LAME DUCK COULD END AT 5AM SAT MORNING- KEEP POUNDING AGAINST BAD AER BILL!!

[Guest guest]

Congressman Boehner is one of the most heavily lobbied congressman on

the hill!! He's been in the pocket of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma for

years!! Don't waste your time on him!! I bet his office has been putting

out some alerts saying to call and fax " him " to differt the effort, when

people should be concentrating on those congressman who will make a

difference. This is really important to understand!!! Boehner probably

has a lot of money riding on this bill going through! He will not

help!!! Mira

 

 

, Rocky Ward

<rachelleward2 wrote:

>

> I've been up for two days on this. Come on folks, I could use some

help. ~Rocky

>

> AHF List: Its 6:30 pm, the lame duck session of congress could end

during the wee hours of saturday morning, and its IMPERATIVE that we

KEEP OPPOSING the Bad AER bill (HR HR 6168, the Dietary Supplement and

Nonprescription Drug Consumer Protection Act). At the end of this alert

please see my urgent plea to help IAHF get back to DC!!

> HERE IS WHY ONGOING PRESSURE IS NECESSARY:

> Senators Hatch and Harken, all the pharma dominated vitamin trade

association, as well as (so called Citizens for Health) are pushing VERY

HARD to get this bill through. An inside source has informed us that

Senator Hatch is recovering from rotator cuff surgery, and that he's

made numerous calls from his hospital bed to Congressman Boehner in an

effort to get the House Majority Leader to put the bill on the calendar

so it can be voted on.

> Our sources on the Hill indicate that Boehner is standing firm like

the rock of Gibralter REFUSING to budge, but there is still a chance

that these oily bastards might attempt to attach the bill as a rider to

a much larger bill such as the NIH Appropriations bill- (which is as

thick as a Manhatten telephone book).

> Stranger things have happened in this Con-gress of WHORES & TRAITORS

which has been selling out our country worse than any congress in

HISTORY. Read the article below to get fired up, then keep calling the

Hill! The Capital Switchboard is open 24/7 and even after hours during

the end of a lame duck there are staff in those congressional offices

til the end of business which could be at 5 am tomorrow morning. So they

WILL get your messages, they're constantly relaying word to their boss

as they keep their fingers on the pulse of the people calling in, so

your calls DO matter!

> Previously we were targetting Boehner, Hastert, and Barton. Now our

inside sources are telling us to SHIFT our focus to the RANK AND FILE in

the House. So please focus on your OWN Congressman and use the phone

script below. You can also fax it in, see http://www.house.gov to get

your congressman's fax number.

> " I want to kill HR 6168, the Dietary Supplement and

Nonprescription Drug Consumer Protection Act and understand that some

are frustrated that Congressman Boehner (pronounced Bayner) hasn't put

it on the calendar, so some are trying to attach it as a RIDER to the

NIH REAUTHORIZATION BILL. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN!! This bill badly needs

a hearing. There is language in it that must be changed. Do not pass it

in the middle of the night attached to something as thick as the

Manhatten telephone directory unless you want me to work tirelessly

against you for the rest of your career til you are driven from office. "

also use this:

> HR 6168 MUST BE KILLED!!

> " A large sector of the Dietary Supplement industry including Solgar,

Nutraceutical Corp, Nature's Plus, Life Extension Foundation, Wellness

Resources and many other companies oppose HR6168 Dietary Supplement and

Nonprescription Drug Consumer Protection Act. This legislation has

nothing in it to determine causality of an Adverse event. Safe dietary

supplements would be wrongly blamed for problems actually caused by

pharmaceutical drugs taken concurrently with one or more dietary

supplements- and there would be no medical or scientific review required

by FDA before they could release the flawed " data " released by this

witch hunt. This would be a trial lawyers dream, but its not good

government and it would do nothing to protect the public health. There

must be hearings on this legislation, and there must be changes made to

its language before it would actually serve its intended purpose. Do not

ram it through on us during the lame duck- if you do, you will enrage

the

> millions of dietary supplements who flooded congress with more mail

during the campaign to pass DSHEA than Congress ever received in its

history on ANY issue. "

> HERES the cool article I told you about:

> The Worst Congress Ever

>

> How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and

perverts -- in five easy steps .

>

> By Matt Taibbi

> 10/31/06 " Rolling Stone " -- -- There is very little that sums up the

record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad

boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation.

After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley

can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and

Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on

in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

>

> These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt

and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative

branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a

historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of

Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed

crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn

the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a

Burkina Faso with cable.

>

> To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological

cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of

bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one

long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism.

That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way

through even the direst political crises is something we Americans

understand instinctively. " There is no native criminal class except

Congress, " Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of

recognition a hundred years later.

>

> But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight

deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less

than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who

control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their

revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to

fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political

minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the

Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and

unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms

for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed

far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their

target.

>

> " The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is

a failed experiment, " says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional

scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George

Washington Law School. " I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill

today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created.

Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and

in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in

Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably

tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of

members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove.

Congress became a mere extension of the White House. "

>

> The end result is a Congress that has hijacked the national treasury,

frantically ceded power to the executive, and sold off the federal

government in a private auction. It all happened before our very eyes.

