Making laws are like making sausage, if you saw it you'd hate them.

Who's the Legislature here anyway, Bush or Congress?

The other day, I was daydreaming about night things in the middle of the afternoon. You know, what it's like. You want to take things you hear at face value and you want to have faith in your government. You truly want to, have faith, that is. Then, it hit me like a freight train! I remember reading the original, unrevised, un-enhanced version of the USA PATRIOT ACT after it was passed in 2001, and how it took my laborious reading of it FIVE times before I could make head or tails out of it, and knowing that there was no forking way that the ex-party animal Bush read it even ONCE before signing it.

Heck, not even the Congress wrote it, Professor John Yoo and Michael Chertoff being its co-authors, crafting its basic draft almost a full year before its final passage after 9/11, and Congress only privy to a scant coversheet of this mammoth new law, giving Bush new greater powers over our private lives, which wasn't too surprising seeing that he already was secretly(and illegally)warrantlessly wiretapping us too, at least 6 months before 9/11.

Please follow me under the fold, this is important dang it...

What's wrong with this picture?, I thought. Well, isn't the Legislature, you know the 535 member people's body, the Congress supposed to be tasked by our Constitution with writing our laws? I always thought they were supposed to be, and pardon my ignorance for being so naive to believe they are actually supposed to legislate all the laws Bush signs.

Isn't it sort of like a usurpation of consitutional duty or authority or at least a conflict of interest for the president himself to be in the legislating business? I mean doesn't he have enough work to do being the nation's Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief, and all of that?

And why do we need a Congress anyway, if Bush gets to write the laws, write his Signing Statements cherry-picking the ones he'll enforce, and he gets to tell the Congress what parts of the laws he sends them to vote on, too?

Like the time he sent them the USA PATRIOT ACT and the 2002 AUMF authorizing the use of force in Iraq, the same one that everybody and their brother who's running for president (on both sides) swears they didn't even get a chance to thoroughly read before voting on it and passing it on to Bush's desk for signature? What's going on here?, I thought. Somebody's got some explaining to do.

So last week I being the old nerd that I am did a little independent research, and ran across this beauty called "H.R. 2764: Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2008", all part of the Omnibus appropriations bill that Mister Bush signed into law the day after Christmas, while everyone else was still enjoying what Santa Claus had brought them the night before. Yes, I still believe in Santa. I have to believe, or else I wouldn't be able to swallow all the lies that this Bush regime has been feeding us all these 7 years.

Anyway, this new law seems innocuous or harmless enough--it's only an appropriations bill for crying out loud, until one really sits down and reads it. Don't worry, you're not going to have to. "The nerd" already did it for you. I'd planned on showing you a few choice snipets of this conglomeration of State Department (or whatever), gobbledy-goop and double-speak, but I got so angry at the mountain of our tax dollars being spent like no tomorrow.

Once you read this new law yourself(if you dare), you're going to conclude with me, too, that there's no way in a month of Sundays that Congress wrote this confusing maze of mangled, double-entendre strewn together syllables, much less that Mister Bush ever stopped drinking his Budweisers long enough to read it before signing it. I doubt that even the good old Dr. Condaleeza Rice herself could've come up with this on her best day.

Now it is the law of the land! And what a beauty of a law it is. If I didn't know better, I'd swear Bush thinks he's the emperor of the world, that he alone rules the world like he rules America, with an iron fist.

"H.R. 2764: Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2008".
"Making appropriations for the Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, and for other purposes".

Sponsor: Nita Lowey, U.S. Representative

State: New York, District 18    Party: Democrat      Birthday: Jul 5, 1937 / 70 years old     Religion: Jewish

Lowey is a radical Democrat according to GovTrack's own analysis of bill sponsorship

Nita Lowey missed 242 of 7012 votes (3%) since Jan 7, 1997.
Statistics: Nita Lowey has sponsored 259 bills since Jan 7, 1997, of which 253 haven't made it out of committee (Very Poor) and 2 were successfully enacted (Average, relative to peers).

Lowey has co-sponsored 2107 bills during the same time period (Many, relative to peers).

Nita Lowey sits on the following committees:
Member, House Committee on Appropriations
Member, Subcommittee on Homeland Security
Member, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Chair, Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Member, House Committee on Homeland Security
Member, Subcommittee on Emergency Communications, Preparedness, and Response

http://www.govtrack.us/...

She seems like she has enough "experience" under her belt, so what about her caught my eye? She's the Chair, Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Member, House Committee on Homeland Security
So she knows more than just passing knowledge of what bills Bush wants to get passed.

The full text of the new law is here: http://www.govtrack.us/...

If you've got the time, this law's got the pork. In fact, it's got so much pork, I had to re-check the title to make sure I had the right bill, and that I wasn't instead at an earmark convention! No wonder we can't seem to get a handle on runaway spending sprees! The spending in this law will literally blow your mind, and make this hog look malnourished:

But I digress. Let's move on to the point of my diary, that there's no way anyone in Congress, much less Bush read this thing.

This is what Bush said about it, after signing it:

"Today, I signed into law H.R. 2764, legislation that will fund the Federal Government within the reasonable and responsible spending levels I proposed -- without raising taxes and without the most objectionable policy changes considered by the Congress. This law provides a down payment for the resources our troops need, without arbitrary timelines for withdrawal. The Congress should quickly take action next year to provide the remainder of the funding needed by our troops.

I am disappointed in the way the Congress compiled this legislation, including abandoning the goal I set early this year to reduce the number and cost of earmarks by half. Instead, the Congress dropped into the bill nearly 9,800 earmarks that total more than $10 billion. These projects are not funded through a merit-based process and provide a vehicle for wasteful Government spending.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/...

Wait just a minute! If he was so "disappointed" like he says, why didn't he just veto it like he's done to SCHIP, Stem cell research, and the timelines bill? You'll see why in a minute. But first, remember the title of the original bill before it got amended 8 or 9 times, where it says it's for the "State Department"?

Since when is the State Department tasked with the Defense Department's job of running the war and making sure the military gets it's funding? It's not, and this shows why we're never going to end the Iraq war simply by defunding it.

This is exactly why, boys and girls, that Congress couldn't defund the Iraq war, even if they tried: Our budget has more loopholes than 10 screen doors on a submarine and the IRS code combined! It is near next to impossible to do it, unless Congress simply decides to shut-down the whole government. Bush would just channel the money from "other sources". And we all know that defunding the whole government's just never going to happen. Hence, short of impeaching Mister Bush, the war is never going to end by the end of his watch on January 20, 2009.

There's no way the whole Congress could've read it before voting on it, and most definitely no way Mister Bush could've read this thing in its entirety. It took me three days to read it and I'm a speed-reader! It is a very complex law, to say the least:

Text of the House Amendments to Senate Amendment to H.R. 2764 – State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2008 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008)

http://thomas.loc.gov/...

I'm not going to ruin your New Year's weekend by posting the gorey details of this pile of garbage, this Omnibus spending law. You get the leaders you elect and the laws come from heaven only knows. And making our laws truly is like making sausages. If you saw them made you'd hate them!