Over my next few posts, in no particular order, will be a bunch of miscellaneous facts or observations from yours truly on various aspects of the state of things in Washington, D.C. today. Unlike some of my ramblings, these will all be short. I’m not sure that this is accurate to say, since this stuff emanates from the seat of the nation’s enormously bloated government, but I’ll say it anyway – Enjoy!
- Apparently, Congress will not take up or pass a budget this year. The Budget Act requiring an annual budget was passed in 1974. The House has never failed to produce and pass a budget since then…until this year. The person responsible for producing that budget, Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-SC) famously remarked in 2006 "if you can’t budget, you can’t govern." I guess the Democrat majority can’t govern. Can you say dysfunctional?
- The so-called Financial Reform Bill has now passed both the House and the Senate. But the versions are quite different from one another, so a conference committee is currently resolving those multiple differences and it will have to pass both chambers again in order to get to the President, who has called for it to be on his desk by July 4th. We need financial reform. I do not want to go through what happened in September/October of 2008 again. But yet again, this bill is another partisan travesty. It will not fix the problem. It will make consumer loans, which are already hard to get, even more expensive and even harder to get, which will further reduce jobs. The President will say exactly the opposite of what I just did. But then he also said that the health care bill would lower the deficit and cut costs in health care. (heavy sigh)
- Some of the biggest contributors to the financial collapse in 2009 were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both are now owned by the government. The Financial Reform Bill doesn’t even address them.
- Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal first asked President Obama for the federal help to protect the coast from the oil spill on May 10th. It has arrived only just recently.
- Our Republican Conference has set up a website with a cool new technology to gather input from Americans everywhere on what the agenda of Congress should be right now instead of the job-killing, deficit-creating, unstable track we are on right now. You can visit it at www.americaspeakingout.com. Go there and weigh in on your thoughts about what we should really be doing and where we should be going. You can also share your thoughts on my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/johncampbell.