from Human Events
Democrats Delay Bill Release to Conceal Details
by Connie Hair
02/13/2009
Democratic staffers released the final version of the stimulus bill at about 11 p.m. last night after delaying the release for hours to put it into a format which people cannot “search” on their home computers.
Instead of publishing the bill as a regular internet document -- which people can search by “key words” and otherwise, the Dems took hours to convert the final bill from the regular searchable format into “pdf” files, which can be read but not searched.
Three of the four .pdf files had no text embedded, just images of the text, which did not permit text searches of the bill. That move to conceal the bill’s provisions had not been remedied this morning at the time of publication of this article. (You can find the entire bill on the House Appropriations [http://appropriations.house.gov/] website.)
So, what are they hiding? A lot.
We searched the bill randomly -- the only way possible -- to see what’s being hidden from the public and the members of Congress who will be voting on the bill today. We found one provision that may be a good example of why the Democrats are desperate to stop any exposure of what is in this bill. Like this gem:
SEC. 1607. (a) CERTIFICATION BY GOVERNOR -- Not later than 45 days after the date of enactment of this Act, for funds provided to any State or agency thereof, the Governor of the State shall certify that: 1) the State request and use funds provided by this Act , and; 2) funds be used to create jobs and promote economic growth.
(b) ACCEPTANCE BY STATE LEGISLATURE -- If funds provided to any State in
any division of this Act are not accepted for use by the Governor, then acceptance by the State legislature, by means of the adoption of a concurrent resolution, shall be sufficient to provide funding to such State.
This provision -- apparently aimed at conservative governors such as South Carolina’s Mark Sanford who does not want the federal money -- would overturn state laws and constitutions, intervening directly in the state’s government to give the legislature the power to overturn a government’s decision.
This provision probably violates the U.S. Constitution, a matter which will be of no concern to Congressional Democrats.
This act -- to strong-arm state governments and a governor’s ability to control the state budget -- is Chicago-style bipartisanship.
This bill is so bad that even the Associated Press analyst report today concludes that the bill will not jump-start the economy.
Scramble in the Senate
Roll Call is reporting that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) will likely not be able to travel to Washington for the vote. This causes a conundrum for Reid, as it would bring the vote total down to 60 -- the number needed -- but no Republican wants to go on record as the 60th vote. Reid may try to get around Senate rules to enable Specter, Snowe and Collins to avoid being Vote #60 for the stimulus bill.
Connie Hair is a freelance writer, a former speechwriter for Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and a former media and coalitions advisor to the Senate Republican Conference.
3 comments:
There are a number of provisions that probably violate the Constitution on their faces. If you know of any lawyer or law firm interested in challenging this, let me know and I will pm you to give you my info. I am a lawyer who is willing to donate time and some money to the cause - I cannot fund a big-firm effort to do so.
The Constitutional questions here are not terribly subtle guys.
But the courts will be packed so soon that unless we get stuff filed soon after the damn thing is signed we will HAVE to go secession unless we want to be herded away like sheep, an outcome I do not relish.
Or maybe just all move to New Hampshire. . .
R.
Anonymous -- I think there are 10 states now ready to invoke the 10th, another 10 are considering it.
Good - I want at least thirty states to do it. If they do it before the total takeover of the media (so it could be publicized), the armed forces would probably be less likely to move against the people / states.
There is a pretty well developed secessionist movement, and they have thought through a lot of the practical aspects of this.
I think some of the hardest issues would be to apportion the federal debt (probably should try to honor the feds domestic and foreign monetary obligations for a number of reasons), to contract with other American regions for border and coastline control, develop a monetary system (gold standard or is that so 20th century?) and to forge agreements for sharing federally-funded institutions (research facilities and the like).
I am not sure what would happen to the traditional US support for "democracies" around the world, but since it looks as if this country is going pro-oppression and anti-freedom perhaps we could be more helpful to the free world as smaller American autonomous regions.
R.
Post a Comment