In case you missed it, here's how they did it -- in five easy steps:

>

> STEP ONE

> RULE BY CABAL

>

> If you want to get a sense of how Congress has changed under GOP

control, just cruise the basement hallways of storied congressional

office buildings like Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Here, in the

minority offices for the various congressional committees, you will

inevitably find exactly the same character -- a Democratic staffer in

rumpled khakis staring blankly off into space, nothing but a single

lonely " Landscapes of Monticello " calendar on his wall, his eyes wide

and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim. His skin is

as white as the belly of a fish; he hasn't seen the sun in seven years.

>

> It is no big scoop that the majority party in Congress has always

found ways of giving the shaft to the minority. But there is a marked

difference in the size and the length of the shaft the Republicans have

given the Democrats in the past six years. There has been a systematic

effort not only to deny the Democrats any kind of power-sharing role in

creating or refining legislation but to humiliate them publicly, show

them up, pee in their faces. Washington was once a chummy fraternity in

which members of both parties golfed together, played in the same pickup

basketball games, probably even shared the same mistresses. Now it is a

one-party town -- and congressional business is conducted accordingly,

as though the half of the country that the Democrats represent simply

does not exist.

>

> American government was not designed for one-party rule but for rule

by consensus -- so this current batch of Republicans has found a way to

work around that product design. They have scuttled both the spirit and

the letter of congressional procedure, turning the lawmaking process

into a backroom deal, with power concentrated in the hands of a few

chiefs behind the scenes. This reduces the legislature to a

Belarus-style rubber stamp, where the opposition is just there for show,

human pieces of stagecraft -- a fact the Republicans don't even bother

to conceal.

>

> " I remember one incident very clearly -- I think it was 2001, " says

Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican staffer

in the Senate. " I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete Domenici

at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the Democrats

were debating what the final result would be. And my boss gets up and he

says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even going to be in the room

when the decisions are made.' Just said it right out in the open. "

>

> Wheeler's very career is a symbol of a bipartisan age long passed into

the history books; he is the last staffer to have served in the offices

of a Republican and a Democrat at the same time, having once worked for

both Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum and Arkansas Democrat David Pryor

simultaneously. Today, those Democratic staffers trapped in the basement

laugh at the idea that such a thing could ever happen again. These days,

they consider themselves lucky if they manage to hold a single hearing

on a bill before Rove's well-oiled legislative machine delivers it up

for Bush's signature.

>

> The GOP's " take that, bitch " approach to governing has been taken to

the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is

chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an

ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that

makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena,

perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became

apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot

Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

>

> " Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when

Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show, " recalls a

Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. " But we got a pretty good

turnout anyway. "

>

> Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but

Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain

amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the

proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked

up his gavel and walked out.

>

> " He was like a kid at the playground, " the staffer says. And just in

case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut

the microphones on his way out of the room.

>

> For similarly petulant moves by a committee chair, one need look no

further than the Ways and Means Committee, where Rep. Bill Thomas -- a

pugnacious Californian with an enviable ego who was caught having an

affair with a pharmaceutical lobbyist -- enjoys a reputation rivaling

that of the rotund Sensenbrenner. The lowlight of his reign took place

just before midnight on July 17th, 2003, when Thomas dumped a

" substitute " pension bill on Democrats -- one that they had never read

-- and informed them they would be voting on it the next morning.

Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding that the bill be read out

line by line while they recessed to a side room to confer. But Thomas

wanted to move forward -- so he called the Capitol police to evict the

Democrats.

>

> Thomas is also notorious for excluding Democrats from the conference

hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate

versions of a bill. According to the rules, conferences have to include

at least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years, Republicans

have managed the conference issue with some of the most mind-blowingly

juvenile behavior seen in any parliament west of the Russian Duma after

happy hour. GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting, bring the press in

for a photo op and then promptly shut the proceedings down. " Take a

picture, wait five minutes, gavel it out -- all for show " is how one

Democratic staffer described the process. Then, amazingly, the

Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats

to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the

meeting. " More often than not, we're trying to figure out where the

conference is, " says one House aide.

>

> In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a

secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where

Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but

no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous " Land

Shark " skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the

door afraid to make a sound. " Rangel was the land shark, I guess, " the

aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the

door. " This meeting, " he informed Rangel, " is only open to the coalition

of the willing. "

>

> Republican rudeness and bluster make for funny stories, but the

phenomenon has serious consequences. The collegial atmosphere that once

prevailed helped Congress form a sense of collective identity that it

needed to fulfill its constitutional role as a check on the power of the

other two branches of government. It also enabled Congress to pass

legislation with a wide mandate, legislation that had been negotiated

between the leaders of both parties. For this reason Republican and

Democratic leaders traditionally maintained cordial relationships with

each other -- the model being the collegiality between House Speaker

Nicholas Longworth and Minority Leader John Nance Garner in the 1920s.

The two used to hold daily meetings over drinks and even rode to work

together.

>

> Although cooperation between the two parties has ebbed and flowed over

the years, historians note that Congress has taken strong bipartisan

action in virtually every administration. It was Sen. Harry Truman who

instigated investigations of wartime profiteering under FDR, and

Republicans Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker Jr. played pivotal roles on

the Senate Watergate Committee that nearly led to Nixon's impeachment.

