Congress Has Too Much Time on Its Hands

A friend once joked that, “it’s a good think we don’t get all the government we pay for.” It is a canard to talk about “serving” in Congress. It’s not “service” when you make much more than the median income, are legally allowed to partake in insider trading, and have better healthcare and retirement than the deplorable proletariat. It’s not “service” when you get to jet around the country and the world at taxpayer expense. It’s not “service” when you come into office a pauper and leave as a millionaire. I love the Constitution and I think all those evil, dead, white men who crafted it did a great job. Their biggest mistake was assuming that Congressmen (and the un-envisioned army of unaccountable staffers) would be honorable people with the best interests of the nation at heart. They were mistaken when they assumed that Congressmen would serve, not “serve,” a couple of terms and then return to their life’s work. I do not think they envisioned the creation of an indolent, unethical, dishonest, capricious, selfish, conceited, disrespectful, hypocritical, indignant, and condescending ruling class of permanent Congressmen, few of whom ever held an honest job in their lives. I have often asserted that Congress should be a part-time job with little pay and no benefits other than those specified in the Constitution to attract the few who really want to serve.

Recently Army Times reported that

Senate lawmakers unhappy with the newly revised Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) want service leaders to develop stronger fitness standards for soldiers most likely to see combat… The current ACFT is somewhat pared down from its predecessor, which was specifically designed as an age- and gender-neutral test with different standards based on whether a soldier’s job requires “heavy,” “significant,” or “moderate” physical effort. But after large numbers of women were unable to meet the minimum requirements, the Army amended the events and created a new scoring system with different standards for age and gender, changing its messaging to describe ACFT as an elevated fitness test, rather than a readiness evaluation.[my emphasis] Officials said the revisions were designed to provide “an assessment for the physical domain of the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness System” and not a predictor of battlefield success. Leaders also discussed whether the word “combat” should be dropped from its name, although it was ultimately kept in.

Lawmakers considered dropping “combat” from ACFT? Not a predictor of battlefield success? What do they think the Army is all about? Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness, I guess. Critical Racist Theory, I guess. Warfighting? Battlefield success? Winning the nation’s wars? Optional. You don’t need to be physically fit to focus on rooting out mythical white rage and white supremacy from an organization that has had illegal quotas for admission and promotion of preferred demographics since the 1970s. (Take a look at General Milley. When was the last time that bloviating sycophant passed a physical fitness test?)

The Constitution says Congress has the power to raise and maintain the Army (actually, it says militia and navy). While that necessarily involves a certain degree of oversight and guidance, over time that has led to micromanagement, with Congress second-guessing strategic, operational, procurement, and tactical decisions. Sometimes this involvement is useful and good, but often it is just meddling. When I wore the uniform, many times I saw Congress place earmarks into defense authorizations for political rather than readiness purposes – to buy votes. We often had to spend weeks trying to figure out which exact company was supposed to get the earmark, because they were circumspect enough to not be forthcoming about that in the authorization bills. But Congress doesn’t have to obey its own laws. Often major weapon systems are manufactured in as many states as possible, not because that makes sense, but because it enables Congressmen to buy votes.

Congressmen manifest their attitude that they are better and smarter than we plebians. Of course, any epileptic monkey is smarter and more duty focused than Secretary Austin, General Milley, or the rest of the sycophants in the Pentagon and that Tartuffe running West Point, but that was the subject of another article. When you elevate political hacks instead of warrior leaders you expect poor decisions.

I think Congress has too much time on its hands if they can spend taxpayer dollars to fourth guess and micromanage a new physical fitness test that took seven years of study, experimentation, and analysis to develop. We know the real issue is not anything about the ACFT other than certain advocacy groups objected to women performing poorly on them at a time when women are serving in the infantry and graduating from Ranger school.

