Category: Congress sucks

Cortillaen sent us an email about Jerry “The Waddler” Nadler and some quotes about him in the Washington Post today. Nadler is feeling a bit insecure about Republicans reading the Constitution. He reminds me of a critic of Christianity who is a little bit afraid of being judged for his sins;

“They are reading it like a sacred text,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the outgoing chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, who has studied and memorized the Constitution with talmudic intensity.

Nadler called the “ritualistic reading” on the floor “total nonsense” and “propaganda” intended to claim the document for Republicans. “You read the Torah, you read the Bible, you build a worship service around it,” said Nadler, who argued that the Founders were not “demigods” and that the document’s need for amendments to abolish slavery and other injustices showed it was “highly imperfect.”

“You are not supposed to worship your constitution. You are supposed to govern your government by it,” he said.

If the Democrats had only used the Constitution to “govern your government by it”, they wouldn’t be in this mess. They’ve twisted every little phrase so out of shape that it’s hardly recognizable in the halls of Congress, and lately in the White House.

These are the people who tried make rape interstate commerce. They find a right to privacy so women can murder their unborn children. They find a right to healthcare and determine that they can make people buy healthcare. And “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” means the government can take away guns whenever they want.

The Constitution was written to constrain government, the Bill of Rights were added to protect individual citizens from the excesses of government and the tyranny of the majority. It is revered by the People like a religion. It resides in a fortified chamber under the National Archives because the Constitution is the basis for our very existence.

It was written in a time when a nation’s authority resided in the body of a living king whose lineage was supposedly ordained by God. We had no king, no lineage and we were founded on the principle that all men derived their liberties from our Creator. The Constitution was written to protect those liberties.

The Constitution wasn’t perfect and hundreds of thousands have shed their blood to correct those shortcomings. That’s why we remember them in our daily lives – hundreds of thousands of saints who martyred themselves for a document. And continue to fall to maintain our reverence for it.

It’s Nadler’s problem if he feels he needs to disparage it and the people who still believe in it because of his own sins against the Constitution.

I don’t like Chris VanHollen. He was my congressman when my paycheck was held hostage in the Maryland gulag of Montgomery County and I hated every minute. VanHollen looks like a shifty used car dealer and talks like one, too. Today he misinforms the public in the Washington Post about the fight against the Democrats’ impending tax hikes just two weeks away from taking effect;

Senate Republicans have made it clear they are willing to raise taxes this January on middle-class Americans unless they get tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires – despite the fact that a tax hike on the middle class could slow an already anemic economic recovery.

Yeah, we’re two weeks away from the tax hikes without a resolution because Democrats have kicked the can down the road this whole year. The truth is that until the November elections, they’d just planned on letting the Bush tax rates expire so they could raise our taxes without actually owning the tax hike.

They had an opportunity to extend the rates before the election, but Nancy Pelosi thought she could hold our votes hostage.

Van Hollen’s whole hissy today in the Post is about estate taxes, or death taxes. He’s upset that Republicans want to exempt estates up to $5 million from this completely irresponsible tax. It’s the height of class warfare. All of a decedent’s estate has already been taxed while he was earning it, and then it gets taxed again upon the decedent’s demise – and the tax is due to the government in 9 months, no matter what form that estate takes, property, business or cash. So the survivors have to sell off the estate to meet the taxes.

If the estate is a business, the business has to be sold. If it’s a farm, the farm must be sold. How is that good for the economy? Van Hollen disagrees;

But this last-minute $23 billion giveaway made payable to the wealthiest estates in the country – which digs us deeper into debt without adding a single job – is simply a bad deal for the American people.

It might not add jobs, but it’ll save some.

Jerry Nadler, known as “The Waddler” in some New York circles because of his grotesque girth, went on CBS’ “Face the Nation” (why is that show still on the air?) yesterday morning to summon the images of “Republicans as mafioso” in the minds of Americans (the two or three who still watch “Face the Nation”) qaccording to the Hill;

…”nice middle class tax cut you have there, pity if something would happen to it unless you give millionaires and billionaries” a tax cut. “Unless you give the wealthier a tax cut we’re not permitting the middle class to get it.”

Nadler expressed concern that Republicans will continue pressing Congress and President Obama for a permanent extension of those tax cuts and if we “succumb to blackmail” now why should there be any expectation that they will have the “political gumption in 2012 to not submit again.”

Hey, Jerry, it’s not a tax cut…it’s maintaining the status quo. To be against the current tax rates, you’re for a tax hike in the middle of an economic downturn. All Americans are equal, all Americans deserve equal treatment under the tax code. The President said that he’s doing what’s best for Americans. If you oppose the President’s tax plan, you’re doing what’s worse for America, right?

Howard Dean chimed in;

Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, argued that the tax bill “is terrible for the country in the long term” because the $857 billion plan isn’t paid for and continuing the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts will represent 60 percent of the deficit by 2018.

I’m lucky that my television has survived the last week or so the number of times I’ve yelled at it about putting those imbeciles in my house talking about “paying for” continuing our current tax policy. The American taxpayers have been “paying for” this shit all along so what are they talking about? I guess the Democrats in secure seats from New York and California haven’t been listening for the last eighteen months.

But if you want real class envy, you have to listen to Bernie Sanders who took the opportunity last week to bark at the moon on the Senate floor over the death estate taxes. I’ll probably never pay a penny in death taxes, but the idea that money which a person earns is his/her lifetime and is already taxed by the state and federal governments, is taxed again just because a person dies is just ludicrous, it’s unAmerican, it’s socialist, it’s insane. (Washington Times link)

Armed with giant charts and statistics galore, the Vermont independent argued that wealthy individuals, including the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, are in a better position financially to shoulder more of the national debt and for that reason the estate tax should return to 2009 levels, or higher.

Firstly, Sanders isn’t “independent”, he’s a communist. And secondly, I doubt Sam Walton built his Wal-Mart empire so his kids could “shoulder more of the national debt”. If that had been in the front of his mind, I doubt the Wal-Mart stores would have ventured far out of Rogers, Arkansas.