>

> But those days are gone. " We haven't seen any congressional

investigations like this during the last six years, " says David Mayhew,

a professor of political science at Yale who has studied Congress for

four decades. " These days, Congress doesn't seem to be capable of doing

this sort of thing. Too much nasty partisanship. "

>

> One of the most depressing examples of one-party rule is the Patriot

Act. The measure was originally crafted in classic bipartisan fashion in

the Judiciary Committee, where it passed by a vote of thirty-six to

zero, with famed liberals like Barney Frank and Jerrold Nadler saying

aye. But when the bill was sent to the Rules Committee, the Republicans

simply chucked the approved bill and replaced it with a new, far more

repressive version, apparently written at the direction of then-Attorney

General John Ashcroft.

>

> " They just rewrote the whole bill, " says Rep. James McGovern, a

minority member of the Rules Committee. " All that committee work was

just for show. "

>

> To ensure that Democrats can't alter any of the last-minute changes,

Republicans have overseen a monstrous increase in the number of " closed "

rules -- bills that go to the floor for a vote without any possibility

of amendment. This tactic undercuts the very essence of democracy: In a

bicameral system, allowing bills to be debated openly is the only way

that the minority can have a real impact, by offering amendments to

legislation drafted by the majority.

>

> In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five

percent of all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last year

Democrats ran the House, that number had dropped to thirty percent --

and Republicans were seriously pissed. " You know what the closed rule

means, " Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on the House

floor. " It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly

undemocratic. " When Republicans took control of the House, they vowed to

throw off the gag rules imposed by Democrats. On opening day of the

104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced

his intention to institute free debate on the floor. " Instead of having

seventy percent closed rules, " he declared, " we are going to have

seventy percent open and unrestricted rules. "

>

> How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first

session of this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven were

appropriations bills, which are traditionally open. That left just one

open vote -- H. Res. 255, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of

2005.

>

> In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule,

outside of appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable bills

have been a genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-leafed

clover of legislative politics.

>

> When bills do make it to the floor for a vote, the debate generally

resembles what one House aide calls " preordained Kabuki. " Republican

leaders in the Bush era have mastered a new congressional innovation:

the one-vote victory. Rather than seeking broad consensus, the

leadership cooks up some hideously expensive, favor-laden boondoggle and

then scales it back bit by bit. Once they're in striking range, they

send the fucker to the floor and beat in the brains of the fence-sitters

with threats and favors until enough members cave in and pass the damn

thing. It is, in essence, a legislative microcosm of the electoral

strategy that Karl Rove has employed to such devastating effect.

>

> A classic example was the vote for the Central American Free Trade

Agreement, the union-smashing, free-trade monstrosity passed in 2005. As

has often been the case in the past six years, the vote was held late at

night, away from the prying eyes of the public, who might be horrified

by what they see. Thanks to such tactics, the 109th is known as the

" Dracula " Congress: Twenty bills have been brought to a vote between

midnight and 7 a.m.

>

> CAFTA actually went to vote early -- at 11:02 p.m. When the usual

fifteen-minute voting period expired, the nays were up, 180 to 175.

Republicans then held the vote open for another forty-seven minutes

while GOP leaders cruised the aisles like the family elders from The

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, frantically chopping at the legs and arms of

Republicans who opposed the measure. They even roused the president out

of bed to help kick ass for the vote, passing a cell phone with Bush on

the line around the House cloakroom like a bong. Rep. Robin Hayes of

North Carolina was approached by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who told

him, " Negotiations are open. Put on the table the things that your

district and people need and we'll get them. " After receiving assurances

that the administration would help textile manufacturers in his home

state by restricting the flow of cheap Chinese imports, Hayes switched

his vote to yea. CAFTA ultimately passed by two votes at 12:03 a.m.

>

> Closed rules, shipwrecked bills, secret negotiations, one-vote

victories. The result of all this is a Congress where there is little or

no open debate and virtually no votes are left to chance; all the

important decisions are made in backroom deals, and what you see on

C-Span is just empty theater, the world's most expensive trained-dolphin

act. The constant here is a political strategy of conducting

congressional business with as little outside input as possible,

rejecting the essentially conservative tradition of rule-by-consensus in

favor of a more revolutionary strategy of rule by cabal.

>

> " This Congress has thrown caution to the wind, " says Turley, the

constitutional scholar. " They have developed rules that are an abuse of

majority power. Keeping votes open by freezing the clock, barring

minority senators from negotiations on important conference issues -- it

is a record that the Republicans should now dread. One of the concerns

that Republicans have about losing Congress is that they will have to

live under the practices and rules they have created. The abuses that

served them in the majority could come back to haunt them in the

minority. "

>

> STEP TWO

> WORK AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE -- AND SCREW UP WHAT LITTLE YOU DO

>

> It's Thursday evening, September 28th, and the Senate is putting the

finishing touches on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, colloquially

known as the " torture bill. " It's a law even Stalin would admire, one

that throws habeas corpus in the trash, legalizes a vast array of savage

interrogation techniques and generally turns the president of the United

States into a kind of turbocharged Yoruba witch doctor, with nearly

unlimited snatching powers. The bill is a fall-from-Eden moment in

American history, a potentially disastrous step toward authoritarianism

-- but what is most disturbing about it, beyond the fact that it's

happening, is that the senators are hurrying to get it done.

>

> In addition to ending generations of bipartisanship and instituting

one-party rule, our national legislators in the Bush years are guilty of

something even more fundamental: They suck at their jobs.

