David Swanson: Senate Sells Us All Out

[FlyingSquirrel]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/17621

The Constitution requires that the House vote first on spending bills, but the Senate just voted first, and did so by trashing the memory of the late Senator Wellstone, using his bill on mental health coverage.

The Senate has voted to spend money it does not have to give the executive branch powers it cannot safely be given -- all in order to dump OUR money on a bunch of billionaire bankers, all motivated by a bunch of fear-mongering lies and the legalized bribery of campaign contributions.

Will somebody tell me one thing the Senate does that the House couldn't do better on its own. The Senate is an idea whose time has long since come and gone. Other nations with two chambers give superior powers to the more representative one. Some other nations with single-chamber legislatures represent their people much better than Washington represents us.

Fortunately this bill can still be stopped in the House. It only has to be stopped in one chamber. We can render the Senate's crime pointless by blocking it in the House. We did so on Monday. We can do so again.

(The entire piece was only 4 paragraphs)

[Hydra]

1. Usually we depend on the Senate to stop bad ideas

Yesterday, they did just the opposite.

Oh, well. We couldn't stop the IWR, we couldn't stop the bankruptcy bill, we couldn't stop the Military Commisions act of 2006, we couldn't stop the gutting of FISA and we couldn't stop the surge.

Why should this week be any different?

[pberq]

2. If enough of us call our Reps, we could just stop this again.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. I hope we are not led by the nose into another disaster....as we were led into the war in Iraq.

[kaygore]

4. Feinstein's comment about her vote on bailout

A friend in San Diego who has never contacted a senator or congressperson before is so angry about the bailout that he called and wrote Feinstein. Feinstein's answer was that she had been contacted by hundreds of thousands of her constituents--all against the bailout--but she didn't care and would do as she liked and that's why senators were elected for 6 years: so that they could do as they pleased and not as their constituents wanted...or what was best for the country (my friend's words. Diane probably couched her arrogance a little less blatantly.)

So, now we know that we will have many more "Bush-Cheney" years, no matter who is elected.