Worst. Congress. Ever.

By Scott Thill, WireTap. Posted October 10, 2006.

"For those who really believe in limited government, then there's virtue in being away from Washington, it's not all bad that we spend less time here. A lot of what we do and a lot of the disdain people have for Washington is because we do too much, not too little. I still believe that if people understood exactly what we do here, they'd probably demand we take more time off."
-- Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

If you can follow the aptly named Jeff Flake's circular wordplay above, as reported by ABC News' John Cochran, he may persuade you that it's fair for our elected representatives to get so much time away from the office. But it's hard to believe that the average American, who annually earns somewhere in the mid-40s depending on whose numbers you believe, likes the fact that their elected representatives take home around 150K a year for less work, not more.

How much work are we talking about? Suck on this, prole: By the time 2006 dies, the House of Representatives will have met for less than 100 days [PDF] for the first time since 1948. In case you're a fan of the math -- which you should be, since you're paying their salaries -- that means your representative is working roughly one-third of the year and getting paid three times as much as you.

Who's the slacker now?

Of course, the numbers don't end there, and the more they're sorted out, the more they add up to a reasonable, evidenced conclusion: The 109th Congress is one of the worst in U.S. history, if not the worst. And it's not just the House that has seemed to have lost its keys to the car, because the Senate fares no better. They're projected to knock heads for less than 130 days in 2006, which is approximately the sixth fewest meetings since 1948, a year of infamy that found Harry Truman similarly knocking heads with the 80th, which he nicknamed for the history books as America's "Do-Nothing" Congress.

The 80th would have met even less if they could have, were it not for the fact that Truman called them into extraordinary session twice. So far, the 109th hasn't done anything extraordinary for the American people, nor has president Bush asked them to. No wonder there: Bush himself has taken more vacation days than any other president, breaking his mentor Ronald Reagan's record in August 2005. When in Washington ... Or is that Crawford?

What the 109th Congress has done to the American people is another matter entirely, and it's appropriate once more to name-drop the oft-mentioned year 1948 before letting it rest. Why? Numbers, people, numbers. That was the year George Orwell turned inside out, literally, in his game-changing dystopian novel 1984, and we all remember how that narrative ended. (With one plus one equaling three, to be exact.)

And on that score, pardon the pun, the 109th Congress cannot but help dredge up the memories of both 1948 and 1984, because although they have managed to pass little if no legislation to help the average American get through the night, they have bent over backwards to reward the rich and empower the executive branch at the expense of civil liberties, the Constitution and democracy itself. If that's not Orwellian, I don't know what is.

For example, take a look at the actual work they did manage to get done. The recently passed Military Commissions Act of 2006, roundly derided as the "torture bill" by those with a secure sense of history, gives president Bush authority that would make Big Brother tingle in places Mark Foley would like to touch. Section 950j of the bill outright criminalizes Supreme and other court challenges to the Act's legality; subsection 4(b) (26) of section 950v offers up anyone, not just military personnel, who is "in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States" to the mercy of military tribunals; and the bill itself redefines the meaning of terrorist so loosely that it now includes those who take part in "the destruction of any property" and "any violent activity whatsoever if it takes place near a designated protected building," as well as those who illegally occupy property and or steal, well, pretty much anything at all.

As online agitators Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones wrote, that "makes squatters and petty thieves enemy combatants." If they're too far out of orbit for your tastes, then consider the words of a serious insider, Sen, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.: "It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power." The New York Times published an editorial calling it "a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts."

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Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, Wired, All Music Guide and others.

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