>

> They don't work many days, don't pass many laws, and the few laws

they're forced to pass, they pass late. In fact, in every year that Bush

has been president, Congress has failed to pass more than three of the

eleven annual appropriations bills on time.

>

> That figures into tonight's problems. At this very moment, as the

torture bill goes to a vote, there are only a few days left until the

beginning of the fiscal year -- and not one appropriations bill has been

passed so far. That's why these assholes are hurrying to bag this

torture bill: They want to finish in time to squeeze in a measly two

hours of debate tonight on the half-trillion-dollar

defense-appropriations bill they've blown off until now. The plan is to

then wrap things up tomorrow before splitting Washington for a month of

real work, i.e., campaigning.

>

> Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont comments on this rush to torture during the

final, frenzied debate. " Over 200 years of jurisprudence in this

country, " Leahy pleads, " and following an hour of debate, we get rid of

it? "

>

> Yawns, chatter, a few sets of rolling eyes -- yeah, whatever, Pat. An

hour later, the torture bill is law. Two hours after that, the

diminutive chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Ted

Stevens, reads off the summary of the military-spending bill to a mostly

empty hall; since the members all need their sleep and most have left

early, the " debate " on the biggest spending bill of the year is

conducted before a largely phantom audience.

>

> " Mr. President, " Stevens begins, eyeing the few members present.

" There are only four days left in the fiscal year. The 2007 defense

appropriations conference report must be signed into law by the

president before Saturday at midnight. . . . "

>

> Watching Ted Stevens spend half a trillion dollars is like watching a

junkie pull a belt around his biceps with his teeth. You get the sense

he could do it just as fast in the dark. When he finishes his summary --

$436 billion in defense spending, including $70 billion for the Iraq

" emergency " -- he fucks off and leaves the hall. A few minutes later,

Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma -- one of the so-called honest Republicans

who has clashed with his own party's leadership on spending issues --

appears in the hall and whines to the empty room about all the lavish

pork projects and sheer unadulterated waste jammed into the bill. But

aside from a bored-looking John Cornyn of Texas, who is acting as

president pro tempore, and a couple of giggling, suit-clad pages, there

is no one in the hall to listen to him.

>

> In the Sixties and Seventies, Congress met an average of 162 days a

year. In the Eighties and Nineties, the average went down to 139 days.

This year, the second session of the 109th Congress will set the

all-time record for fewest days worked by a U.S. Congress: ninety-three.

That means that House members will collect their $165,000 paychecks for

only three months of actual work.

>

> What this means is that the current Congress will not only beat but

shatter the record for laziness set by the notorious " Do-Nothing "

Congress of 1948, which met for a combined 252 days between the House

and the Senate. This Congress -- the Do-Even-Less Congress -- met for

218 days, just over half a year, between the House and the Senate

combined.

>

> And even those numbers don't come close to telling the full story.

Those who actually work on the Hill will tell you that a great many of

those " workdays " were shameless mail-ins, half-days at best. Congress

has arranged things now so that the typical workweek on the Hill begins

late on Tuesday and ends just after noon on Thursday, to give members

time to go home for the four-day weekend. This is borne out in the

numbers: On nine of its " workdays " this year, the House held not a

single vote -- meeting for less than eleven minutes. The Senate managed

to top the House's feat, pulling off three workdays this year that

lasted less than one minute. All told, a full fifteen percent of the

Senate's workdays lasted less than four hours. Figuring for half-days,

in fact, the 109th Congress probably worked almost two months less than

that " Do-Nothing " Congress.

>

> Congressional laziness comes at a high price. By leaving so many

appropriations bills unpassed by the beginning of the new fiscal year,

Congress forces big chunks of the government to rely on " continuing

resolutions " for their funding. Why is this a problem? Because under

congressional rules, CRs are funded at the lowest of three levels: the

level approved by the House, the level approved by the Senate or the

level approved from the previous year. Thanks to wide discrepancies

between House and Senate appropriations for social programming, CRs

effectively operate as a backdoor way to slash social programs. It's

also a nice way for congressmen to get around having to pay for

expensive-ass programs they voted for, like No Child Left Behind and

some of the other terminally underfunded boondoggles of the Bush years.

>

> " The whole point of passing appropriations bills is that Congress is

supposed to make small increases in programs to account for things like

the increase in population, " says Adam Hughes, director of federal

fiscal policy for OMB Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group. " It's their

main job. " Instead, he says, the reliance on CRs " leaves programs

underfunded. "

>

> Instead of dealing with its chief constitutional duty -- approving all

government spending -- Congress devotes its time to dumb bullshit. " This

Congress spent a week and a half debating Terri Schiavo -- it never made

appropriations a priority, " says Hughes. In fact, Congress leaves itself

so little time to pass the real appropriations bills that it winds up

rolling them all into one giant monstrosity known as an Omnibus bill and

passing it with little or no debate. Rolling eight-elevenths of all

federal spending into a single bill that hits the floor a day or two

before the fiscal year ends does not leave much room to check the fine

print. " It allows a lot more leeway for fiscal irresponsibility, " says

Hughes.

>

> A few years ago, when Democratic staffers in the Senate were

frantically poring over a massive Omnibus bill they had been handed the

night before the scheduled vote, they discovered a tiny provision that

had not been in any of the previous versions. The item would have given

senators on the Appropriations Committee access to the private records

of any taxpayer -- essentially endowing a few selected hacks in the

Senate with the license to snoop into the private financial information

of all Americans.

