Dr. Wes
If I hadn’t been sequestered for so long, I could’ve predicted well in advance how this story would
Let’s celebrate one victory of sense over nonsense. Thursday’s Washington State Supreme Court decision did what I said they should the day before, namely strike down the law that required a two-thirds majority to raise taxes. We are delighted that they agree with us that Washington state’s constitution should apply to voters exploiting the initiative process as much as it does to the state legislature, the governor and dog catchers.
Convinced that all Washington State Supreme Court justices read this column for our valuable legal insights, we take full credit for this turn of events. If only we had told them the right course of action before the Republicans took over the state Senate. Sorry ‘bout that.
I still say that while Tim Eyman and his cronies started pushing for the amendment to the state constitution that the court required, we should work toward an amendment that says that no amendment can ever require a 99 percent majority vote of Congress to pass any kind of law — unless the amendment itself passes with a 99 percent majority vote of the people. Just to be on the safe side, because you know they’d like to go that far.
Speaking of going far, the news this Friday morning of your past is that the U.S. Congress flew away for the weekend even though the sequester was pending within hours. This really, really chaps my hide.
Not only is my hide chapped that Congress would take off like that. It is also chapped that I am unable to write this closer to publication so as to know what if anything Congress manages to do about it after they get back. So you, the reader, get to know, but I don’t. There is nothing I hate more than smug future people la-dee-da-ing around knowing more than I do here in the past just because of the inexorable passage of time, and not from any effort on their part. Fie on you and all your future ilk.
Fie on time. Lousy, lousy flow of time. If it wasn’t for time I’d be a terrific dancer. If it wasn’t for time there wouldn’t be weeks or weekends. Congress would still be in session, and there’d be hope that sequestering would be prevented. Well, I can’t really say prevented as there’d be no past tense.
Anyway, my hide is chapped. “How chapped, Wes?”
I pay my bills. I pay my bills on time, or I arrange to pay them late. I don’t not pay my bills and take a plane to Cancun.
Congress racked up the expenses that we need to pay off. The money we’re talking about is money due on prior commitments, not money that has yet to be allocated.
Congress doesn’t even have the poor man’s excuse of “you can’t get blood out of a turnip.” We aren’t asking members of Congress to pay the bills out of their own pockets, although if they kicked in a little we wouldn’t complain.
We only want Congress to raise the money from us to pay for what they have already spent in our name. The money is in plain sight. The rich are wallowing in it and flaunting it in our faces. If they weren’t going to go after the rich man’s dollars to pay these bills, they shouldn’t have racked them up in the first place, because they knew all along that’s where the money was.
Congress is like a worthless tax accountant, who promises to finish your tax preparation by April 15 so you can file it. Then, after waiting until 11:30 p.m. to even look at the records, he calls you on his cellphone from a nightclub and tells you he’s too wasted to look at it now, and you can hear music and laughter in the background.
And you yourself can’t afford to go to nightclubs.
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