Tag: congress

A Standing Ovation for Genocide

There’s no mention of their duty to the people in the oath of office that members of Congress take. It says they will support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Maybe, in some regard defending the Constitution would mean doing their job: representing the people that elected them. But today, the architect of the genocide against the Palestinian people walked in and out of the “people’s house” to a standing ovation. He was given more time with our lawmakers than any of us will ever get in our lifetime and he used it to insist he was a good man that was commanding a moral army – insisting they have not killed anyone who did not deserve to have their life ended in the blink of an eye.

There are one thousand indications that our government has no obligation to us. This moment was just one – but it was one I will never let slip my mind. These people are no different than the settlers that gather in lawn chairs, eat popcorn, and cheer when the Israeli military drops bombs on apartment complexes in Gaza. For as long as they’ve been in office, they’ve had a front row seat to the carnage and all they do is gawk and cheer from the sidelines. Every once in a while, someone they are supposed to work for pesters them about their complacency and we are swatted away like flies.

The majority opinion in the United States is against continued support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Stories come out every week that push the needle further. Last week, the story of Muhammad Bhar surfaced and was circulated around the world. Muhammad was my age, 24, and had Down Syndrome. The Israeli military raided his home and let their dog attack him, tearing his arm to shreds. They separated him from his family, and left him in a room all by himself. They ordered his family to leave the house and left Muhammad to die – alone, bleeding, and scared. His family found Muhammad starting to decompose in the room the soldiers left him in. He still had a tourniquet on his arm from when they tried to stop the bleeding. And they just left him there, like he was nothing.

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Democrat says green pin ditched by GOP had hidden message

House Republican leaders spent a reported $40,000 in January to replace the official pin given to all members to show they had been sworn into the 118th Congress — a midterm expense driven by a confluence of factors, including that members on both sides of the aisle didn’t like the color.

Behind the decision to throw out the pin issued to 435 lawmakers: politics. Republicans believed that the outgoing Democratic majority of the 117th Congress picked the bright green color in honor of the Green New Deal, a progressive policy conservatives revile.

“I heard some guys and gals grumbling that it’s an environmental tribute or something like that — which, hey, I like the color green, I have a lot of John Deere equipment in that color,” said Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.), a rice farmer who serves on the committees on Agriculture and Natural Resources.

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Federal Judge Rules That Congress Violated Constitution Passing $1.7 Trillion Spending Bill

In a landmark decision, a federal judge in Texas has ruled that a $1.7 trillion government funding bill was passed unconstitutionally in 2022 because lawmakers voted by proxy rather than in person because of a pandemic-era rule.

U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, issued a memorandum opinion and order on Feb. 27 finding that lawmakers violated the Constitution’s Quorum Clause when, in December 2022, they passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, the largest ever spending package in U.S. history.

The Biden administration, which was sued over the matter by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, argued that the court didn’t have the power to address the issue “because it cannot look to extrinsic evidence to question whether a bill became law,” per the order.

Judge Hendrix disagreed because, as he said in the order, the court was interpreting and enforcing the U.S. Constitution rather than second-guessing the vote count.

“The Court concludes that, by including members who were indisputably absent in the quorum count, the Act at issue passed in violation of the Constitution’s Quorum Clause,” the judge wrote.

The judge gave the Department of Justice (DOJ), which was representing the Biden administration in the case, a week to file an appeal.

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Is Congress Getting Serious About UFOs?

When Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is in your back yard, you grow up hearing about the little green men stored in freezers and their saucer-shaped ships. It is a fact that whatever the government retrieved at Roswell ended up at Wright-Patterson, Ohio where Project Blue Book was headquartered between March 1952 and December 1969. 

Project Blue Book was the code name for the U.S. Air Force’s investigation of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) phenomena. It was initially directed by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and followed similar projects established by the Air Force — Project Sign in 1947, and Project Grudge in 1948.

The results of these investigatory programs were, predictably, lackluster. Or, at least, the publicly available information pointed to mundane explanations of fantastical eye witness accounts. Officially, no physical evidence of any determinative value was ever submitted or collected by Project Blue Book. So, after the collection of over twelve thousand UFO reports, the books were closed by the official Air Force. 

But, in the public’s consciousness, those books were never closed. 

The investigative training and experience I gained from twenty years as an FBI Special Agent have only deepened my interest in UFO theories, testimony, and evidence (direct or circumstantial). And, I have resolved any personal theological questions concerning extraterrestrial life.  

Recently, the UFO acronym has fallen out of favor — an attempt to create distance from the stigmas associated with “flying saucers.” Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP) is now in vogue. 

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Ramaswamy: Public shouldn’t be paying ‘hush money for sexual indiscretions’ by members of Congress

In voicing his opposition to former President Trump’s indictment, tech entrepreneur and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy noted that taxpayers have been paying millions to settle sexual harassment claims in Congress.

“If you want to talk about hush money for sexual indiscretions by politicians,” he tweeted Friday, “consider this: in the past 25 years, the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights has paid a staggering $18.2 million of *taxpayer dollars* to settle 291 cases of sexual harassment & other misconduct committed by members of Congress.

“The public shouldn’t be paying for this nonsense. We’re fixing corruption. No one will be spared.” 

The indictment of Trump by a Manhattan grand jury stems from hush money payments he allegedly made to women before the 2016 presidential election. The 45th president’s arraignment is expected to take place in New York on Tuesday,

Ramaswamy said the indictment is “politically motivated” and “marks a dark moment in American history.”

