Nation Unbuilding - The Decline of Checks and Balances

We don't have to wait any longer.  We now know that Nancy Pelosi's Democrats are a bunch of crooked politicians, just like the ones they replaced last November.

Ms. Pelosi became Speaker of the House partly because voters were upset at Republicans stealing tax money.  She vowed to change the laws to "clean up Congress."  What happened?  Some of the names changed, and lobbyists can't take Congress-critters to dinner any more, but legislators can still earmark money for favored companies.  They even voted down a law that would have made it illegal to earmark money for companies where their relatives work!

The only thing Democrats didn't like about Republican corruption was that Democrats weren't in on it.  Now that they have the power to steal our money, the sky's the limit, assuming there's any limit at all.

The men who wrote our constitution knew that only government has the power to keep government under control so they set up a system of checks and balances.  Congress is part of the legislative branch of government, they're supposed to blow the whistle when the executive branch gets out of line.  Similarly, the "justice" department works for the executive branch, it's supposed to put crooked legislators in jail.

This worked pretty well for 200 years, but our government now takes in so much money that both branches got greedy.  There seems to be a "don't ask, don't tell" deal between Congress and the administration where they don't rat each other out for stealing our money.

Look at Iraq.  There's been talk of billions of dollars in reconstruction funds going missing.  Has Congress taken action?  No, if Congress complained how the administration wasted money, the administration might criticize them for the way they waste money.

For example, the administration is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on a system to computerize military medical records.  They've been at it for years with basically no progress.  The head of the project visited the Washington Medical Center where a private company had spent less than $20 million building a system which would do the job, but he wasn't interested.  All this money down the drain and where's Congress?  Counting earmarks.

Congress and the administration have decided to let each other steal.

Where are the newspapers which Thomas Jefferson charged with keeping both parts of the government in line?  The mainstream media hate President Bush, why don't they go after the money wasted in Iraq?  They act like they're afraid they might damage their Democrat friends if they got the taxpayers looking too closely at how tax money is thrown away.

Maybe taxpayers are smarter than politicians think.  Mr. Bush has very low approval ratings, but Congress' ratings are a lot lower.  Hopefully, they'll vote some of the rascals out this time.