Mark Steyn - After America

The late Robert C. Byrd sat in the Senate for half-a-century while the world transformed, and strung along: a former Klan leader (“Exalted Cyclops”) and recruiter (“Kleagle”) who opposed civil rights, he ended his days as a hero to Moveon.org for opposing the war on terror. He doesn’t seem to have been a principled Klansman or a principled Moveon.orgiast.

He simply moved on as required. You gotta know when to change the sheets.

He did what was necessary to maintain himself in power. Everything in West Virginia apart from the Bureau of Public Debt and the Klan lodge is named after him. When he turned against the war in Afghanistan in 2002, I suggested that maybe if we agreed to rename the place Robert C. Byrdistan, he might see his way to staying onside for a couple more months. (I’m still in favor of that: his view of power was no less primitively tribal and venal than your average Pushtun village headman’s.) Apart from naming more public buildings after himself than your average Latin American caudillo would, what else did Byrd accomplish in his “public service”? What do Michiganders have to show for the Dingell dynasty’s four-fifths of a century in office? Opponents should simply put up graphs showing the debt when Inouye and the rest were elected, and what it is now.

Charlie Rangel has been there since 1970. Even his car has been there a long time. Apparently in Congress you’re not meant to keep a vehicle in the House parking garage for more than six weeks without moving it. Rangel parked his Mercedes in one of the most “highly coveted” spaces in 2003, put a tarp on it, and left it there for six years. 70If only we could have done that with him and the rest of the legislative class. The chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, Rangel was the man who wrote the nation’s tax laws yet did not consider himself bound by them. So, for example, he had a rental property in the Dominican Republic but did not declare the income he received from it. Good for him. Would you like to have a rental property in a foreign jurisdiction and keep all the dough to yourself? Too bad. If you were to do it, there wouldn’t be enough money to maintain our rulers in the style to which they’ve become accustomed.

Rangel isn’t rich by congressional standards, but he is in the happy position of so many people one encounters in “public service” who rarely if ever have cause to write a personal check. After the congressman’s grotesque self-pitying ululations on the House floor for the injustice of being “censured” for his conduct, Kerry Picket of the Washington Times invited him to imagine what punishment the “average American citizen” would have received had he done what Rangel did. “Please,” the congressman told her. “I don’t deal in average American citizens.” 71

If only. Pete Stark has been in the House of Representatives since 1973.

For all those decades, he has sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. What’s in there? Let Pete explain it. In 2010, running for his nineteenth term in Congress, Stark was asked about the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

He replied: “I think there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.” 72

His lady questioner wanted to be sure she’d understood: “Is your answer that they can do anything?”

Stark responded: “The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.”

He’s right. If the Commerce Clause can be stretched to require you to make arrangements for your health care that meet the approval of the national government, then the republic is dead.

What’s the very least that we’re entitled to expect of our legislators?

That they know what they’re legislating. John Conyers has been in the House of Representatives since 1965. Like most representatives, he didn’t bother reading the 3,000-page health-care bill he voted for, because, as he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” sighed Congressman Conyers. “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” 73

Okay, so it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. He’s got wall-to-wall aides to do that for him. When you’re rejiggering more than one-sixth of the economy and incurring massive future debt, that’s the sort of minor task you can outsource to a flunkey. It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Representative Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit. 74Perhaps if the ObamaCare bill had had a centerfold of Kathleen Sebelius on page 1,872, or maybe a “Girls of the Health & Human Services Death Panel” pictorial…

Two-thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers plea would still hold: no individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on. That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

But there’s a more basic objection: Conyers is correct. He doesn’t need to read the bill because he is no longer a maker of law. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is two thousand pages, there’s no equality: instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege. One state is treated differently from another, out of raw political necessity. For ObamaCare, Nebraska got a “Cornhusker Kickback,” but there was no “Granite State Graft” for New Hampshire, because there was no political need for one.

Some citizens (i.e., members of powerful unions and approved identity groups) are treated differently from other citizens (i.e., you). It’s not a law so much as a Forbes 500 List, a hit parade of who’s most plugged in to who matters in Washington, with Nebraska senators and UAW honchos at the top, and a loser like you way down at the bottom. And even then, as happened almost as soon as ObamaCare had passed, the un-level playing field had to be re-landscaped with additional hillocks and valleys containing opt-outs for McDonald’s, the United Federation of Teachers, and anyone else powerful enough to get past the Obama switchboard operator. 75

So Conyers has to worry only that his client groups have been taken care of: he doesn’t deal in average American citizens, as Charlie Rangel would say. Joe Average and all the rest can be left to the agency of this, the board of that, the commission of the other, manned by millions of bureaucrats whose role is to determine, arbitrarily but authoritatively, which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-the-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into.

The lifetime professional legislative class boasts of its “experience.”

Experience of what? Of spending beyond not their means but ours. The Emirs of Incumbistan have presided over an explosion of government, an avalanche of debt, and the looting of America’s future. Robert C. Byrd named buildings after himself; Eddie Bernice Johnson handed out a third of Congressional Black Caucus college scholarships to her own grandchildren and the family of her senior aide; 76Charlie Rangel fiddled his expenses while Rome burned through our money. Focused on their petty privileges, they were happy to sub-contract law-making to others. The Emirs corrupted not just themselves but the very idea of responsible government.