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.
11 comments
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Race Dowling
8 June, 2009 at 7:56 AM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
If the average citizen knew what we who work inside the beltway know, there would be a cornucopia of ex-congressmen on the lecture circuit. They get away with it because most citizens aren’t paying attention.
Engineer-Poet
8 June, 2009 at 10:47 PM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
Or in this case, they are paying attention.
Like, they aren’t raving hoplophobes and don’t want to have to deal with being branded a criminal if they happen to drive from one place where carry is legal to another where carry is legal, but happening to go through a national park without doing the get out/unload weapon/lock in box routine and the reverse at the other border. A major route happens to go through Great Smoky Mountains National Park, for example.
God
9 June, 2009 at 7:03 AM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
I have never understood the nature of this process, it does indeed smack of the highest order of assholishness.
Sorry E-P, I don’t mean to disrespect you, as most of your responses are quite well thought out. I guess we just fall on different sides of this issue, because your argument sounds to me a lot like “if rape is legal on side A of the park and on side B, do I really need to put my pants on while driving through”
david ellis
9 June, 2009 at 11:57 AM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
I completely agree that its disgraceful that our legislative system allows congressmen to tack completely unrelated provisions onto a bill.
But I also have no problem, despite being highly liberal, with conceal and carry permits extended to national parks. Guns are the one issue on which I seem to be substantially at odds with other liberals.
Engineer-Poet
9 June, 2009 at 7:50 PM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
Comparing licensed carry of a concealed weapon to rape is a textbook example of the raving hoplophobia I was talking about. Reason goes right out the window (I hope it didn’t hit anyone).
Incidentally, some national parks are getting rather dangerous because drug dealers are using them to grow certain prohibited herbs. We can debate the wisdom of this prohibition, but mandating that hikers have to be defenseless against armed criminals on the federal side of the park border (which may not be marked) but can lawfully use a firearm to repel an attack on state land a few feet away is lunacy.
Saint Gasoline
9 June, 2009 at 8:53 PM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
Engineer-Poet, I didn’t write this post to criticize concealed weapons laws, as I am rather ambivalent about them. Rather, I just think it is absurd that they tack crap like this onto totally irrelevant legislation as a way to either kill the original bill or sneak the added bill in.
I did, however, criticize NRA gun nuts; they’re just crazy. Because it strikes me as one of the silliest things to be so passionate about.
Saint Gasoline
9 June, 2009 at 9:36 PM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
David Ellis–
I just wanted to say I saw you using the 10,000 blastocyst or 1 child thought experiment in the comments of that blog entry, and I was quite amused to see the commenter refuse to answer the question and dodge it by saying he’d rescue both. It just goes to show how well the thought experiment works that they go to such lengths to avoid thinking about it.
Engineer-Poet
10 June, 2009 at 6:20 PM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
SG: You just noticed this? The use of “riders” has a long and tawdry history in the US Congress. Michigan has prohibited them, by a Constitutional provision requiring bills to deal with one subject. That said, a lot of nasty laws which harass gun dealers and owners were passed as riders (because they could not make it as a one-subject bill), so revoking this useless provision of the law through a rider strikes me as poetic justice.
I’m sure there are “NRA gun nuts” (nice neutral label there—no value judgements or prejudice implied! <g>) who don’t think much of the way you rely on the First Amendment. I happen to stand for the entire Bill of Rights, though I do have a quibble with the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and would like to see that changed.
God
10 June, 2009 at 7:10 PM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
Okay, I apologize for my failed attempt at humour, I never meant to equate rape with concealed weapons. I only meant to convey the apparent randomness of your argument (to me) in a humourous fashion. The fact that you would worry about having to get out of your truck to stow your gun would be overly annoying is slightly humourous to me. I’m from Canada, and unless you live in Toronto or Vancouver, there is not a high degree of necessity for concealed weapons.
If anything I am actually a hoplophile, I just have a problem with EVERYONE having the right to own firearms. I honestly think the US safeguards in place regarding ownership are inadequate. Think about it, owning a gun does give you an advantage to protect your family, but do you really want every gun loving nut to have one? Some of them are disturbed, and as far as I know the NRA and the law makes very little distinction, unless they actually did something wrong.
God
10 June, 2009 at 7:12 PM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
sorry to highjack the agenda, riders are stupid, one issue one vote should be the norm
Amy
12 June, 2009 at 10:35 AM (UTC -6) Link to this comment
I love you! Thanks for having a brain, using it and amusing me all at the same time.
A