You’ve heard of helicopter parenting? S. 1693 would require the Secretary of Agriculture to enhance coordination with states and schools operating school meal programs in the case of a recall of contaminated food.
I think states and schools systems can handle it.
Happy Fourth of July!
What better way to celebrate the founding of our nation than . . . um, by . . . blogging?
Those were the words that introduced the WashingtonWatch.com blog one year ago yesterday – well, one year and two days ago.
That’s right, this blog debuted exactly one year ago, give or take a day. For reasons I don’t recall, the introductory post saluting our nation’s founding went out on July 3rd in the evening, rather than the actual 4th of July. So, why not, let’s celebrate our one year anniversary on the 5th!
It’s been a fun and interesting year of blogging. We scored some early blogging success by calling out the big bedbug issue. It’s an example of Congress getting into just about everything, and we’ve dedicated a whole set of posts to that kind of thing, which we call Jack of All Trades, Master of None.
Needless to say, there are people that disagree – they believe that Congress should handle this issue. Their comments are important and welcome.
Another fun category is something called “And a pony . . .” In it I’ve pointed out bills that over-promise what Congress can do. Everyone gets a pony!
But those fun categories were overtaken in the past year with lots and lots and lots of writing about the financial services bailout and economic stimulus bills. It’s been a huge year for big, expensive legislation.
We worked hard to get the bailout text up online as quickly as we could. Our bailout scandal post got some of the most traffic the blog has seen. (More posts on bailouts here.)
But the highest traffic has been for our post containing the text of the stimulus bill. It seems that people want to know what goes on in Washington. (More posts on the economic stimulus here.)
And the people – you – how you like to be heard. The comments on the site are in the tens of thousands each year. As we detailed in our 2008 year-end post, there were about 19,000 comments that year. As we’ve pointed out here, there is lots of entertainment in the comments. There’s ugliness too, as we highlighted in a post called “Racism Exists.”
Speaking of numbers, we’ve had about 150,000 visits to just over 450 posts here on the blog. Hopefully, the posts have helped to weave the bills in Congress together with the real world. It’s all a part of making Washington, D.C. a little more accessible to the people whose money it spends.
Speaking of money, there are endless things we would do to improve this site if money grew on trees. It doesn’t. But it does trickle in when more people visit. WashingtonWatch.com is advertising-supported (for the most part). So we need more visitors.
If you like what you find here – if you care enough to have read this whole self-congratulatory blog post – please take a little time to tell your friends about WashingtonWatch.com and how they can use the site to be better citizens – to be a little more like you. Thanks for reading!
S. 1244 would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding by new mothers, to provide for a performance standard for breast pumps, and to provide tax incentives to encourage breastfeeding.
That’s right:
There really is nothing that Congress won’t make the federal government’s business.
See also H.R. 2819.
I believe that children are our future. But I don’t know if that means the White House needs to look after them. There certainly are people who do.
A new bill, H.R. 2653, would create a White House Office of National Youth Policy to ensure the coordination and effectiveness of services to youth.
The good folks at WhiteHouseOfficeonChildrenandYouth.org say:
The Federal government runs hundreds of programs to serve children and youth ages 0-24, spread across 12 departments and agencies. The vast majority of these efforts are essential and effective; however, they are not part of an integrated, strategic plan to help at-risk populations achieve successful adulthood. Overall, the federal government’s efforts for children and youth are scattershot and these fragmented efforts, contained within narrow silos, are failing America’s young people.
For this reason, they say, there should be a White House Office on Children and Youth.
But not everything that’s important should be a subject for the federal government to handle, much less the White House. If the government is making a priority of everything, the government is making a priority of nothing.
Agree? Disagree? Comment!
And here is the current vote on H.R. 2653. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.
Back when this blog was just in diapers, we got a lot of attention for calling out a proposal for a new federal law on bedbugs. “No issue is too small for your Congress to handle,” I wrote. The public reacted.
Well, the bill didn’t pass, but the feds are on the bedbug case all the same. Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency had a big meeting on bedbugs.
“Faced with rising numbers of complaints to city information lines and increasingly frustrated landlords, hotel chains and housing authorities, the Environmental Protection Agency hosted its first-ever bedbug summit Tuesday,” the AP reported. I don’t know why the EPA has to fix a problem for all these businesses, but that’s just me.
We have yet to see a bedbug bill re-introduced in the current Congress, but if one is, I guarantee you’ll read about it here on the unofficial Bedbug Blog.
Update: A House bill has now been introduced too.
One of my earliest posts on this blog was called “Here’s a Law We Don’t Need,” and it mocked a bill to ban novelty lighters. A follow-up was called “Senate Joins Anti-Novelty Lighter Crusade.”
