Legislation 101: Who is writing the legislation?

 

Who is writing the legislation? It’s not your Congress critter. At Conservative Treehouse, Sundance explains, and his entire posting is essentially Legislation 101 for voters:

. . . Recap: Corporations (special interest group) write the legislation. Lobbyists [K Street] take the law and go find politician(s) to support it. Politicians get support from their peers using tenure and status etc. Eventually, if things go according to norm, the legislation gets a vote.

Within every step of the process there are expense account lunches, dinners, trips, venue tickets and a host of other customary financial waypoints to generate/leverage a successful outcome. The amount of money spent is proportional to the benefit derived from the outcome.

The important part to remember is that the origination of the entire process is EXTERNAL to congress.

Congress does not write laws or legislation; special interest groups do. Lobbyists are paid, some very well paid, to get politicians to go along with the need of the legislative group.

When you are voting for a Congressional Rep or a U.S. Senator you are not voting for a person who will write laws. Your rep only votes on legislation to approve or disapprove of constructs that are written by outside groups and sold to them through lobbyists who work for those outside groups.

While all of this is happening the same outside groups who write the laws are providing money for the campaigns of the politicians, they need to pass them. This construct sets up the quid-pro-quo of influence, although much of it is fraught with plausible deniability.

This is the way legislation is created.

If your frame of reference is not established in this basic understanding you can often fall into the trap of viewing a politician, or political vote, through a false prism. The modern origin of all legislative constructs is not within congress.

“we’ll have to pass the bill to, well, find out what is in the bill” etc. ~ Nancy Pelosi 2009

“We rely upon the stupidity of the American voter” ~ Johnathan Gruber 2011, 2012.

Once you understand this process, you can understand how politicians get rich.

Much more at the link here.

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GOP vs GOPe : the Uniparty in plain sight

 

The curtain is pulled back.  Paula Bolyard is right about the GOP opposition to [R-establishment] Kevin McCarthy becoming Speaker of the House --- the floor fight visibly exposes the Uniparty’s concern for its own power and wealth – and it has nothing to do with the voters:

As of publishing time, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has lost five six votes in his bid to be House speaker and there seems to be no end in sight. There are around 20 Republican holdouts in the “never McCarthy” camp, and they’re showing no signs of budging.

. . .

Meanwhile, Republican establishment types are running around with their hair on fire, shouting about unity and warning that Republicans will pay a steep price unless they can show a united front in the early days of their House majority.

Hogwash.

One way or another, this will all be over in a few days and we’ll all go back to binge-watching mindless dramas on Netflix and planning our Super Bowl parties. A month from now, Rep. Jim Jordan will be holding hearings that won’t result in any Democrats paying a price for their treachery during Trump’s presidency, the House will once again be spending money like drunken sailors, and Congress will continue to get next to nothing useful done for the American people. Lather, rinse, repeat. Delaying the start of the congressional session by a few days, or even a month, won’t matter one iota. By the time the 2024 election rolls around, no one will care that there was a protracted fight for House speaker in early 2023.

. . .

What we’re witnessing now is the messy, glorious republican form of government our Founding Fathers laid out in the Constitution. Many Americans are tired of the Uniparty that exuberantly passes pork-laden omnibus spending bills in the dead of night and plays by Marquess of Queensberry Rules as our country plunges toward insolvency, immorality, and anarchy.

While establishment Republicans like Kevin McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel would like to keep the party’s dirty laundry hidden, the American people deserve to know how the sausage is being made. We need to know what’s being promised to Republicans who vote for McCarthy. There are rumors that he may try to bring Democrats over to his side, and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is reportedly trying to cut a deal with him, which only increases distrust within the caucus.

And Ms Bolyard points out toward the end of the article:

But no matter what happens, the beauty is in the process. . . . enjoy the process, and thank God that you live in a country where we settle these things with words and not guns.

Read Ms. Bolyard’s PJ Media article here.