I am not sure that standards for non-Combat arms should be significantly lower. After all, it was the cooks in the 82nd who took out the HQ of the Herman Goering Division on Sicily. At some point in Security and Support Operations (SASO), everyone is combat arms. But if you are going down that path, rating military occupational specialties as “heavy,” “significant” or “moderate” physical effort seems rational. The question is where do you draw the line. The Army will never officially admit this, but when we started assigning women as truck drivers, many of the women couldn’t change the tires on their trucks – they are very large and heavy. This hurt the unit, because we had to send men out with the women when we could have just sent men alone, which meant we suddenly couldn’t run as many trucks to support the mission. But Congress is here to “help.”

While as an infantryman, I feel like we were harder and tougher than anyone else, do we really want to create a multitiered class system for basic soldier skills? The Marines have it right when they say that “every Marine is an infantryman.” Apparently, Congress wants the Army to be “every soldier a sensitive, inclusive poltroon.”

This is just one example of why I think Congress has too much time on its hands. You can’t micromanage and meddle unless you don’t have anything better to do. Congress should only meet two months out of the year like most state legislatures. When did it become a full-time job with high pay, benefits, and retirement? Congress is a self-licking ice cream cone, and taxpayers are stuck with the sticky mess. Their bloated number of committees, subcommittees, select committees, caucuses, and cabals make work for themselves and each other. It makes them feel busy and important. But the nation would be better off if many of those things never were accomplished.

Ironically, Congress doesn’t even do its own dirty work much of the time. To insulate themselves from the ramifications (and the work), they create special committees, commissions, and investigations. They have created a humongous number of regulatory agencies that have become increasingly overreaching and tyrannical. Congress is too busy to do the few things that the Constitution empowers them to do, but they have stolen so much Unconstitutional power, they cannot do it all and instead delegate it to agencies that have usurped power from the States specifically allocated to them under the 10^th Amendment.

While my friend might be right that “it’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for,” we still get significantly more than we need. Congress creates a lot of legislation that is not useful. In recent years, fascists like Pelosi have even admitted they haven’t read the bills on which they are voting. If they weren’t proposing endless volumes of superfluous legislation to dictate how we deplorables should live our lives, they might instead have time to read a smaller number of presumably high-priority bills. That is their job, after all, but in many cases, they abrogate this responsibility to their staffers and wait for the staffers to tell them what their opinion should be. If they weren’t passing legislation that no one needs or wants, they might have nothing else to do!

Bills have become bloated monstrosities full of earmarks and riders, instead of clearly worded documents that focus on a single topic. Build Back Broker, as an example was 2,465 pages, and Congressmen freely admitted they didn’t read it before voting on it. Nancy Pelosi famously said of the Unaffordable Care Act, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Fyodor Dostoevsky once said (in a quote often attributed to Mark Twain), “I’m sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” With all the time Congressmen seem to have on their hands, you’d think they could carefully craft clearly worded, single topic, and positively impactful legislation.

The cost to taxpayers of Congress, including the unaccountable and arrogant staffers, is astronomical. To create legislation that no one wants or to intervene in the functioning of the military, business, States, or people, they spend taxpayer dollars grandstanding at hearings that are neither useful nor necessary.

Gideon J. Tucker once said, “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” If Congress was restricted to just eight weeks out of the year, they would be forced to focus on just a few important things during each legislative session. Congress would be forced to push power back to the States where the 10^th Amendment tells us it belongs. During those short sessions, Congressmen should be paid the normal per diem rates that the rest of us get when we are on government-related travel. There should be no retirement benefits for Congressmen or staffers. They should have to pay for their own Obama care and other benefits. Most of the year should be spent in their “day job.”  Serving in Congress should indeed be service, not “service.” Serving in Congress (whether as a member or staffer) should be service, never a career.

Congressmen have too much time on their hands, and they use that extra time to create, rather than resolve, problems — and then to create new problems trying to sov ethe problems they created in the first place. Take away that time by limiting how much they can meet. Return power to the States. Make Congressmen live in the real world with the rest of us in fly-over country

If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN

Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: AFNN_USA