When I was younger, I remember watching Schoolhouse Rock, a children’s show, explain the legislative process through a simple cartoon featuring a singing bill. The flamboyant bill sang quite eloquently about the political process involved in turning a bill into law, detailing the many congressional votes and potential presidential veto involved in the process. Schoolhouse Rock never examined the dark, seedy underside to congressional legislative practices, though. The cartoon bill sitting on Capitol Hill doesn’t examine all the ways in which the bill could be defiled, violated, and molested.

Such dramatic language is not just hyperbole. There is a legislative process so depraved and foul that it can only be described adequately with imagery of tainted purity and degraded sanctity; it is the practice of adding pointless or irrelevant or downright crazy legislation to worthwhile bills. Such a thing is often done in an attempt to prevent the bill from becoming law or else to allow the crazy added legislation to become law by sneaking in behind the less crazy legislation upon which it has attached itself.

A recent example of this assholish legislative practice involves Senator Chris Dodd’s recent credit card reform bill, which Senator Tom Coburn has amended to add another bill that allows concealed weapons in national parks. Now the bill will not only restrain misleading economic practices in the credit card industry, but it will also allow your credit card company to threaten to shoot you if you don’t pay your bills—so long as this is done in a public park and the creditor has given the debtor a month’s notice.

It’s almost as if the bill sitting on Capitol Hill had suddenly grown a grotesque tumor, surgically implanted there by gun-crazed Republicans who are terrified of being mugged in a national park, perhaps by bears seeking picnic baskets. Tom Coburn has effective ripped off the bill’s pants, bent it over, and reamed it up the ass, leaving it dishevelled, broken, and alone to rot—too violated and ashamed to want to be a law but too important to be ignored. This is the side of Capitol Hill you don’t see in Saturday morning cartoons.

Such crazy legislative provisions make no sense to me. Why is it even possible to add such ridiculous crap? If Coburn doesn’t like a particular piece of legislation, can he simply attach a ludicrous bill requiring all children to ride to school on sea lions in order to kill the bill in congress? If Coburn desperately wants to have sex with a marlin, can he add legislation to any bill, no matter how irrelevant, that permits him unfettered access to aquariums and aquatic parks? Would it be possible, if I were a senator, to add a bill that proclaims, once and for all, that chocolate is the best ice cream flavor, far superior to vanilla? All of this, like credit card reform, is important and deserves to be considered—and on the same bill as the legislation dealing with credit card reform! To present such legislation separately would only piss off the environmentalists who are so concerned with saving paper.

Of course, it makes sense that an NRA gun nut would be the one to write such silly legislation. The nutjobs who try so desperately to preserve our 2nd amendment right are often the craziest and go to the wildest extremes to ensure that they can carry a concealed gun in a holster. Their guns are like the security blankets they lost as children, infantile relics of a bed-wetting past. The chances that they’d need a gun in a national park, of course, are essentially zero, but being paranoid asshats they assume that criminals with guns will be lurking behind every bush, all of them wearing striped clothing and holding bags with a dollar sign on it, thinking to themselves, “Aha! No one at the national park will have a gun, so I can rob them indiscriminately while at the same time enjoying the scenic view!” Their understanding of criminal psychology, naturally, is so profound and deep that FBI criminal profilers can only shake their heads in amazement at such a stunning and amazing innate ability.

Credit goes to the shit-stained chimp refuge for the story idea.