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Mercola: data on COVID shots

 

Published at AmericaFirstReport:

Dr. Joseph Mercola: Covid Jabs
Have Erased 25 Years of Health Gains

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• Americans had lost nearly three years of life expectancy during 2020 and 2021. In 2019, the average life span of Americans of all ethnicities was 78.8 years. By the end of 2020, it had dropped to 77.0 years and by the end of 2021 it was 76.4
• From 2020 to 2021, death rates increased for each age group 1 year and over. The age groups with the highest increases include working age adults, 25 to 54, and children under 4
• The leading causes of death in 2021 were heart disease, cancer and COVID-19, all three of which were higher in 2021 than 2020. Unintentional injury and stroke also significantly increased in 2021
• Heart disease, stroke and cancer are all now-known side effects of the COVID jabs. Unintentional injuries may also be due to the shots, as you may easily be injured if you pass out or suffer a heart attack or stroke while doing just about anything
• If the COVID jabs worked, you’d expect excess mortality to drop, yet that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re also not seeing mass death from COVID. The only clear factor that might account for these discrepancies is mass injection with an experimental gene transfer technology

Read the entire report here.

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The Clown Show Continues

 

And the Babylon Bee is on it:

Republicans Gather In Congress To Vote On

Who Will Fail The Voters This Time

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Republicans in Congress are gathering to vote for their preferred politician who will let the voters down over the next two years.

"This is an honorable tradition, where we come together as team players to choose the one man who will most effectively preserve our power while doing the opposite of everything we promised our voters and spending trillions of dollars," said Rep. Dan Crenshaw. "Anyone who opposes our pick is anti-American!"

At publishing time, Republicans had considered just electing a Democrat Speaker of the House since there isn't much difference anyway.

Source link for the “report” is here.

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Daniel Greenfield: reasons for optimism

 

Daniel Greenfield at FrontPageMag has real reasons for optimism.  Here’s an extract:

. . . Few people across the country are feeling optimistic about 2023. The old jokes about 2021 and 2022 have long since worn thin. Inflation is draining incomes, insecurity is growing and the lack of confidence in a better future has hit numbers that we may have never seen before among Americans in modern times.

Times are hard.

But hope paradoxically comes from hard times. Comfort breeds complacency. The seeds of the tragedy we’re living through were sown when most people decided that they could take a vacation from history, from thinking about what their leaders were doing, what was being taught in their schools, and from politics.

No answer was ever going to emerge from the false hopes of a comfortable society.

The pain that’s being experienced is something that no one should welcome, but it will get worse. And the only hope will come from that. As we’ve seen in the midterms, people are worried, angry and afraid. But the lessons still haven’t been learned. Life can get worse than the price of staples going up by the double digits.

If things go on at this rate, it will. And economics are the least of it.

The hard times we’re living through are nothing compared to what some previous generations experienced. And while I hope that things won’t have to get worse, wake-up calls are painful miserable things.

Mr Greenfield concludes:

We are living through history. And we’re not passive actors in it. We can seize the moment. We can fight for change. The guard rails are off. The system is coming apart. But we’re not doomed to be passive actors in it. Unlike so much of the last generation, what we do can actually make a difference if we make the right choices.

2023 is ours to win or lose.

It’s a very good read.  Click here.

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Bidenomics

A F Branco cartoon seen at Flopping Aces:

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Neil Oliver on the New Year

 

Here’s part of Neil Oliver’s weekend monologue to ring in the New Year:

In a few hours, we welcome 2023, but as far as our leaders and their lackeys are concerned it might as well be Groundhog Day.

I look at the headlines on this last day of 2022 and what do I see? Covid, Ukraine and Climate Change. Folks nuttier than anything found in a selection box are talking about bringing back face masks. God help us. Let’s remind everyone for the umpteenth time that Covid is now no more dangerous to most than the common cold. But still, the talk is of the pandemic, same old, same old.

. . .

I honestly feel the relentless push to keep us down, with fear of pestilence, fear of war, fear of the ending of the world, is the equivalent of a sustained beating designed, once and for all, to knock the last of the spirit out of us so that finally we shut up and do as we’re told.

But here’s the thing: that spirit is not vanquished. Instead, and on the contrary, in the hearts and minds of enough of us, that spirit has been ignited into flame.

. . .

The more each of us speaks to out in the world, the better. The more we share, the more reassurance we provide one another, and the stronger we are. That’s where the hope lies, and the promise of brighter days sooner or later.

. . .

The Hobbit Frodo Baggins feels all but overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead of him and tells the wizard Gandalf,

“I wish it need not have happened in my time.”

“So do I,” replies Gandalf. “And so do all who live to see such times. But it is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Happy New Year, to all dear friends and fellow travelers.

Read the rest of the transcript here.

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