Lame Duck, or Just Lame?

by Darrell Castle, Constitution Party National Committee Vice-Chairman

“All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” (United States Constitution, Article I Section 1.).

This section of the Constitution places all legislative or law-making power clearly in the hands of Congress, and therefore denies them the right to transfer that responsibility to the president. In light of the Constitutional responsibilities of Congress, then, let’s take a brief look at not only what this lame duck session has accomplished, but also what has been accomplished in recent years.

The lame duck session passed 3 of the 4 major items on its agenda. The three were the START treaty, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), and the “deal” to extend the Bush tax cuts. The only thing they were denied was President Obama’s DREAM Act (AIM: amnesty for illegal minors).

I won’t go into detail about any of these because we have so many accomplishments to list, except to say that the tax cut extension was really Stimulus II or, in other words, a deceitful way of pumping more money into the economy which the American public clearly rejected in the November elections. The total cost of the “deal” is estimated at $990 billion or just short of a trillion dollars, and two thirds of that money had nothing to do with tax cuts, middle class or otherwise.

With the lame ducks out of the way, what else can Congress be proud of? Here’s just a few:

• Allowing the president to wage trillion dollar wars of aggression all over the world;
• Bankrupting the richest nation on earth;
• Destroying two-thirds of the manufacturing base of the greatest manufacturing nation on earth;
• Plunging future generations of Americans into debt peonage;
• Obamacare with its health mandates that deny the right to exit the system – a system, by the way, to which Congress is not subject;
• Return of death panels despite the assurances that they would not return;
• The Food Safety Bill, or the bill to make Monsanto our food controller;
• Genetically modified foods; irradiated foods; imported and uninspected foods;
• Net neutrality talks well under way;
• A controlled press,
• and destruction of the best education system in the world.

I could go on with this for pages and pages but I think you get the idea.

In light of all this I have a Christmas gift (winter holiday gift as they say in Washington) suggestion that Congress could give the American people to partially repent for what it has done. The gift is this: Just stay on your Christmas vacation forever. Congresspersons just stay permanently away from Washington. If you can’t bear to stay permanently away then give us one of those compromises you are so good at and stay away for a year.

What a wonderful, glorious, happy time that would be for all Americans and indeed for the whole world for us to know that we were safe from your efforts to destroy our lives and property for a whole year. If you think about it you will see that we don’t need you. What bills could you pass that are not harmful? What have we lived without for almost 250 years that we can’t live without for just one more year?

If Congress actually decided to give us a break and stay away for a year, a shout of joy and freedom would ring out around the world that has not been heard since the end of World War II. Not that you earn it or deserve it, but we would be willing to let you keep your salaries. It would be well worth it for the year of safety we would enjoy without your strutting, preening presence on our televisions.

We might even be willing to make the day of the announcement a national holiday so we could have a day off too. But wait, that would require you to come back to Washington for a vote, so never mind.