The US
federal government was set up to handle limited powers for a reason. If our current federal government had been
limited to its “enumerated powers” over the past 150 years, we wouldn’t have
out of control agencies writing laws controlling issues that should have been
controlled by the states and the people.
Elected
US Senators and House Reps should be writing the laws and regulations dealing
with their limited powers. Elected State
Senators and House Reps should be writing laws and regulations dealing with
very limited powers as well. Agencies
who write regulations in areas not authorized by their enumerated powers should
be closed permanently. The following article
explains how we get laws we don’t want.
Survey:
D.C. bureaucrats think 'public are idiots' 'Many civil servants expressed utter
contempt for the citizens they served', by Garth Kant, 10/6/16
WASHINGTON
– “These are ungrateful ignoramuses. Never has the term ‘public servant’ been
rendered more devoid of meaning.”
That was
the succinct but scathing reaction of former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., to
the findings in a survey in a Washington Post article titled, “Washington’s ‘governing elite’ think
Americans are morons.”
The
survey found most of the bureaucrats and Capitol Hill staffers who run the
federal government think public opinion should be largely ignored on policy
decisions. The Johns
Hopkins University political scientists who did the survey found, “Many civil
servants expressed utter contempt for the citizens they served.” The Post
called the results “eye-popping,” adding, “On a wide range of issues,
bureaucrats believe that Americans are ignorant.”
Bachmann
told WND, “Only people in secure, insulated, well-paid jobs with generous
pensions and healthcare benefits can afford to look down their noses at the
people who provide for them a lifestyle they could never acquire for themselves
in the private marketplace.”
It’s not
just contempt for the public. It’s contempt for Congress, too, according to
someone who should know. Former
Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, had an eye-opening and in-person experience with
that, telling WND, “In the ’90s, I was not recognized as a congressman a lot of
the time. And I’d go out with staffers and socialize all the time.”
“I’d say,
‘How’s your boss?’ They’d say, ‘Oh man is he a jerk,’ never realizing I was a
congressman.”
Stockman
described a particular time he was socializing with a group of staffers for a
prominent conservative congressman who is still in office. “They sat
there telling me how their congressman was an idiot about education, as he was
trying to reform education. They were going to make sure the education budget
was increased, which ran totally counter to the congressman’s philosophy. And
yet, they prevailed, not the congressman.”
“This
happens again and again and again. It’s unbelievable. I was shocked,” he
marveled. Sometimes the contempt wasn’t even hidden; it was out in the open. “I
had one staffer, now in a lobbying firm, actually come out and tell me, ‘You
are not the congressman. I am.'”
“I fired
him,” Stockman continued. “And when he left, I found all my constituents’
letters in boxes everywhere. He wasn’t even responding. He didn’t even
understand the correlation between getting elected and making your constituents
happy.”
“Meanwhile,”
he added, “congressmen are focused on fundraising and getting re-elected while
staff and a lot of people behind the scenes are busy making powerful decisions
against the wishes of the constituents.”
And those
staffers and bureaucrats have real power. In a way, much more power than the
elected representatives of the people. That was
illustrated during an interview last year with Sen. Mike Lee,
R-Utah, who told WND, “For every one page of law we pass, they pass 100.” He
described how regulations are written by unelected bureaucrats with little, if
any, input from the people’s elected representatives in Congress.
Lee
offered an even more graphic illustration, on display in the reception area of
his D.C. office. A small
stack of 800 pages, comprising the bills passed in 2013, was dwarfed by a
cabinet full of the 80,000 pages of proposed regulations those bills generated. The 800
pages of laws were only a few inches tall. The 80,000 pages of regulations,
when stacked end to end, were about 10 feet tall. 1-16-15,
B-Roll of Federal Regulations
Empowering
unelected lawmakers is not the only problem. Not having to answer to voters,
bureaucrats can spend freely. Lee
observed that to comply with the hundreds-of-thousands of pages of regulations
in existence, it costs the American economy $2 trillion a year. That’s
another reason why, Stockman told WND, “We should sunset all administrative
law.”
He was
referring to “sunset” laws that would automatically terminate regulations by a
certain date unless they were renewed.
Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump has proposed an even more sweeping
solution. As WND reported in August, during a speech
detailing how to “Make America Great Again,” Trump proposed drastic reductions
in regulations, along with tax cuts, to revive the economy.
Trump
said he would cut regulations “massively.” He also called for a temporary
moratorium on new federal regulations. The candidate shared the belief of many
conservatives that the enormous number of existing regulations are a crushing
burden on small businesses and have stunted the country’s economic growth.
Trump
vowed to “ask each and every federal agency to prepare a list of all of the
regulations they impose on Americans which are not necessary, do not improve
public safety, and which needlessly kill jobs. Those regulations will be
eliminated.”
He also
called for the removal of bureaucrats and their replacement by “experts who
know how to create jobs.” Stockman
told WND that a suggestion in the Post article to put term limits on
bureaucrats and Capitol Hill staffers was “brilliant and long overdue.” The
former congressman summed up what he saw as the bottom line. “The bureaucrats
have always thought, and always will think, that the public are idiots.”
If our
elected officials don’t have enough time to write our laws and regulations, we
need to solve the campaign finance problem by restricting all campaign
contributions to only allow registered voters to make campaign contributions to
candidates who would appear on their ballot. Candidates would need to rely on
contributions from their voters that are collected from their websites.
There
would be no ad expense and there would be lots of internet videos of candidates
in town hall meetings. Their entire resumes, their positions and their votes or
opinions on all issues should be posted on their websites. Special interests would be free to promote
their causes on their own websites to maintain their free speech rights.
Government
should not be involved with anything that affects the free market economy. Subsidies would be eliminated and the law of
supply and demand would determine all prices.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment