Make your elected officials work for you!

I always get all proud and citizen-y when I actually get motivated enough about an issue to write to my Congress-critters about it. Well, yesterday there were two.

First off, the committee-neutering rules that the Republicans passed for the House Ethics Committee just make me mad. House majority leader Tom DeLay has been accused of taking trips (a golf outing to Scotland, I think) funded by lobbyests, and under the current new rules, no ethics investigation can even start until both parties on the Ethics committee agree that there's a need. Both parties agree on something in this Congress? Give me a break. It gets worse: if there's no agreement, nothing happens. Any ethics charges just quietly go away, and that's a bunch of crap. The Democrats have stonewalled the whole ethics process until the rules get changed back to closer to what they were before, and I say bully for them. And I let the Honorable David Price know exactly that.

The other thing that got me riled up was all the blustering about the filibuster in the Senate. The Democrats don't like Bush's judicial nominees, and threaten to filibuster any that come up for confirmation. The Republicans, of course, don't take kindly to this, and keep threatening to invoke the Nuclear Option (got to love the emotional payload on that term, eh?) and through parliamentary rule changes remove the ability to filibuster from the rules. I'm not at all nuts about what Bush has sent down in the way of judicial nominees, and I strongly support the current process remaining intact. It's worked well for many, many years, and the Republicans threatening to change the rules just because they don't like the way the game is going seems really childish and not at all good for the country. And I let Senators Dole and Burr know how I felt about that.

Relatedly, this also makes me mad. (I really don't usually spend this much time mad. The Republicans have just been doing a really good job at it lately. :-)) Bill Frist out making talks to the religious right (the same ones who kept Bush in office :-/) to oppose the filibuster as irreverent and UnChristian. I hope this backfires and gets exposed as the stupid emotional manipulative play that it really is.

-B