“The Secretary shall” do this and “The Secretary shall” do that…a recipe to irrelevancy for our Legislators in the US Congress and Senate. Senator Rand Paul gets it right (emphasis mine):
I, for one, am for immigration reform. … That being said, I’m worried that the bill before us won’t pass. May pass the Senate, may not pass the House. I want to be constructive in making the bill strong enough that conservatives, myself included, conservative Republicans in the House, will vote for this because I think immigration reform is something we should do. In this bill, I’m worried though… it says, well, you have to have a plan to build a fence, but you don’t have to build a fence. And if you don’t have a plan to build a fence, then you get a commission. I don’t know what happens if the commission doesn’t do anything. That’s the story of Washington around here. To me, it’s a little bit like Obamacare, and I hate to bring that up, but 1800 references to the “secretary shall at a later date” decide things. We don’t write bills around here. We should write the bill, we should write the plan, we should do these things to secure the border, whether it be fence, entry-exit, we should write it, not delegate it, because, what’s going to happen in five years, if they don’t do their job — it may not even be them, it may be somebody else who doesn’t do their job in five years — and the border’s not secure, we will be blamed for the next ten million people who come here illegally.
Do we need immigration reform?
Yes.
Do we need what is being pitched at us again? No – absolutely NOT!
Ever since Ted “The Swimmer” Kennedy started his incremental journey to open borders for all IllegalAlienPalooza, it has been one bad bill after another. They have not been about making America better, smarter, richer, or diverse – and since starting blogging here at the ‘Grok, each and everyone of them has been both major parties trying to outpander each other in acquiring new voters – and essentially relegating current Citizens to a secondary status. However, my gripping here is not the main point.
Rand does nail what I believe the essential problem – Legislators are NO LONGER legislating! Obamacare was not Legislating as much as it was a cover-up / throw over the wall to the Executive Branch. Sure, no Republicans voted for this horror story of a bill that keeps coughing up bad bill language on top of bad mandates every single day lately. Why?
Legislators were (and still are), by dint of what turns out to be in their legislation (or not that should be):
- LAZY!
- Unwilling to take the time to see if the pieces of a bill actually fit together – often, they run counter to stated language in major ways
- Unwilling to see what dynamic responses will do to the intent (Employers dropping employee hours to fit Obamacare restrictions)
- Too willing to be seen as “doing something” for the sake of voter visibility. Appearances over nuts and bolts, time consuming, hard work
- Unwilling to stand up for principles – only concerned with winning the next election instead of doing their job.
- Giving up their declared responsibilities to the Executive branch’s bureaucracy to do their work.
Gosh, I could go on forever, but it is late. As we saw here today here in NH, no watchdog spied the problems with SB11 – a piece of legislation that creates another layer of bureaucracy and blithely says ” you make the decisions – and oh, by the way, you are not accountable to voters for what you do”. Any one of these: Obamacare or the new immigration law at the national level, or SB11 here in NH, is a Progressive dream. Why? If you were to get any Progressive to be honest and level with you, they want “The Smart People” running things – we are too stupid to do this for ourselves including electing people to represent us (Doubt me? Ask our esteemed Governor, Maggie The Red Hassan why she was structuring her MaggieCare!).
Unfortunately, while we all hate our collective Legislatures, we keep voting for the same Legislators – many times based on vote tabulations by organizations that are trying to be our watchdogs in the legislator sausage factory. It is hard work, time consuming, and generally thankless work. But I do have one suggestion!
Just like in athletics (e.g., diving, gymnastics), there are “degrees of difficulty” involved with what an athlete does in competition (e.g., a dive, a vault, a beam exercise, et al). Can we add in “Degree of Fecklessness” for our legislators? If a bill is complete in that it makes the decision, the DoF is a 1. If a bill keeps sending the actual decision making to another body beyond the ordinary Citizenry – a 10. Add in the fact that an SB11 type water board can assume debt on its own? A 100. So voting for SB11 would yield a score of 110 – and low scores mean that legislators are actually doing the jobs we sent them to do.
If they aren’t doing the work inside the bill, or doing the work to read the bill to see if those landmines exist (or give their approval to anyways), we should know about it by them getting dinged about it.
Your thoughts?
