Even after going along with President Obama and compromising on a deal to avoid the end-of-the-year “fiscal cliff,” Congress receives good or excellent marks for its job performance from just nine percent (9%) of Likely U.S. Voters. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 64% give the nation’s legislators poor marks.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that she opposes a cut in congressional pay because it would diminish the dignity of lawmakers’ jobs.
“I don’t think we should do it; I think we should respect the work we do,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “I think it’s necessary for us to have the dignity of the job that we have rewarded.”
As we in the private sector know, the amount of dignity comes not from what you do, but how well you do it. Not everyone can hold the “prestige” jobs even if they have the ability to do so. Dignity is not an attribute that is accorded to you just on your say so, Nancy Pelosi. If the level of pay (approx $174,000 / year) is the true measure of “dignity”, our Representatives have accorded themselves quite the allotment of dignity all to themselves by themselves. Dignity comes from a job well done – not mere words. Can she really think that the job being done right now is exemplary of the full definition of dignity?
Dignity? It would first help if you actually carried out the responsibilities required by your jobs according to how the Law of the Land (the US Constitution) says it should be done – and within the bounds of what it says. The fact that you have refuse to do so, have contributed mightily to the national debt of $16 Trillion, means that we are to hold you in high regard? Does spending on an engorged size of Government determine “dignity”? If that is true, doesn’t that pretty much mean that any wino on the street could create the same result as you folks have – and would that be considered “dignitorious” (although we might get there far cheaper for a few cases of Wild Turkey or Ripple than paying for what we do right now)?
Sorry, but when a US Representative, Hank Johnson, coughs up the idea that a rather large island could tip over if you put enough people on it ( Guam could tip over if US troops were based there instead of in Japan), that pretty much destroys any kind of “dignity” that’s left unabused in the US House of Representatives (and for the voters that keep putting people like this into one of the highest elected offices in the Land). Examples of this type of “utterance” are legion – and trust me, they do not lend themselves to Nancy draping herself in the mantle of “Do you know who I am?”.