“It will undermine public trust in our electoral system and justice system,” he said. “It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals. Principles go beyond partisanship. Let the American people decide who governs.”

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Congress Has Been Captured by the Arms Industry

On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were — or at least should have been — stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it.

The new Pentagon budget would come in at $842 billion. That’s the highest level requested since World War II, except for the peak moment of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when the United States had nearly 200,000 troops deployed in those two countries.

$1 Trillion for the Pentagon?

It’s important to note that the $842 billion proposed price tag for the Pentagon next year will only be the beginning of what taxpayers will be asked to shell out in the name of “defense.” If you add in nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy and small amounts of military spending spread across other agencies, you’re already at a total military budget of $886 billion. And if last year is any guide, Congress will add tens of billions of dollars extra to that sum, while yet more billions will go for emergency aid to Ukraine to help it fend off Russia’s brutal invasion. In short, we’re talking about possible total spending of well over $950 billion on war and preparations for more of it — within striking distance, in other words, of the $1 trillion mark that hawkish officials and pundits could only dream about a few short years ago.

The ultimate driver of that enormous spending spree is a seldom-commented-upon strategy of global military overreach, including 750 U.S. military bases scattered on every continent except Antarctica, 170,000 troops stationed overseas, and counterterror operations in at least 85 — no, that is not a typo — countries (a count offered by Brown University’s Costs of War Project). Worse yet, the Biden administration only seems to be preparing for more of the same. Its National Defense Strategy, released late last year, manages to find the potential for conflict virtually everywhere on the planet and calls for preparations to win a war with Russia and/or China, fight Iran and North Korea, and continue to wage a global war on terror, which, in recent times, has been redubbed “countering violent extremism.” Think of such a strategic view of the world as the exact opposite of the “diplomacy first” approach touted by President Joe Biden and his team during his early months in office. Worse yet, it’s more likely to serve as a recipe for conflict than a blueprint for peace and security.

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Oregon Democrat Proposes Increasing Congressional ‘Diversity’ by Adding Seats

Within weeks of allegations that his wife engaged in insider trading when she acquired $15,000 worth of Amgen stock, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has introduced legislation to expand the number of Congressmen and women in D.C.

The Restoring Equal and Accountable Legislators in the House (REAL House) Act aims to increase the number of representatives and increase their “diversity,” as well as the diversity of the Electoral College because Blumenauer thinks that congressional districts are too large.

“The number of constituents living in a single congressional district has dramatically increased since the number of House members was arbitrarily capped in 1929,” Blumenauer said. “Current district sizes threaten the direct constituent connection on which the House was founded.”

Currently, there are 435 voting members of the House of Representatives, a cap from when the U.S. population was only 122 million people.

“The REAL House Act will help our government better reflect our districts and constituents’ needs,” Blumenauer said in a statement online. “To restore the House’s direct link to the public and to foster greater diversity among members and the Electoral College, we must increase the number of representatives.”

The proposal did not outline how much it would cost to increase the size of the U.S. government by his suggested 149 seats.

Since 1929, Blumenauer argues the U.S. population has more than doubled to 328 million people and, as a result, the size of congressional districts has nearly tripled while the number of representatives has remained stagnant.

“The average congressional district now includes 800,000 constituents. If Congress fails to act, by 2050, each member of Congress is on track to represent more than one million people,” he said.

In December 2022, the Democratic National Committee approved a move to remove Iowa as the first state on the party’s presidential nominating calendar—as has been tradition since 1972.

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Nancy’s golden goodbye: Outgoing House speaker Pelosi raises maximum wage for staff in lower house of Congress by $38,000 to $212,000

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decreed that Congress will once again raise its stiff salary cap for staffers – this time, to an eyewatering $212,100.

Pelosi – whose second stint as House Speaker began in 2019 – announced the change Friday, in what very well could be her last acts before being replaced in the now-Republican-dominated chamber.

It also serves as the third time the 82-year-old San Francisco official raised the maximum salary for House staff – to $199,300 last year and again in May to $203,700 to maintain parity with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

That said, the raise – which pertains to staffers in the lower chamber – now puts the new top-possible salary for aides at $38,000 more than what Senate staffers make themselves. 

In a statement, Pelosi, who is unlikely to continue her term as speaker come Sunday now that Republicans have regained control over the House, revealed the change for the New Year, and detailed her reasoning behind the substantial hike.

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Head of Congressional Ethics Office Arrested, Charged with DUI After Crashing Car Into House

The guy who has been in charge of the congressional ethics office for the past 12 years is an alcoholic who crashed his car into someone’s house while driving under the influence.

Omar Ashmawy, the head of the Congressional Ethics Office, was arrested and charged with a DUI last month, according to an exclusive report by Yahoo News published on Thursday.

Ashmway was suspended after crashing into a stop sign, hitting a parked car and plowing into the front porch of a house while drunk.

The criminal complaint was filed in a Pike County, Pennsylvania court.

“I’ve had some medical issues including a diagnosis of syncope that I am dealing with in this case, but this incident was a wake-up call to me that I have a problem with alcohol dependency,” Ashmawy said in a statement to Yahoo News. “I’ve since sought out treatment for my use of alcohol, and I’m currently in a program where I am addressing this dependency. I’m grateful for the continued support of my family, friends and colleagues.”

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