Rage Can Keep You Up At Night

Anyone who has spent an extended period of time around me will know that I run on a fuel known as "rage-ahol" and it keeps me functioning well.

Most times I see something that incites me into a fit of rage, and that keeps me going throughout the day. Eventually my rage high wears off and I fall into a heap on the ground where I am covered up until a dream incites rage enough to wake me. Well, I made the mistake of watching the news and then actually looking up raw video before going to bed the other night. I couldn't go to sleep after I saw this:



What is going on is the Wisconsin State Senate broke up the previous budget bill that called for an end of the ability for most public unions to negotiate for anything other than wages, and the Republicans are voting it through committee over a point of order objection of one of it's members. To be fair, the member never says "point of order" but he is clearly having a point of order discussion with the chair. Nothing can be more antithetical to the messages that Republicans have put out over the last two years.

"Well Ragin' Man, that is only in Wisconsin!" you say. Well random guy who talks to my brain, I say check out the first two or twenty minutes of this video:



What you're seeing is Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) making a point of order objection to a bill being entered into committee because it clearly fails to meet the standards of the legislative body it seeks to gain passage in.

This is where Republicans have lost me. I get their adherence to the Constitution kick, and I'll be honest, I find it a little too slogan-y for my taste, but there's nothing wrong with getting back to basics. If you want to make a superfluous rule, go ahead and make it. I don't have to follow it, so I'm not too worried about it. The problem I have is that while passing the healthcare bill in 2010 Republican spokespeople like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh never failed to mention what dastardly tricks that are within the rules the Democrats were willing to use to pass the bill. If we turned back to Republicans, who became fiscal hawks overnight in November, we would have a stricter adherence to Glenn Beck's understanding of what the Founders intended.

These rules were made to ensure that the healthcare debacle never happened again. I guess the rules could do that, but apparently they can be selectively followed.

The best case of this hypocrisy is in the person of Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) who has often misquoted then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's famous "But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy." On March 6th's Meet the Press she again misquoted to "famously" say "We have to pass the bill to know what's in it."

What is most egregious about this misquote is that Rep. Bachmann is making it sound as if then-Speaker Pelosi has no idea what is in the bill, and was not speaking about the public not knowing what was in the bill. I'm not going to get into my personal feelings about the quote by then-Speaker Pelosi, because it is a whole other issue. The real issue at hand is that the Republicans in Wisconsin in the first video I posted essentially told the one Democrat in the room that he could find out what was in the bill after they passed it. Will Rep. Bachmann lend her voice to the growing chorus of those enraged by this breaking of the rules? Not that I have seen, but she had previously been very active in speaking out about her support of Gov. Walker, so it stands to reason she should speak out about a completely wrong and illegal practice used to get the bill out of committee.

I don't care what you think of the bill, but if you had a problem with how the healthcare bill was passed a few years ago, then you should be marching in the streets of Wisconsin. Republicans refer to the states as "laboratories of democracy", and if you're not outspoken you could be the next victim of this latest experiment in a Republic based on the end, and not a republic based on laws.