>

> " We were like, 'What the hell is this?' ?says one Democratic aide

familiar with the incident. " It was the most egregious thing imaginable.

It was just lucky we caught them. "

>

> STEP THREE

> LET THE PRESIDENT DO WHATEVER HE WANTS

>

> The constitution is very clear on the responsibility of Congress to

serve as a check on the excesses of the executive branch. The House and

Senate, after all, are supposed to pass all laws -- the president is

simply supposed to execute them. Over the years, despite some ups and

downs, Congress has been fairly consistent in upholding this fundamental

responsibility, regardless of which party controlled the legislative

branch. Elected representatives saw themselves as beholden not to their

own party or the president but to the institution of Congress itself.

The model of congressional independence was Sen. William Fulbright, who

took on McCarthy, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon with equal vigor during the

course of his long career.

>

> " Fulbright behaved the same way with Nixon as he did with Johnson, "

says Wheeler, the former Senate aide who worked on both sides of the

aisle. " You wouldn't see that today. "

>

> In fact, the Republican-controlled Congress has created a new standard

for the use of oversight powers. That standard seems to be that when a

Democratic president is in power, there are no matters too stupid or

meaningless to be investigated fully -- but when George Bush is

president, no evidence of corruption or incompetence is shocking enough

to warrant congressional attention. One gets the sense that Bush would

have to drink the blood of Christian babies to inspire hearings in

Congress -- and only then if he did it during a nationally televised

State of the Union address and the babies were from Pennsylvania, where

Senate Judiciary chairman Arlen Specter was running ten points behind in

an election year.

>

> The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through

the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee

chairman issued a subpoena without either minority consent or a

committee vote. In the Clinton years, Republicans chucked that

long-standing arrangement and issued more than 1,000 subpoenas to

investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct, reviewing

more than 2 million pages of government documents.

>

> Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since

George Bush took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the

number of open rules debated this year; two fewer than the number of

appropriations bills passed on time.

>

> And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35

million investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer

funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into account, was more

than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to

investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper

payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today's Congress spent

barely half a million dollars investigating the outright fraud and

government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural

disaster in American history.

>

> " Oversight is one of the most important functions of Congress --

perhaps more important than legislating, " says Rep. Henry Waxman. " And

the Republicans have completely failed at it. I think they decided that

they were going to be good Republicans first and good legislators

second. "

>

> As the ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee,

Waxman has earned a reputation as the chief Democratic muckraker,

obsessively cranking out reports on official misconduct and

incompetence. Among them is a lengthy document detailing all of the

wrongdoing by the Bush administration that should have been investigated

-- and would have been, in any other era. The litany of fishy behavior

left uninvestigated in the Bush years includes the manipulation of

intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the

mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA status,

the award of Halliburton contracts, the White House response to Katrina,

secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney's energy task force, the withholding of

Medicare cost estimates, the administration's politicization of science,

contract abuses at Homeland Security and lobbyist influence at the EPA.

>

> Waxman notes that the failure to investigate these issues has actually

hurt the president, leaving potentially fatal flaws in his policies

unexamined even by those in his own party. Without proper congressional

oversight, small disasters like the misuse of Iraq intelligence have

turned into huge, festering, unsolvable fiascoes like the Iraq

occupation. Republicans in Congress who stonewalled investigations of

the administration " thought they were doing Bush a favor, " says Waxman.

" But they did him the biggest disservice of all. "

>

> Congress has repeatedly refused to look at any aspect of the war. In

2003, Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by Waxman

that would have established an independent commission to review the

false claims Bush made in asking Congress to declare war on Iraq. That

same year, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss,

refused to hold hearings on whether the administration had forged

evidence of the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Iraq. A year later the

chair of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold

hearings on new evidence casting doubt on the " nuclear tubes " cited by

the Bush administration before the war. Sen. Pat Roberts, who pledged to

issue a Senate Intelligence Committee report after the 2004 election on

whether the Bush administration had misled the public before the

invasion, changed his mind after the president won re-election. " I think

it would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any

> further, " Roberts said.

>

> Sensenbrenner has done his bit to squelch any debate over Iraq. He

refused a request by John Conyers and more than fifty other Democrats

for hearings on the famed " Downing Street Memo, " the internal British

document that stated that Bush had " fixed " the intelligence about the

war, and he was one of three committee chairs who rejected requests for

hearings on the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Despite an international

uproar over Abu Ghraib, Congress spent only twelve hours on hearings on

the issue. During the Clinton administration, by contrast, the

Republican Congress spent 140 hours investigating the president's

alleged misuse of his Christmas-card greeting list.

>

> " You talk to many Republicans in Congress privately, and they will

tell you how appalled they are by the administration's diminishment of

civil liberties and the constant effort to keep fear alive, " says

Turley, who testified as a constitutional scholar in favor of the

Clinton impeachment. " Yet those same members slavishly vote with the

White House. What's most alarming about the 109th has been the massive

erosion of authority in Congress. There has always been partisanship,

but this is different. Members have become robotic in the way they

vote. "

>

> Perhaps the most classic example of failed oversight in the Bush era

came in a little-publicized hearing of the Senate Armed Services

Committee held on February 13th, 2003 -- just weeks before the invasion

of Iraq. The hearing offered senators a rare opportunity to grill

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and top Pentagon officials on a

wide variety of matters, including the fairly important question of

whether they even had a fucking plan for the open-ended occupation of a

gigantic hostile foreign population halfway around the planet. This was

the biggest bite that Congress would have at the Iraq apple before the

war, and given the gravity of the issue, it should have been a beast of

a hearing.

>

> But it wasn't to be. In a meeting that lasted two hours and

fifty-three minutes, only one question was asked about the military's

readiness on the eve of the invasion. Sen. John Warner, the committee's

venerable and powerful chairman, asked Gen. Richard Myers if the U.S.

was ready to fight simultaneously in both Iraq and North Korea, if

necessary.

>

> Myers answered, " Absolutely. "

>

> And that was it. The entire exchange lasted fifteen seconds. The rest

of the session followed a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a

hearing on C-Span: The members, when they weren't reading or chatting

with one another, used their time with witnesses almost exclusively to

address parochial concerns revolving around pork projects in their own

districts. Warner set the tone in his opening remarks; after announcing

that U.S. troops preparing to invade Iraq could count on his committee's

" strongest support, " the senator from Virginia quickly turned to the

question of how the war would affect the budget for Navy shipbuilding,

which, he said, was not increasing " as much as we wish. " Not that

there's a huge Navy shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, or anything.

>

> Other senators followed suit. Daniel Akaka was relatively uninterested

in Iraq but asked about reports that Korea might have a missile that

could reach his home state of Hawaii. David Pryor of Arkansas used his

time to tout the wonders of military bases in Little Rock and Pine

Bluff. When the senators weren't eating up their allotted time in this

fashion, they were usually currying favor with the generals. Warner

himself nicely encapsulated the obsequious tone of the session when he

complimented Rumsfeld for having his shit so together on the war.

>

> " I think your response reflects that we have given a good deal of

consideration, " Warner said. " That we have clear plans in place and are

ready to proceed. " We all know how that turned out.

>

> STEP FOUR

> SPEND, SPEND, SPEND

>

> There is a simple reason that members of Congress don't waste their

time providing any oversight of the executive branch: There's nothing in

it for them. " What they've all figured out is that there's no political

payoff in oversight, " says Wheeler, the former congressional staffer.

" But there's a big payoff in pork. "

>

> When one considers that Congress has forsaken hearings and debate,

conspired to work only three months a year, completely ditched its

constitutional mandate to provide oversight and passed very little in

the way of meaningful legislation, the question arises: What do they do?

>

> The answer is easy: They spend. When Bill Clinton left office, the

nation had a budget surplus of $236 billion. Today, thanks to Congress,

the budget is $296 billion in the hole. This year, more than sixty-five

percent of all the money borrowed in the entire world will be borrowed

by America, a statistic fueled by the speed-junkie spending habits of

our supposedly " fiscally conservative " Congress. It took forty-two

presidents before George W. Bush to borrow $1 trillion; under Bush,

Congress has more than doubled that number in six years. And more often

than not, we are borrowing from countries the sane among us would prefer

not to be indebted to: The U.S. shells out $77 billion a year in

interest to foreign creditors, including payment on the $300 billion we

currently owe China.

>

> What do they spend that money on? In the age of Jack Abramoff, that is

an ugly question to even contemplate. But let's take just one bill, the

so-called energy bill, a big, hairy, favor-laden bitch of a law that

started out as the wet dream of Dick Cheney's energy task force and

spent four long years leaving grease-tracks on every set of palms in the

Capitol before finally becoming law in 2005.

>

> Like a lot of laws in the Bush era, it was crafted with virtually no

input from the Democrats, who were excluded from the conference process.

And during the course of the bill's gestation period we were made aware

that many of its provisions were more or less openly for sale, as in the

case of a small electric utility from Kansas called Westar Energy.

>

> Westar wanted a provision favorable to its business inserted in the

bill -- and in an internal company memo, it acknowledged that members of

Congress had requested Westar donate money to their campaigns in

exchange for the provision. The members included former Louisiana

congressman Billy Tauzin and current Energy and Commerce chairman Joe

Barton of Texas. " They have made this request in lieu of contributions

made to their own campaigns, " the memo noted. The total amount of

Westar's contributions was $58,200.

>

> Keep in mind, that number -- fifty-eight grand -- was for a single

favor. The energy bill was loaded with them. Between 2001 and the

passage of the bill, energy companies donated $115 million to federal

politicians, with seventy-five percent of the money going to

Republicans. When the bill finally passed, it contained $6 billion in

subsidies for the oil industry, much of which was funneled through a

company with ties to Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It included an exemption

from the Safe Drinking Water Act for companies that use a

methane-drilling technique called " hydraulic fracturing " -- one of the

widest practitioners of which is Halliburton. And it included billions

in subsidies for the construction of new coal plants and billions more

in loan guarantees to enable the coal and nuclear industries to borrow

money at bargain-basement interest rates.

>

> Favors for campaign contributors, exemptions for polluters, shifting

the costs of private projects on to the public -- these are the

specialties of this Congress. They seldom miss an opportunity to

impoverish the states we live in and up the bottom line of their

campaign contributors. All this time -- while Congress did nothing about

Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Mark Foley's boy-madness or anything else of

import -- it has been all about pork, all about political favors, all

about budget " earmarks " set aside for expensive and often useless

projects in their own districts. In 2000, Congress passed 6,073

earmarks; by 2005, that number had risen to 15,877. They got better at

it every year. It's the one thing they're good at.

