You knew it would happen.
President Obama and Harry Reid have worked out a deal to exempt Congressional employees including members of Congress from being treated like everyone else, and having to help pay the cost of premiums under Obamacare.
Magically, Obama’s Office of Personnel Management is coming out with a determination that you, the taxpayers, can help pay the cost of your congressional employees’ health insurance premiums. Of course, this includes the premiums that would be paid by members of Congress.
But don’t worry, you will also get to pay the increased costs of your health insurance, and private employers will have to pay massively increased premiums. In Ohio, insurance regulators have stated that insurance premiums will rise as much as 41 percent from 2013 levels in the new state exchange.
In the criminal enterprise that is Big Government, the people are nothing more than a deep pocket to be picked by their D.C. masters.
Not exactly how the textbooks teach it is supposed to work, but it is certainly what our nation’s constitutional framers feared.
The sad part is that it is not surprising that the federal government has made it a top priority to protect itself from the ravages of Obamacare, while insisting on funding the implementation of the law on the rest of us. After all, we are the fools who voted them into office in the first place.
This is just one small example of how our federal government has devolved into a battle which pits official D.C. against the people.
Congress and Obama agreed on a bi-partisan basis that there was nothing wrong with the government snooping on emails, Facebook posts and phone calls of private U.S. citizens in spite of Fourth Amendment Constitutional protections designed to prevent search and seizure of information without probable cause.
The public wants Obamacare gone, yet attempts to take the modest step of defunding it for one year are being met with intense behind the scenes opposition from congressional leadership from both political parties. Legislation by Rep. Tom Graves pushing defunding the soon to be imposed health law has more than 100 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives in just a few weeks, and in spite of Administration admissions that the law is not ready for implementation in just five months, official bipartisan Washington is determined to sit by and do nothing.
The people overwhelmingly support cutting foreign aid, yet no one in the House of Representatives have introduced legislation to strip the International Monetary Fund of the open ended $165 billion line of credit that they enjoy from the U.S. Treasury. The IMF has already tapped $35 billion of the funds, but it is not too late to close the barn door and protect the remaining $130 billion of U.S. taxpayer money from being wasted through bailing out failed European states and the banks that enabled them.
After all, why shouldn’t the U.S. taxpayer borrow money from China and the Federal Reserve so the IMF can give it to failing countries that can use it to pay off their creditor banks and foreign governments like China who hold their debts?
Official Washington knows that it would be disastrous to their ability to work in harmony if Republicans drew a line in the sand against radical nominees like the EPA’s Gina McCarthy, who in one of her first public appearances after achieving confirmation vowed to continue the Agency’s onslaught against those who make the lights come on in our homes, and produce the gasoline that drives our vehicles.
Keeping the peace in Official Washington supersedes obstructing a job killing EPA from engaging in their holy war against energy producers. The very energy producers who are at the heart of the hope of a low cost energy American economic revival that promises to revive our nation’s manufacturing sector and the good jobs it creates.
That certainly is nothing worth fighting over.
Four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya in a terrorist attack on our consulate on September 11, 2012, and almost a year later, the leadership of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives continues to resist the creation of a special committee with full subpoena powers to get to the bottom of what happened. This reticence exists in spite of an avalanche of evidence that the Administration has been deliberately intimidating potential witnesses and covering up what happened that fateful night and the days that immediately followed it.
Perhaps what is needed is a modern day Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to do a reprise of their iconic song renaming it Four Dead in Benghazi, to get Official Washington off the dime. This continuing failure to identify what went wrong will ensure that if our embassies and consulates come under attack in five weeks on the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, that everyone in Official Washington will share the blame.
Four dead in Benghazi doesn’t seem to matter, but just mess with Official Washington’s ability to have taxpayers fund their health care costs, and you have the whole town up in arms. Is there any doubt why Congress is held in such low regard by the people.
We now live in a brave, new world in America. Reality shows reign supreme over the airwaves, but the one that plays out in Washington, D.C. reveals a new cynicism where the elites don’t even bother to hide their contempt for those they pretend to represent.
This reality show should be titled Official Washington versus the People, and it is proof of just how far we have fallen from our nation’s initial vision of government of the people, by the people and for the people.
