Bailouts, bribery, and breaking chains

Surprise, surprise, the Senate passed the massive financial bailout bill the House, feeling the heat, took a pass on. Equally unsurprising is the amount of pork and unrelated business that attached to the plan between Monday and today. Even less surprising is the chicanery involved in all of this.

How would you expect the Senate bill to start? Probably not like this:

To amend section 712 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, section 2705 of the Public Health Service Act, section 9812 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to require equity in the provision of mental health and substance-related disorder benefits under group health plans, to prohibit discrimination on the basis of genetic information with respect to health insurance and employment, and for other purposes.

Start with that last phrase. Nearly all legislation now carries that opening. The result is each bill becomes a catchall, such that no legislator trying to conscientiously vote against bad policy can do so, for fear of being pilloried for being "against" some other provision tucked into the bill that most people wouldn't have an issue with. It also allows legislators to "buy" each others' votes with goodies tucked away in the text. This all-or-nothing lumping of needful things, wasteful spending and abuse of power is at the root of how we've arrived at a $10 trillion national debt. Several states have laws requiring bills to be for a single purpose. That should be a no-brainer, immediately enacted at the Federal level.

What really bothers me is the Senate taking up a bill the House rejected. The bailout is a revenue bill, and under the Constitution, all such bills MUST originate in the House. The idea was that Representatives elected every two years would be much more in touch with the people, and thus only they should be given the power of the purse. This would seem to hold true: I wager the House was pretty eager to pass the bailout... until the people lit up the switchboards telling them to think twice.

So if the people's voice was heard in the House, how do we get the Senate resurrecting the plan like some Frankenstein monster?

For you Constitutional scholars, by the way, Reid was able to grab ahold of the bill, a "revenue raiser" usually required to leave the starting gate on the House and not the Senate side of the Hill, by a procedural provision that allows the Senate to take an old House bill that it never passed, scratch out the text and drop in new language--in this case the bailout bill.

So let me get this straight: a procedural motion now trumps the Constitution, allowing an override of the loudly stated will of the public? Could it BE any plainer our government has no intention of playing by the rules? The whole point of the Constitution was to bind up government, so it served its needful purposes (defense and criminal justice) and nothing more.

Those chains are clearly broken, and Leviathan runs free.