oil Companies still receive federal subsidies!
• Food prices soaring!
• Congress intentionally slowing completion of the border fence.
• Earmarks costing the taxpayers billions!
• Congress using earmarks to return favors to campaign contributors.
• Lobbyists / special interests contributing to Congressional campaigns, heavily influencing your Representatives.
• Congress regularly deferring to lobbyists over the voter.
• Seniority system in Congress fueling almost absolute power to a select few Senators and Representatives.
• Congress riddled with ethics violations, both rule violations and moral violations.
• Rampant disregard of the public trust.
• Senators and Representatives entering Congress with little personal wealth and leaving with great personal wealth.
• Partisan politics nearly always trumps what is good for America and good for the American people.
• Funds wasted on earmarks and redundant Federal programs.
• America’s sovereignty and national security at risk due to oil.
• America’s oil independence abdicated by Congress in favor of lobbyists.
• Congress is 38% lawyers.

This list should be enough of an indictment on Congress and how it functions to warrant changes – big changes. Today’s Congress does not run as was intended by the founding fathers. Why should your Representatives be listening to and acting upon requests from constituents of other Districts and States and not you? Why would a Senator or Representative take actions contrary to the well being of their constituent and nation? It is all about money! Money for reelection to perpetuate this non-representation of constituents. Money to be able to leave Congress very wealthy. Congress has become a lure for those who seek power and money from that power. Lobbyists provide the money to power campaigns in all sorts of devious ways. Senators and Representatives repay campaign contributors with un-debated and often weakly disclosed earmarked projects. Congress is almost the definition of broken government or more aptly corrupt government. Our Congress often makes the Iraqi and Mexican Parliaments look like a Boy Scout Jamboree.

Why is it wrong?

The Senate: The founding fathers placed checks and balances in the Constitution for the States to control the Federal Government. This was done to ensure that the States remained an equal partner. It was also done to keep power from being concentrated. In 1913, Congress, after years of trying to make Senate elections direct and not serve the legislatures, with the help of a powerful newspaper chain (Hearst Newspapers – Randolph Hearst felt he could control elections of Senators if they were directly elected, by swaying public opinion about the candidates) pushed through the Seventeenth Amendment – the House Joint Resolution 39 and the Ratification process are still questioned today as whether the Constitution was followed. The Congress with a strong popular movement by the voters due to the wide reaching Hearst chain’s agenda journalism was in an absolute rush to push the amendment through.

What did the amendment change? From the founding of this nation until the Seventeenth in 1913, Senators were elected by the States’ Legislatures and represented the States. Senators were obliged to mind the wishes of the States’ Legislatures. The Senate, the upper house, was the voice of the States in the Federal Government. The only lobby the Senators could really listen to was the lobby that elected them – their legislature. After the Seventeenth Amendment, the Senate was elected by directly by the voter, but this made them subject to the growing threat of lobbyists. Senate campaigns now run between ten million and one hundred million dollars, depending on location. This requires money from people, PAC’s, and corporations, not of your state, seeking to influence future votes on matters concerning them that may be contrary to your state’s needs. The direct election of Senators removed any control your State had over the growth of and the operation of the Federal Government.

The House of Representatives: The founding fathers intended the House to be the lower house, made up of citizen legislators. It was not to be a permanent home for Representatives serving for up to 50 years, as is the case of Representative John Dingell. These citizen legislators were to be the direct representative of the people of their district, serving the needs of the people of their district, and listening only to the people of their district. Today, to run for the House of Representatives, it will cost upwards of $5 Million for both the primary and general elections. This money primarily comes from outside your Congressional District. It comes from lobbyists in devious ways, corporations, again in devious ways, and from political parties. Since most of the money for the campaign does not come from the District, you do not get represented, the contributors do. Someone or some entity in Florida does not contribute to a campaign in a Texas District, without expecting votes in return. Votes often not in your best interest.

What do we do about it?

First, fix the Senate and return checks and balances back to your State. Push, plead with, and prod your State Legislature, through a Constitutional Convention, to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.

Second, return your House Representative to his or her role of Citizen Legislator. Take the big money out of the job. Remove the overarching influence on these Representatives away from people and entities not in your District. Push, plead with, and prod your State Legislature to, through that Constitutional Convention, to amend the Constitution to restrict campaign contributions to House candidate campaigns. Require candidates for the House of Representatives to only accept campaign contributions of money, property, or services in kind from INDIVIDUALS PRIMARILY RESIDING in the candidate’s district. No money from lobbyists outside the District, no money from Corporations, and no money from political parties. The cost of a campaign will drop dramatically, creating a level playing field for candidates. The elected representative from your District, will only have you the voter/constituent to serve.

