Ever Get the Feeling Congress Has Another Agenda?

Things are the way they are because that’s the way eternal Washington wants them to be.

Back in 2014, there was in incident in the House of Representatives that was so heated that the Sergeant-at-Arms of had to remove Nancy Pelosi from the floor - with help from others.

Representative Tom Marino (R-PA) had challenged San Fran Gran Nan for her penchant of prevarication and arrogance and her response was to ball up her emaciated fingers into impotent fists and come at Marino from behind yelling that he was “a liar” and screaming at him that he was “inconsequential” and “just insignificant”.

If you have ever wondered why the federal government never seems responsible to the citizens, and in many cases, crafts national policies, conducts actions directly opposed to the interests of the people and often ignores their own rules – and even duly passed laws, its because the federal government is not controlled by the people at all. The majority of government feels the same way about you as Pelosi felt about Marino - you are insignificant, inconsequential liars.

Sure, we make a big deal about elections. There’s a march to the polls (or the mailboxes today) as Pomp and Circumstance plays softly in the background and there is anxiety and anger when the votes are counted – whenever they get counted, that is. There are exit polls, ballot counting, cable news projections and eventually, your candidate (or the other candidate) becomes something-elect and goes off to DC to be initiated into one of many august clubs there.

But we still don’t have regular order in the House or a budget - Congress just passes open-ended “continuing resolutions” to keep 13% of the federal government from shutting down (87% is legally mandated spending that cannot be shut down). Trillions of dollars of taxpayer and borrowed money are handed out like Halloween candy.

How about illegal immigration? Ever wonder why there is rarely any substantive legislation or enforcement out of Congress regardless of who is in charge? The GOP is certainly marginally better than the Democrats, but even then, they only act when they are forced to act – the only reason there was anything done in the past decades was because President Trump demanded it.

The appointment of a special counsel to investigate J6 (something the House has been doing for nearly two years) and the Mar-A-Lago raid (that revealed nothing of natural security interest was taken) but not any interest in Joe, James, Hunter and their connections to Russia, Ukraine and China – WTF?

Laws still get passed that do not have majority party support - neither the Senate nor the House is required to pass bills that have majority support within the majority caucus – John Boehner moved several legislative items that did not have the support of the majority of the GOP caucus at the time but had enough Democrat support to get passed.

Committees in the House and Senate don’t seem to be very effective in oversight or investigations – mostly because the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader in the Senate have largely stripped the committee chairs of independence.

The most consequential committees in each body are the respective Rules Committees. These committees are tools of the leadership and set and enforce the agenda of the Senate and the House. The House Rules Committee is also known as the "Speaker’s Committee”, informally signaling that it is just an arm of the Speaker of the House. These committees have been used to advantage the majority party and disadvantage the minority and often these changes are made abruptly and without debate to get a particular bill passed. Both Schumer and Pelosi are masters of the bait and switch, but it isn’t exclusively a Democrat thing. Cocaine Mitch has done it, and as noted, Weepy John Boehner did it as well.

I don’t think people understand that we do not have a government of the people, by the people and for the people – what we have is always a risk within a representative republic – it is that those representing us and those in power in the Congressional leadership become more interested in representing Congress than being responsive to the people who sent them to DC and forfeit significant portions of their earnings and savings to keep them there.

Bill Barr told Margaret Hoover on Firing Line that “I am critical of the Deep State and believe it exists.”

Gee, Bill. Who knew?

You bet your sweet bippy it exists, and it isn’t just the cabal of employees in the Senior Executive Service (SES) – people who serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees – where the average length of federal service is 23.4 years. The Deep State includes the entrenched leadership of both political parties in Congress AND the bureaucracy (that knows what levers to pull and where the bodies are buried) who, when push comes to shove, prioritize their actions to protect their common interests.

We can see how the allegedly impartial DOJ has circled the wagons around the Democrats. You may ask why that happened, but it is patently obvious. These two entities have decided they have both shared enemies and shared interests. The leadership within the DOJ has decided that the institution is so important that it must survive at any cost, no matter how corrupt.

If you don’t think the ancients in the House and Senate haven’t come to the same conclusion, you need to reassess.

America has reached the stage where the institutions in the federal government have decided they are more important than the citizens and that they must survive even if it means the citizenry does not.

Citizens no longer have a government that serves them; the government has citizen serfs from which it sucks blood. The citizen is inconsequential.

The Freedom Caucus has put forth a package of rule changes that would return power to the committees and to the people and transparency to Congress. If you want a validation of my premises, pay attention to how the leadership deals with those proposals.

Don’t be fooled by the firebrand rhetoric, things don’t come to any clear conclusions because neither party leadership wants a conclusion. Things are the way they are because that’s the way eternal Washington wants them to be.