Vote Freshman - it’s crunch time
If your elected representatives voted for H.R. 5122 — and you can check here to see — you probably ought to vote for someone else on the Seventh. Your Senators didn’t care to hold a recorded vote on the issue, so why not just toss every single one of ‘em? It seems like a good plan!
The worrisome portion of H.R. 5122 is Section 1076, “USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.” Tucked away in between a tweak to the H-2B visa program and the utterly innocuous Section 1077 (”INCREASED HUNTING AND FISHING OPPORTUNITIES FOR MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES, RETIRED MEMBERS, AND DISABLED VETERANS”), 1076 authorizes the President to override state authority with respect to the National Guards, and use the Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement more or less at his discretion. It deeply weakens the Posse Comitatus Act, one of the most important protections of our civil rights.
Anyhow, Vote Freshman. Freshmen don’t have a track record of selling us out to tyrants.
Update: Wikipedia already has a hotly-debated article outlining the changes. Yay Web 2.0!
Abby:
Freshman don’t have a track record of selling us out b/c they haven’t been given the opportunity yet.
31 October 2006, 2:59 pmColin:
That nonetheless makes them preferable to the incumbents. It’s a sad state of affairs.
31 October 2006, 3:11 pmKen:
There is a better way to vote that involves rooftops.
1 November 2006, 8:59 amentirely safe and fun » Blog Archive » Congratulations, Freshmen!:
[…] As for me, well, I’ve blogged before about my feeling of disenfranchisement at not having a viable alternative candidate to the strongly statist senior Senator Dianne Feinstein. As expected, she’ll be heading back to Washington — looking a little better in my eyes for not being her opponent, the alternately risible and terrifying Dick Mountjoy — along with the mostly unobjectionable Anna Eshoo, Silicon Valley’s Congresswoman. My only objection to Eshoo, besides antics like enlarging the power of the executive, is her decade and a half of incumbency. For a variety of reasons, I think that objection is fatal, but things could be worse. She could be entrenched and objectionable, right? […]
8 November 2006, 12:37 am