>

> Even worse, this may well be the first Congress ever to lose control

of the government's finances. For the past six years, it has essentially

been writing checks without keeping an eye on its balance. When you do

that, unpleasant notices eventually start appearing in the mail. In

2003, the inspector general of the Defense Department reported to

Congress that the military's financial-management systems did not comply

with " generally accepted accounting principles " and that the department

" cannot currently provide adequate evidence supporting various material

amounts on the financial statements. "

>

> Translation: The Defense Department can no longer account for its

money. " It essentially can't be audited, " says Wheeler, the former

congressional staffer. " And nobody did anything about it. That's the job

of Congress, but they don't care anymore. "

>

> So not only does Congress not care what intelligence was used to get

into the war, what the plan was supposed to be once we got there, what

goes on in military prisons in Iraq and elsewhere, how military

contracts are being given away and to whom -- it doesn't even give a

shit what happens to the half-trillion bucks it throws at the military

every year.

>

> Not to say, of course, that this Congress hasn't made an effort to

reform itself. In the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, and following a

public uproar over the widespread abuse of earmarks, both the House and

the Senate passed their own versions of an earmark reform bill this

year. But when the two chambers couldn't agree on a final version, the

House was left to pass its own watered-down measure in the waning days

of the most recent session. This pathetically, almost historically

half-assed attempt at reforming corruption should tell you all you need

to know about the current Congress.

>

> The House rule will force legislators to attach their names to all

earmarks. Well, not all earmarks. Actually, the new rule applies only to

nonfederal funding -- money for local governments, nonprofits and

universities. And the rule will remain in effect only for the remainder

of this congressional year -- in other words, for the few remaining days

of business after lawmakers return to Washington following the election

season. After that, it's back to business as usual next year.

>

> That is what passes for " corruption reform " in this Congress --

forcing lawmakers to put their names on a tiny fraction of all earmarks.

For a couple of days.

>

> STEP FIVE

> LINE YOUR OWN POCKETS

>

> Anyone who wants to get a feel for the kinds of beasts that have been

roaming the grounds of the congressional zoo in the past six years need

only look at the deranged, handwritten letter that convicted bribe-taker

and GOP ex-congressman Randy " Duke " Cunningham recently sent from prison

to Marcus Stern, the reporter who helped bust him. In it, Cunningham --

who was convicted last year of taking $2.4 million in cash, rugs,

furniture and jewelry from a defense contractor called MZM -- bitches

out Stern in the broken, half-literate penmanship of a six-year-old put

in time-out.

>

> " Each time you print it hurts my family And now I have lost them Along

with Everything I have worked for during my 64 years of life, "

Cunningham wrote. " I am human not an Animal to keep whiping [sic]. I

made some decissions [sic] Ill be sorry for the rest of my life. "

>

> The amazing thing about Cunningham's letter is not his utter lack of

remorse, or his insistence on blaming defense contractor Mitchell Wade

for ratting him out ( " 90% of what has happed [sic] is Wade, " he writes),

but his frantic, almost epic battle with the English language. It is

clear that the same Congress that put a drooling child-chaser like Mark

Foley in charge of a House caucus on child exploitation also named

Cunningham, a man who can barely write his own name in the ground with a

stick, to a similarly appropriate position. Ladies and gentlemen, we

give you the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Human

Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence:

>

> " As truth will come out and you will find out how liablest [sic] you

have & will be. Not once did you list the positives. Education Man of

the Year...hospital funding, jobs, Hiway [sic] funding, border security,

Megans law my bill, Tuna Dolfin [sic] my bill...and every time you

wanted an expert on the wars who did you call. No Marcus you write About

how I died. "

>

> How liablest you have & will be? What the fuck does that even mean?

This guy sat on the Appropriations Committee for years -- no wonder

Congress couldn't pass any spending bills!

>

> This is Congress in the Bush years, in a nutshell -- a guy who takes

$2 million in bribes from a contractor, whooping it up in turtlenecks

and pajama bottoms with young women on a contractor-provided yacht named

after himself (the " Duke-Stir " ), and not only is he shocked when he's

caught, he's too dumb to even understand that he's been guilty of

anything.

>

> This kind of appalling moral blindness, a sort of high-functioning,

sociopathic stupidity, has been a consistent characteristic of the

numerous Republicans indicted during the Bush era. Like all

revolutionaries, they seem to feel entitled to break rules in the name

of whatever the hell it is they think they're doing. And when caught

breaking said rules with wads of cash spilling out of their pockets,

they appear genuinely indignant at accusations of wrongdoing. Former

House Majority Leader and brazen fuckhead Tom DeLay, after finally being

indicted for money laundering, seemed amazed that anyone would bring him

into court.

>

> " I have done nothing wrong, " he declared. " I have violated no law, no

regulation, no rule of the House. " Unless, of course, you count the

charges against him for conspiring to inject illegal contributions into

state elections in Texas " with the intent that a felony be committed. "

>

> It was the same when Ohio's officious jackass of a (soon-to-be-ex)

Congressman Bob Ney finally went down for accepting $170,000 in trips

from Abramoff in exchange for various favors. Even as the evidence piled

high, Ney denied any wrongdoing. When he finally did plead guilty, he

blamed the sauce. " A dependence on alcohol has been a problem for me, "

he said.

