Memorial Day hasn’t always fallen on a Monday. In the National Holiday Act of 1971 (P.L. 90-363), Congress changed it from May 30 each year – the anniversary of the original Decoration Day in 1868 – to the last Monday in May. Some argue that this change has detracted from the solemnity of the holiday.

Memorial Day commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in military service. It was first enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War and was expanded after World War I to include American casualties of any war or military action.

These days we enjoy Memorial Day as much as anything for having a three-day weekend in the late spring. It’s a legitimate question whether all the barbecues take our attention away from paying homage to fallen soldiers.

S. 70 would restore the traditional day of observance of Memorial Day. The bill has been introduced for the last ten Congresses, though, and hasn’t seen much action. Is this the Congress to pass it? Or do we want to keep our three-day weekend?

Here’s the current vote on S. 70. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the bill.

Ben Goddard writes in The Hill about the new taxpayer revolt in California this week. The political establishment put together a package of initiatives that it thought would fix the budget process there – but the people weren’t buying it.  The only thing they passed was the measure to ban salary increases for legislators if they didn’t balance the budget.

There are similar proposals floating around Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.  If bills were subject to a popular vote, it seems like such a thing would be likely to pass.

California Proposition 1F is a measure on the ballot for the May 19 election in California.

It would prohibit the state commission that sets salary levels for the governor, other top state officials, and members of the California State Legislature from increasing those salaries if the state General Fund is expected to end the year with a deficit.

We’ve been following bills to limit pay for Members of the U.S. Congress in a post called “No Salary Increase for Congress in Fiscal 2010.” There are at least fifteen bills in the current Congress to limit federal politicians’ pay.

H.R. 201, the Deficit Accountability Act of 2009, is similar to the California ballot initiative. It would prevent automatic pay increases for Members of Congress in the year after a fiscal year in which there is a Federal budget deficit.

H.R. 566 would prevent pay increases when government outlays (that is, spending) exceed receipts (that is, taxes).

Here are the current votes on H.R. 201 and H.R. 566. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki articles on these bills.

The Hill reports that Members of Congress who failed to disclose their earmark requests as required by new rules in the House will still get their goodies.

Members who failed to disclose their earmarks as required by the April 4 deadline should have them rejected out of hand. But Congress makes the rules, and Congress can break the rules.

Our list of earmark requests is here. (It’s current to April 12 – let us know of updates.)

We’ll be working on getting the earmark requests into usable formats so we can have a good discussion about which are worthy of taxpayer dollars and which aren’t.

That was Cokie Roberts on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos as the Sunday morning panel sought to figure out what the April 15 tea parties were all about.

Was it about taxes? Well, taxes haven’t gone up. In fact, they’ve gone down – but they might have to go up given the massive new debt that the government is now incurring.

Was it about that debt? Perhaps the public has a gut sense that short-term gains from economic stimulus spending will be outweighed by the heavy burden of debt on the economy.

Maybe it’s government involvement in the economy. The administration has made competitive and leadership decisions for the auto industry recently, breaking down a dividing line between the public and private sectors that has been well accepted for most of our nation’s history.

“There’s a lot going on Washington that we’re not very comfortable with.”

Of course, there’s a theory that the tea parties were manufactured by interest groups on the right and that they were motivated by simple anti-Obama passions.

So, what were the tea parties about for you?

Among the more bizarre comments we’ve seen in a while are the first few on H.R. 1467, The Safe and Secure America Act of 2009. The bill would extend provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 for 10 years. Serious stuff.

But that doesn’t mean that serious comments are always required. And these are definitely not serious. (Warning if you go to look at them: They use some offensive terms and names.)

The highlight?

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thats my dinosaur face!

That’s right: a little dinosaur emoticon, and “that’s my dinosaur face!”

Who knows what people are thinking sometimes. Perhaps it’s brilliant theater of the absurd. Or perhaps these are extremely subtle substantive comments that I just haven’t been able to interpret.

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 1467, The Safe and Secure America Act of 2009. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

I wrote about Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) here once before, but his trial on corruption charges hasn’t been a focus. It just occurred to me when I read of his exoneration that the news about a person being indicted gets splashed across the headlines, but when the charges fall apart, word often doesn’t get out.

So here’s our little part to correct the impression the world has of Ted Stevens: he has been exonerated.

(Do consider the fact, which I also noted in the post about his indictment, that I worked for him on the staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1996. I don’t have a relationship with him or feel any personal admiration, but I was inspired to write this by a note from a fellow former staffer.)

In January, Congress got a pay raise of $4,700, bringing their salaries to $174,000. Not bad at all, when you consider that people around the country are losing their jobs or taking pay cuts just to keep them.

