Incomprehensible Government

Being the curious sort, I was looking through the acts of our new 111th Congress of the United States... it is a very interesting endeavor:

http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c111query.html

While the country crumbles between their fingers, look at a small sample of 'resolutions' put forward in our esteemed House of Representatives.

H.R 118: To add 100 acres to Morristown National Historic Park

H.R 565 To prohibit the use of funds to transfer persons from Gitmo to the Naval Brig in Charleston, SC.... of course introduced by the members from SC! A not in my backyard bill I suppose. (one of many bills introduced to prohibit the transfer of gitmo detainees to various facilities in various states)

H.R 562 To allow the deduction of travel expenses of a taxpayer's spouse accompanying the taxpayer on business travel. Oh yeah! That makes sense.

H.R 16 National Life Insurance Awareness Month! I suppose it is only a matter of time before the taxpayer foots the bill for life insurance too!

H.R 357 WAIVER OF GROUNDS FOR REMOVAL OF, DENIAL OF ADMISSION TO, JOSE DE JESUS IBARRA, MONICA IBARRA RODRIGUEZ, AND CRISTINA GAMEZ. (One of many bills prohibiting the removal of various persons for immigration reasons from the US. Isn't this what we have petty bureaucrats for? As opposed to congress wasting the taxpayers time and money?)

H.R 336 A "Peace Stamp" for the Peace Corp and give the money earned to the Peace Corp... forget that the US Postal service is going bankrupt and talking about limiting delivery to only 5 days a week... yeah, lets have a pretty new stamp!

Well that's just a sampling from the first two hundred resolutions listed in the Library of Congress... out of 966 listed for the month of January. This is not intended to be any kind of representative (no pun intended) sample... just things that caught my eye as I scanned through the listing.

There are plenty of serious issues... like HR 216, requiring heads of agencies to put controls in place to prevent the abuse of "government credit cards"... not one to nit pick.... but shouldn't we have done this prior to issuing government credit cards to government employees? I think it was about 10 years ago that we first started giving government credit cards to government employees... at least I had one back then, when I was a government employee.

Looking at almost 1000 resolutions put forth in the first month of congress... it seems virtually impossible for the average citizen to keep track of the actions and activities of government. Picking the serious matters from the fluff is also a difficult task given the sometimes bizarre naming conventions used. If I wasn't busily employed supporting myself and my family, perhaps I could pay more attention to what goes on in Congress... or perhaps they could just focus on the real business of running the country... I wonder how much it costs to have congress consider adding a small plot of land to a national historic district? Or whether or not Jose de Jesus Ibarra should be here or not? Should we really be paying 435 people $174000 a year to decide Jose's fate? I'm thinking maybe 1 judge could handle it.

Cheers!