Oversight, an Oversight

Hooray! Congress decided to stop slapping boners and finally passed a bill just before we defaulted on a whole bunch of payments (though not before our credit might no longer be AAA). After I read this news, I masturbated, which is a pretty standard response for me, then I read the terms and conditions. Less spending, awesome. We're going to try to "right the course." Nice.

"Super Congress." What. The. Fuck.

First, I don't know if they are actually calling this new thing Super Congress, but it makes more sense than saying a supervisory body that works outside of public scrutiny to cut programs that it deems spurious with no oversight just doesn't ring right for me. Still, I thought it only fair that I looked up both terms when I looked for where in the Constitution this sort of power is delegated to Congress to make a super version of itself.

Hint: it doesn't.

I get that they do have the power to create committees and take care of taxes and such, but this Super Congress shit is such a misappropriation of power that I can't help but think politicians are just pushing envelopes on some whatever they feel like power trip.

Those of you who haven't had a basic civics or, "being an American class," might not know this, but our forefathers were pretty good at doing what they did, which is setting up a government. A lot of stuff was worded liberally, so power could be adjusted as necessary. To counteract people being "huge, literal dicknozzles," they worded in checks and balances. Each individual branch of government was watched by the other two, in the hopes that asshattery would be noticed and quashed. Whether or not you realize it, loose construction and inter-branch oversight has basically kept this whole process together.

What Congress has now done is put itself into a position where it can make decisions unilaterally, giving a middle finger to the citizens and everyone else in government. As much as I have ridiculed the process to getting this bill passed, at least I got to watch this whole process and read bills as they were being passed. Super Congress doesn't report to any man except when it releases edicts to us commoners. No more social security? We thought that was right. Defense budget gets triplicated? Fight the power. Much like a strange Twitter feed, we get the end result without seeing the process, so a hundred forty characters at a time we get to see services cut without knowing who believed in it.

Worse yet is how this whole thing played out. Essentially, Congress has sat on its hands watching the whole shitshow smoke and burn, waiting until the moment when everyone who cares is ready to give up as much as possible. Then it forces a bill through with this general oversight committee bullshit attached, and we gobble up their vomit because it's all anyone can do.

Maybe I should have some links or whatever, but it is obvious sometimes no one reads what is happening in government, so fuck the extra mile today. I'm making my tin foil hat, watching pornography, and posting to the conspiracy theory blogs about how we had to invade Afghanistan to assure opium to the pharmaceutical companies so they could keep the general populace enslaved by painkiller.