>

> Abramoff, incidentally, was another Republican with a curious

inability to admit wrongdoing even after conviction; even now he

confesses only to trying too hard to " save the world. " But everything we

know about Abramoff suggests that Congress has embarked on a

never-ending party, a wild daisy-chain of golf junkets, skybox tickets

and casino trips. Money is everywhere and guys like Abramoff found ways

to get it to guys like Ney, who made the important discovery that even a

small entry in the Congressional Record can get you a tee time at St.

Andrews.

>

> Although Ney is so far the only congressman to win an all-expenses

trip to prison as a result of his relationship with Abramoff, nearly a

dozen other House Republicans are known to have done favors for him.

Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, who accepted some $36,000 from

Abramoff-connected donors, helped prevent the Jena Band of Choctaw

Indians from opening a casino that would have competed with Abramoff's

clients. Rep. Deborah Pryce, who sent a letter to Interior Secretary

Gale Norton opposing the Jena casino, received $8,000 from the Abramoff

money machine. Rep. John Doolittle, whose wife was hired to work for

Abramoff's sham charity, also intervened on behalf of the lobbyist's

clients.

>

> Then there was DeLay and his fellow Texan, Rep. Pete Sessions, who did

Abramoff's bidding after accepting gifts and junkets. So much energy

devoted to smarmy little casino disputes at a time when the country was

careening toward disaster in Iraq: no time for oversight but plenty of

time for golf.

>

> For those who didn't want to go the black-bag route, there was always

the legal jackpot. Billy Tauzin scarcely waited a week after leaving

office to start a $2 million-a-year job running PhRMA, the group that

helped him push through a bill prohibiting the government from

negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. Tauzin also became the

all-time poster boy for pork absurdity when a " greenbonds initiative "

crafted in his Energy and Commerce Committee turned out to be a subsidy

to build a Hooters in his home state of Louisiana.

>

> The greed and laziness of the 109th Congress has reached such epic

proportions that it has finally started to piss off the public. In an

April poll by CBS News, fully two-thirds of those surveyed said that

Congress has achieved " less than it usually does during a typical

two-year period. " A recent Pew poll found that the chief concerns that

occupy Congress -- gay marriage and the inheritance tax -- are near the

bottom of the public's list of worries. Those at the top -- education,

health care, Iraq and Social Security -- were mostly blown off by

Congress. Even a Fox News poll found that fifty-three percent of voters

say Congress isn't " working on issues important to most Americans. "

>

> One could go on and on about the scandals and failures of the past six

years; to document them all would take . . . well, it would take more

than ninety-three fucking days, that's for sure. But you can boil the

whole sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth. Greed. Abuse of

power. Hatred of democracy. Government as a cheap backroom deal,

finished in time for thirty-six holes of the world's best golf. And

brains too stupid to be ashamed of any of it. If we have learned nothing

else in the Bush years, it's that this Congress cannot be reformed. The

only way to change it is to get rid of it.

>

> Fortunately, we still get that chance once in a while.

>

> See our picks for the 10 Worst Congressmen and read what people are

saying in our politics blog.

> IAHF needs your help to get back to DC in January:

> If we can kill the AER bill in the House during this lame duck

session which ends Friday, the bill would have to be reintroduced in the

next Congress under new bill numbers- they'd have to try again- and we

will have to push very hard for a HEARING on the bill in order to get

the changes made to it that we need.

> The other side is pulling out all the stops to get this bill through

because it would enable the big supplement companies that could afford

the red tape to knock off the small companies that can't and the big

ones would gain hugely increased marketshare. Thank God not all big

companies are against us! Please be sure to THANK Nature's Plus,

Nutraceutical, and Solgar for being in our corner against NPA (formerly

NNFA).

> We must continue to build our base regardless of what happens on

this bill. We must ALSO push for a hearing on FDA's illegal Trilateral

Cooperation Charter with Canada/ Mexico wherein FDA is attempting to

harmonize the food and drug regs for all 3 countries as if the

N.American Union already existed. We're seeing a concerted push to

DESTROY our country, and it will be destroyed, but ONLY if we LET it!

> See my petition and please sign it:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/373269232#body

> For donations of $25 we'll send a copy of Byron Richard's book

> FIGHT FOR YOUR HEALTH- EXPOSING THE FDA's BETRAYAL OF AMERICA

> For $50. we'll send the book, plus Kevin Miller's documentary film

" We Become Silent " about the Codex vitamin issue.For $100. we'll send

the above + an IAHF Bumper Sticker.

> For $200. or more we'll send the above + an autographed photo

suitable for framing of John Hammell swimming in a hole cut in the ice

of a frozen pond.

> The photo helps anyone who sees it to increase their resolve to be

stronger than any hardship you may ever face.

> Please help us get back to DC so we can do our work!

> IAHF 556 Boundary Bay Rd., Point Roberts WA 98281 or via paypal:

http://www.iahf.com click to enter site, see paypal link on top of

scrollbar inside the site.

>

> For Health Freedom, John C. Hammell, President International

Advocates for Health Freedom 556 Boundary Bay Road Point Roberts, WA

98281-8702 USA http://www.iahf.com jham 800-333-2553 N.America

360-945-0352 World

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