Third, at that Constitutional Convention, push, plead with, and prod your State Legislature to, through the Convention, propose a Constitutional Amendment that restricts all spending bills to be of like nature, military, agriculture, health, etc, and spending provisions may not be including in an amendment – it must be in the main body of the bill and clearly disclose in the bill if it is a targeted expense to one District or to one State and not a broad based spending bill. This will eliminate earmarks.

Fourth, Simply do not vote for an incumbent in November. This will replace 468 sitting Senators and Representatives for the 111th Congress in 2009. How is that for a message to Congress?

Illegal Immigrant Recycling

We should set up a “Deportometer”. It could record the number of times we send someone back to his or her home country. The “Deportometer” can be a little device that mounts on an illegal alien’s belt, just like a pedometer. After all, if we are going to repeatedly spend tax payers dollars on rounding up and deporting someone fourteen (YES 14) times, the least we could do is give that person a “Deportometer.” It appears that there is no penalty beyond deportation for a repeat illegal. So it certainly appears that we have no additional penalties for the recycling of illegals – why would they not keep trying to enter, since there is little down side. Our Congress appears to NOT have fixed this problem, yet they have time to hold hearings on baseball, HGH, and Roger Clemens. Has our President or his Homeland Security Chief requested this stiffer penalty – perhaps, but I cannot find evidence of the request.

You might say, 14 times, impossible. Well according to the DenverPost.Com‘s Howard Pankratz it is possible. The following is an excerpt from his article: A man arrested Monday on Interstate 70 while allegedly transporting illegal aliens has been deported 14 times, Eagle county authorities said today…

The article can be found at:

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_8304924

It doesn’t take an immigration wizard to understand that unless penalties get increasingly more severe after each deportation, like some prison time, the problem will continue unabated. This problem of illegal immigration is both nutured and fostered by our political parties. Politicians see that giving citizenship gives the vote, for them hopefully. These politicians will sell out the rest of us to acquire the new votes and for whose benefit? Yes, their own benefit. The impact on this nation and its current citizens is meaningless to them. There actions bely any belief that they are serving for the public good. This includes the office of President. When you look at the cumulative history of our current and past Presidents’ efforts on stopping illegal immigration, you must come to the conclusion that they did not and do not want to stop it. Has there been some sort of deal cut with Presidents Fox and Calderon of Mexico? It would certainly seem so. Three of the four presidential candidates are also on record as being very lenient on illegal aliens to say the least. Am I missing something? Are not controlling who or even knowing who enters your country and allowing a deportation game of cat and mouse to run “ad infinitum” good for this country?

Why bother to have any immigration control at the borders? Let’s just stop all this craziness of trying to enforce the law, dumbly I might add, and save all that money. It really is time for a change in Washington and not just the President. We should put brand new fannies into the 468 Senate and House seats up for re-election. This would be real change and not the repeated soaring rhetoric of our candidates for President. Their words are cheap, our votes at the ballot box on election day cleaning out both Houses of Congress to the limit of the Constitution are valuable.

U.S. Government Fostering Illegal Immigration!

One would think that after years of machination regarding illegal immigration and attempts to seal the borders the Federal Government would understand that improving the LEGAL immigration infrastructure apparatus goes hand in hand with sealing the border. Well they still don’t get it! Why is this? Without doing any research, it would be a good guess that Congress has not provided sufficient funding for the apparatus improvement, either because the funding was not requested by the appropriate agencies or Congress was too busy funding anything else.

Yesterday the Houston Chronicle reported on its web site “Chron.Com” (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5533508.html) that 47,000 applicants for a green card will receive their green cards before their background investigation is complete. The newspaper further reports in the same article “USCIS officials reported an estimated 329,160 applicants for citizenship and green cards were waiting in the FBI name check backlog as of May, the most recent data available. Of those, about 104,600 — or 32 percent — had been in the system for more than three months but less than a year. Sixteen percent, some 51,497 applicants, were pending between one and two years. About 17 percent of applicants had been waiting more than two years.”

