PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Congressman Thomas Massie: If Kentucky Representatives did What DC Reps do, they would be in Jail! :: 04/26/2016
Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie has long taken stands for the people. Last week, Rep. Massie called for a roll-call vote on a billion-dollar foreign aid bill. Because of his demand, the people of America are able to see how their representatives voted on the bill. Without that demand, the bill would have been passed by the voices of only about twelve representatives.
How is this representative government? It isn’t and Massie said if local politicians functioned in such a manner, they would find themselves in jail.
Congressman Massie was interviewed on the morning after the vote by Brian Thomas at KRC-Radio in Cincinnati, Ohio. He told Thomas that the money contained in that bill was nothing more than “a one billion dollars slush fund for the president. “In fact, Massie pointed out that four bill passed by voice votes on the very same day, which he didn’t even have an opportunity to read!
Massie explained that these actions were unlawful. He said, “Regardless of what the rules and practices of the House are, the Constitution says the House has to have a quorum to do business — in other words to pass bills. A quorum is defined in the Constitution as a majority. There are 435 members of Congress, so a majority of 218 members must be present to do this. Yet, they commonly do it with less than a dozen members on the floor.”
While he did say that this has been going on for a long time, the majority of the time, it was used to name Post Offices or for technical corrections to a bill. However, since the camel got its nose under the tent, it has been used to pass unconstitutional spending bills to the tune of billions of dollars each. That means that only about a dozen or so representatives actually vote on this legislation.
I ask, how can the law be upheld when we are a Republic, the Constitution proclaims to ensure that we have a Republican form of government, but 12 people can make billion dollar decisions for America? That is not a Republic. It isn’t even a democracy.
Congressman Massie did say that having a couple of days’ notice did provide opportunity for him to arrange to be on the floor at the time the vote was taken. However, that doesn’t always occur.
“I will say this, we had about one or two working days’ notice that this bill was coming to the floor,” Massie told Thomas. “So I had plenty of time to get over there or plan to get over there. What’s really frustrating is when they put bills on the floor and they don’t eve give us the text to the bill, they don’t tell us in advance that it is coming to the floor. In fact, last night I was standing on the floor and they passed four bills, that were unannounced, by unanimous consent. Now, three of them were permission to use the grounds of the Capitol for some celebration or something. But, one of them was a drug bill and they passed that thing by unanimous consent as we were all filtering out of the chamber and thought the votes were over.”
Massie is not alone in his criticism of not reading bills and passing them so quickly. In 2012, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul spoke out about senators that vote without reading the bills.
Then Massie through a bombshell in the midst of the interview. He said that if the procedures that are done in the House in DC were done in his home state of Kentucky, those involved would find themselves behind bars.
“Look, if you did that in city council or in a fiscal court meeting, in Kentucky we have something called fiscal court,” he said. “It’s equivalent of city council that runs the county. You would go to jail; you would go to jail. You have to announce an ordinance like three weeks in advance. You have to do two readings. You have to vote on it twice. Those protections are put in place for the people, and they are gone here in Congress.”
So, why are the people not enforcing the Constitution against their representatives? It’s more than likely due to the fact that we have not built up the Constitutional militia. After all, they are the ones who enforce the laws of the Constitution. So, let’s build up that militia, the Constitutional one, and let’s start enforcing the law against these criminals.
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Related Article:
Thank You, Thomas Massie
http://campaignforliberty.org/thank-thomas-massie
Yesterday, the House passed H.R. 1567, the “Global Food Security Act.” As I wrote earlier this week, H.R. 1567”....requires the President to coordinate the development and implementation of a comprehensive strategy to accomplish the objectives of promoting global food security, resilience, and nutrition consistent with national food security investment plans.”
It also authorized the federal government to spend one billion dollars on foreign aid programs, which is chump change in DC, but as Senator Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” This is on top of the billions the U.S. Government currently spends on overseas programs.
It is bad enough that House Leadership would put legislation like this on the suspension calendar, but even worse, they intended to ram this legislation through on a voice vote.
Fortunately, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie caught wind of this scheme and was on the floor to demand a roll call vote. Thanks to Mr. Massie, we now know which members support spending more of your money (or increasing the debt owed by you and your children) on wasteful foreign aid programs, and which ones stand with the taxpayers and the American people.
That’s the good news. The bad news is... only thirty-three representatives voted against this new foreign aid bill.
You can see the roll call vote here.