Well? Congress is baaack! And a new bill to control the scourge of novelty lighters has been introduced in the Senate.
The idea, of course, is to protect the children. Ah, the children. But the thinking I laid out before is still good. (No surprise I think that, huh?):
Children are going to be attracted to lighters whether they’re “novelty” or not. They’re lighters, after all. And that’s why we have “parents.” To tell children to leave lighters the heck alone. And to take them away from children, and to scold children, and to send children to bed without any supper, and ultimately to mold children into well-adjusted adults.
My one concern is that I’m not being very well-adjusted, what with this anti-anti-novelty-lighter crusade. . . . But whatever. This is a problem that I’m quite certain the U.S. Congress was not created by our Constitution to solve.
Here’s the latest vote on the bill. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.
The 111th Congress didn’t waste any time. Over 600 bills were introduced last week, its first week of action.
The full tally of measures introduced is actually 740, but that includes non-substantive bills, housekeeping measures, and such. (We only display the substantive stuff – and we exclude bills to rename post offices too. Let us know if there are any you want to see, of course.)
The number we have on display is 634. That’s 31+ pages of bills for you to look through and decide your opinion on. (I dare you to go through and vote on them all!)
If you want an idea of the subjects all this legislation covers, take a look at the recent post Bills About Everything. You might be surprised at what you find. Congress is clearly putting itself at risk of being jack of all trades, master of none.
Last week, during Congress’ lame duck session to consider economic stimulus legislation, a couple dozen more bills were introduced, bringing the total number of bills in the current Congress above 11,000. And it’s not over: Congress will probably come back the week of December 8th to do a little more legislating.
Statistics don’t often mean a lot – particularly simple ones like “number of bills introduced.” But when you see thousands and thousands of bills go in the hopper and nothing being done to run the legislative trains on time, something is going wrong.
I pointed this out in a post from August called “10,000 Bills Introduced in Congress, While Government Management Goes Neglected.” Congress was writing all this legislation, but didn’t pass any regular annual spending bills. The number of bills has increased by 10% since then.
One is struck with curiosity, of course, why some bills are introduced with just days to go in the legislative session. They’re not going anywhere. When Congress finally adjourns sine die (latin for “for real”), all these bills will be dead. The process starts over again next year.
And that’s actually part of the story, starting over again. Lobbyists and congressional staff like to point out that a bill has a history – “It’s been introduced in the last three Congresses” – to show that a bill is something serious. So they might still work to get a bill introduced even if it has no chance of passing.
But more than that, I think it’s a signal that Congress is doing too many things at once. And, as noted in that 10,000 bills post, it’s definitely not doing the regular work of running the government. It’s enough to make you want to . . . take the rest of the week off and eat some turkey!
With the drama of the election and the recent huge bailout and spending bills flying through Congress, it’s easy to forget the kajillions of little things the federal government is churning out all the time.
So here’s one that caught my eye – the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has just announced a meeting “of the General Conference Committee of the National Poultry Improvement Plan.” It’ll be held at the at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta January 28, so book your plane tickets now if you want to go.
The meeting will be open to the public, but I was disappointed to learn that the public is not allowed to participate in the discussions during the meeting. I had thought that I would share my personal poultry improvement plan, which is to cook it in some oil and spices and plop it into folded corn tortillas with a dollop of sour cream.
Word on the street is that Congress will come back in on November 17th to do some post-election business. The respite gives us time to look at some of the bills hustled across the House floor while we were concentrating on the big stuff.
Though there might be more silliness when Congress comes back, this is the final one in this set of “Silly Season” posts. Here are the previous installments: Silly Season on Capitol Hill; Silly Season, Part Deux; Silly Season, Part C; and Silly Season, Part IV.
Here are some of the bills that saw action on the House floor Thursday and Friday last week. It wasn’t the silliest period compared to a few days earlier but, again, these bills could have been debated at any time, not just the last two days of the regular session:
H.R. 5159
The Capitol Visitor Center Act of 2008
Costs: $1.51 per family
H.R. 7221
The Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act of 2008
S. 3197
The National Guard and Reservists Debt Relief Act of 2008
Costs: $0.00 per family
H.R. 5714
The United States Army Commemorative Coin Act of 2008
H.R. 6867
The Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2008
S. 602
The Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007
Costs: $0.00 per family
H.R. 6469
The Organ Transplant Authorization Act of 2008
S. 3197
The National Guard and Reservists Debt Relief Act of 2008
Costs: $0.00 per family
H.R. 7222
To extend the Andean Trade Preference Act, and for other purposes