The need to set up an adequate legal immigration infrastructure apparatus is so obvious in the fight against illegal immigration that it is incredulous that it has not been done. Someone is not doing their job. Whether the “someone” is a bureaucrat, an Administration official, or a member of Congress – that someone needs to lose his or her job or in the plural sense their jobs. So tell me who are the simpletons here? Is it the Administration? Is it Congress? Despite a national uproar on “Illegal Immigration”, we have not done the one basic step that will encourage legal immigration over illegal immigration. We have not properly set up an infrastructure to manage the legal immigrant entrance process. Are we leaving the running of this country to those who don’t care and only want to take from it what they can or to those who are simply too dumb to know better? I am talking Republican and Democrat. Our federal agencies and Congress possess both. Of course the current Administration also has some answering to do here.

Borders & Entry

There is a movement in this country to open our borders to free migration into our country for anyone who wishes to enter. I wonder if these people keep their residence doors locked or if they encourage strangers to enter their homes and stay a while?

Back in the eighteenth century when our country was founded, people could freely immigrate to the United States. In those days, people did not lock their residence doors and did invite strangers to say over. In the eighteenth century, nations fought wars with a degree of civility – there were understood rules. Today, the world has changed. If you haven’t noticed, we are no longer seeing nations fighting wars with civility. Non-nation entities actually declare war against nations and weapons of mass destruction may be in the hands of these non-nation entities. In addition, organized gangs exist across national boundaries.

Early in the twentieth century, the U.S. managed immigration fairly well. Even though we experienced heavy immigration from Europe, we managed to carefully screen each and every person – can you say Ellis Island? Oh yes, like today these immigrants came to this country because they were dirt poor and were seeking the bounty of the United States of America. Screening émigrés did not prevent those who wished to come to our country from coming here, provided they were reasonably healthy and not criminals. The only obstacles were emigration quotas and sponsorship rules.

 

Today, we have Muslim extremists wanting us dead, the international gang MS13, violent convicts fleeing their country, and the potential of international pandemics. Does it make sense now to abandon the screening of all émigrés? Does it make sense to abdicate the management of all our borders? Another most important and forgotten element of our immigration policy is making visas available. One of the drivers of this current torrent of illegal entry into our country is our failure to provide sufficient visa quotas to those who wish to emigrate to our country. Our leaders claim that we need low-wage unskilled people to do jobs Americans won’t do, yet they have done nothing to grant more work visas to this labor pool. They have not attempted to fix the bureaucratic maze required to enter this country legally. All we hear from our leaders is “We need a comprehensive solution to immigration.” What a load of crap! Large problems are fixed by breaking them down into smaller and more manageable issues. Cure the cause of a problem or suffer continuing recurrences of the problem.

What is an illegal alien? What is an undocumented alien? What is an immigrant? The law of the land enacted by Congress requires anyone entering our country for an extended stay to either be a citizen of the U.S. or to obtain permission to enter. Permission is granted in the form of an entry visa. Visas provide for categories of entry – you are here to work or you are here to reside. Residence visas are granted to spouses of citizens and sponsored émigrés by relatives. More minor categories exist as well. Work visas are granted to workers who are sponsored by employers. In the last 25 years, rules for work visas tended to more readily allow entry based on the level of worker skills. Doctors and engineers are more likely to receive a visa as their skills are in the national interest. Low skilled or non skilled workers have little chance of receiving a work visa. So, if you have a visa, you have a document. If you do not have a visa, you are undocumented. If you are in the country and do not have a valid visa for your status, you are undocumented and are here in violation of our laws – you are illegal.

 

An immigrant is a person who emigrates from another country to the U.S. for tourist, economic, relationship, or political reasons. We know that our country was built by immigrants and immigrants are good. Uncontrolled immigration can do damage to our economy, health safety, and security against crime and terrorism. The open border people look at the history of this country and believe that immigration is good and they are right, but they tend to ignore the damage caused by uncontrolled immigration – and they are wrong. Widespread disregard for our laws is anarchy. Twelve to twenty million undocumented – illegal entrants into our country is arguably anarchy. You be the judge.

We need to properly and adequately establish visa quotas, work skill requirement levels, and the infrastructure to investigate and process applications, issue visas, revoke visas and notify immigration enforcement of invalid visas. Without this step, we are aimless in our efforts to solve this problem of entry. We should take care of these issues concurrently with our efforts toward enforcement.