23 November 2004

Assigned Reading

I was listening intently to the news this morning, looking at the speaker of the battered boom-box like the RCA dog. I purchased it at the Eighth Army Headquarters Post Exchange in Seoul, Korea, in 1980. All my other stuff had been stolen in transit from Japan. The radio lived in my garage for years, when I had a garage, and it has the paint splashes and sawdust trapped in the grill to prove it.

I could get another, I suppose. But it sounds fine, even if the news is not quite what you would want as we approach the first of the holidays. The Christmas card panic is going to start in less than a week, and the apprehension about shopping will start to grow. I feel like I am just about ready for Labor Day. I gave up newspapers a while back because there was too much news, and some of it was right.

Maybe I ought to get back to doing my assigned daily reading. I don't think I'm the only one that should.

Back home it is deer season, and a good week to stay out of the woods. I'm going home to Michigan for some Turkey this week and I am going to keep my head down. Anything can happen in the woods, what with the unhappy confluence of high-powered rifles, beer and buck fever.

With all that, the news from Meteor, Wisconsin, makes one pause. A 36-year old Hmong immigrant named Chai Vang from St. Paul, Minnesota, apparently got lost and wandered off public land and onto a 400-acre private hunting reserve. He found a prepared hunting stand, and took his 7.65mm assault rifle and climbed up to wait for his buck.

What happened later is curious, since when the property owners showed up and told him to leave, he shot and killed five of them.

It is tempting to connect this incident to some long-lost war in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, but Mr. Vang would have been seven when Saigon fell. The best explanation I have read is that the Hmong community has some issues in understanding the concept of the sanctity of property rights. It is unnerving to realize this deficiency exists in this great democracy where anyone can buy an assault rifle, ammunition, a twenty round clip and operate a motor vehicle and hunt citizens of the Cheese State.

I'm sure this will all be revealed to be a case of miscommunication and possibly racism. We can do something about those things. If it was just madness we would be helpless. And we don't like that. So down here we are getting ready for travel and feasting. I have a side bet with a colleague about how many people are going to burn down their houses this year attempting to deep-fry their Thanksgiving turkeys. I think more than fifteen.

Congress is trying to close down and get to their own birds. Most of the Members are gone, but the Leadership is stuck answering questions.

The debacle over the intelligence bill is embarrassing everyone except the two Cheshire Cat Committee Chairmen who prevented it from coming to a vote Saturday. There is muttering that something needs to be done, accusations of disloyalty flung at the phlegmatic Mr. Rumsfeld in his fortress Pentagon.

The President's people are embarrassed, and they don't go on recess. Andy Card is the White House Chief of Staff, and he lives around the corner from Big Pink. He had strategy discussions on the bill with the president's senior staff. He sent David Hobbs, White House liaison to Congress down to Capitol Hill to meet with House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois. Maybe something will happen.

But the situation appears to reflect something fundamental about the post-election landscape. There is apparently a move afoot on the part of some of the Republican members of the House to equalize the balance of power between the Executive and Legislative branches of Government. The Judicial component of the triad of power is in disarray through age and infirmity, so let us put them aside for the moment. The President will deal with them presently.

The argument on the Hill goes something like this: ''In wartime, it is appropriate that the President assume a leadership position. In peacetime, the power should revert to the People's elected representatives.''

So it is good news, apparently, that the war is over. I wish we had known about that before the beginning of November.

The House has taken advantage of peacetime to pass special rules to protect Tom DeLay, just in case he is indicted by a grand jury down in Travis County, Texas. Three of Tom's associates have already been written up. The new rules say that he can be stripped of his leadership position only if he is indicted on Federal charges.

That is a relief, since I would hate to see anything happen to Mr. Delay while he is so effectively doing his job here in the closing whispers of the second session of the108th Congress.

There is a lot of important work for him to do. For example, it was vital to insert an anti-abortion provision into the $388 billion omnibus budget measure that should have completed the business of this Congress.

No one understands what it means, really, since it was inserted without debate.

The language appears to tell health care providers and insurance companies that they are free to ignore Roe vs Wade and assorted subordinate laws and regulations that make abortion a legal alternative to term pregnancy. It appears to provide a mechanism for the insurance companies to avoid payment for the procedure. I don't know what to think, though like I said, no one talked about this and the new law of the land is terra incognita.

That wasn't the only surprise contained in the legislation. Chairman of the Transportation and Treasury Appropriations Subcommittee is a fellow named Ernest Istook, of the great state of Oklahoma. His panel has jurisdiction over the Internal Revenue Service budget. His staff provided the language to accompany the appropriations to allow the IRS to do its job this year.

Mr. Istook indicated he was very surprised that the bill this Congress passed contained a measure allowing some lawmakers and their staffs to examine individual income tax returns. He did not deny responsibility for his portion of the law of the land, but he explained that the words had been inserted by one of his staff without his knowledge or approval.

I don't know about you, but I am held responsible for legal documents I sign. I feel oddly liberated by the knowledge that the Congress doesn't bother to read its own legislation.

The chairman of the full Appropriations Committee, Representative C. W. ''Bill'' Young, Republican of Jacksonville, also had not read the measure, but said he was sure that nothing untoward was intended.

That is a relief. I'd hate to see what might happen if these people were actually out to get us.

I don't want the leadership distracted. They need to focus on what they can do to salvage something out of the debacle on the intelligence reform bill. The House Republican leadership, which rammed through the prescription drug bill by keeping the vote open for hours past the deadline, seemed oddly torpid on this matter. Tom DeLay, waiting on news from Travis County, kept a low profile. 

There's talk now about passing some version of the bill next month. Maybe the Members will read it if they have to come back.

My vote is that they stay home until they are ready to do their assigned reading.