Anonymous Report This Comment Date: October 28, 2006 06:38AM
Pretty much a free Rolling Stone, some inside stories you've probably never
heard of before, Full Cover Stories here,
[
www.rollingstone.com]
Anonymous Report This Comment Date: October 28, 2006 09:24AM
I knew they stunk but,
In the Sixties and Seventies, Congress met an average of 162 days a year. In the
Eighties and Nineties, the average went down to 139 days. This year, the second
session of the 109th Congress will set the all-time record for fewest days
worked by a U.S. Congress: ninety-three. That means that House members will
collect their $165,000 paychecks for only three months of actual work.
The numbers bear this out. From the McCarthy era in the 1950s through the
Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, no Democratic committee chairman issued
a subpoena without either minority consent or a committee vote. In the Clinton
years, Republicans chucked that long-standing arrangement and issued more than
1,000 subpoenas to investigate alleged administration and Democratic misconduct,
reviewing more than 2 million pages of government documents.
Guess how many subpoenas have been issued to the White House since George Bush
took office? Zero -- that's right, zero, the same as the number of open rules
debated this year; two fewer than the number of appropriations bills passed on
time.
And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million
investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent, when
independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150 million.
Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD secretary
Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a mistress. In
contrast, today's Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the
outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the
largest natural disaster in American history.
"Oversight is one of the most important functions of Congress -- perhaps
more important than legislating," says Rep. Henry Waxman. "And the
Republicans have completely failed at it. I think they decided that they were
going to be good Republicans first and good legislators second."