In a recent comment on our post about bills to deny Congress pay increases, for example, a program manager for a defense contractor wrote about taking a 3% reduction in salary to keep people in his company from losing their jobs.

Well, it turns out that Congress canceled its raise for the coming fiscal year in the big omnibus spending bill it passed last week. (The very last sentence of the bill says: “Notwithstanding any provision of section 601(a)(2) of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 (2 U.S.C. 31(2)), the percentage adjustment scheduled to take effect under any such provision in calendar year 2010 shall not take effect.”)

But should Congress have canceled its automatic pay increases entirely? There was a little battle over that in the Senate last week, and the majority of Senators voted not to cancel their automatic pay raises. If an amendment to strike automatic pay raises had been passed, the bill would have had to go back to the House for another vote. Time has the whole story.

So, do you accept the argument that the press of business was too much to take time with a cancellation of automatic pay raises? Or was the “press of business” a problem that Congress created itself when it failed to pass the annual spending bills on schedule? (It’s already behind schedule for the coming fiscal year.)

Here is a list of Senators’ votes on whether or not to cancel the automatic pay increase. (The official vote record is here.) Scroll down to find your state and Senators. A “Yea” vote was a vote for continuing automatic pay increases. A “Nay” vote was for canceling automatic pay increases. Here’s how to contact them and let them know what you think. (more…)

So it looks like we’re your full-time constitutional amendment monitoring service.

Another constitutional amendment recently proposed in Congress is H. J. Res. 37. It would define marriage in the United States as the “legal union of one man and one woman.”

Now here’s a challenge to those of you who believe strongly in this definition of marriage and who love our country and its constitutional heritage:

In our last post on amendments, we discussed how the constitution is really about government, not society, and pointed out some amendments that didn’t fit that bill. Well, a marriage amendment is kind of one of those. It would turn the constitution into a document about society, and make it less of a charter for limited government.

This has been done once before – the thirteenth amendment affected legal relations among citizens and residents by abolishing slavery. This came after a devastating and bloody civil war (for those of you who are historically challenged).

As strongly as you feel about marriage, do you think the marriage issue is equivalent to the Civil War and that the constitution should be further changed from a charter about limited government into a blueprint for how Americans should and shouldn’t live their lives? Which do you care most about, the structure of the government that has served us so well for so long or using the government to enforce this moral value?

If you choose using the constitution to govern society’s values, you join the people who want to make housing and health care a constitutional right. All of you believe that the constitution shouldn’t be about a limited federal government and negative rights any more.

Maybe everyone will get along fine when marriage is defined this way and everyone sits around waiting for their welfare, housing, and health care checks rather than working. But I’m not so sure.

We’ve pointed out new constitutional amendments a couple of times here. Well, a bunch of new ones are on Congress’ docket.

Just for you, we’ve organized them into two piles. From the consistent-with-our-scheme-of-negative-rights pile, there’s:

• H. J. Res. 28, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States regarding the right to vote
• H. J. Res. 31, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to equality of rights and reproductive rights
• H. J. Res. 34, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to taxing the people of the United States progressively
• H. J. Res. 36, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to abolish the Electoral College and provide for the direct election of the President and Vice President by the popular vote of all citizens of the United States regardless of place of residence
• S. J. Res. 13, A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relative to parental rights

And from the inconsistent-with-our-scheme-of-negative-rights pile:

• H. J. Res. 29, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States regarding the right of all citizens of the United States to a public education of equal high quality
• H. J. Res. 30, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States regarding the right of citizens of the United States to health care of equal high quality
• H. J. Res. 32, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting the right to decent, safe, sanitary, and affordable housing
• H. J. Res. 33, Proposing an amendment the Constitution of the United States respecting the right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment
• H. J. Res. 35, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting the right to full employment and balanced growth

What does that mean? “inconsistent with our scheme of negative rights”? Is there something wrong with this second pile? Well, kinda.

Our constitution is really a document about government, not society. It lays out the organization and powers of the federal government, how it should work, and what its limits are. As to limits, the Bill of Rights in particular lays out a list of negative rights – rights individuals have to prevent the government from doing certain things that interfering with our lives and freedom. The constitution doesn’t determine what outcomes the government should achieve or give individuals rights to enjoy anything that we don’t earn ourselves.

So a set of constitutional amendments that guaranteed a high quality education, high quality health care, affordable housing, a sustainable environment, or full employment – those are inconsistent with what the constitution has been used for up to now.

These things are all good, of course. We want everyone to have them. But it’s an open question whether people would get them by requiring it in the constitution.