Congress Matters

Well, I'm going to write about May 20th's Today in Congress because I have no idea how to find May 26th's, so hopefully this works. I even tried to switch the 20 in the web address to 26 but that gave me the same information. Cross my fingers lol.

I will say I'm glad we went over the things we did in class because it gave me a much better understanding of what I was reading. For instance, the HR in front of the bill numbers, etc. Like, it was said in class I believe Congress is a very hard idea to wrap your head around so the clarification made this blog/article, whatever it is a lot simpler to navigate.

One thing I noticed about this was how informal the writing style was and how biased it seemed to be. I know, I know media/politics is always at some sort of bias, but I was wondering who writes for this website. He's definately not a conservative from what I read. Not a fan of any Republicans (I clicked on his name). Is it a random reporter or it someone that Congress has appointed to write these articles, knowing this would help me put this into a little bit better context.

Okay, so the first thing I noticed when reading this blog was what the House was meeting on. What popped out at me was the National Missing Children Day and Teacher Appreciation blah blah. Don't get me wrong I'm not an ass (sorry I know you said not to cuss but I can't help it), and these things are important, but do we really need to be spending time in Congress on this kind of thing. I know you mentioned in class about these sorts of debates but why couldn't we send around a professional survey (or something equivelant) and congressmen and women could vote on it during their own time. There are so many important issues out there and why are we spending tax dollars (there I go with the whole tax card) to decide these issues. I would like to know how much time and money is spent on these mundane issues. Now that I've made myself look like a biatch I'll move on.

Moving on, I did notice that the House spent the majority of their time on bills such as the Credit Cardholder's Act which I'm divided on and need to do better research on. They also met on the Small Business Act and the PACT Act. I clicked on the PACT Act because I wasn't sure what it was about so I was interested in that it was about the tobacco taxes. It was good to see that these sort of bills are what is spent the most time on.

As far as the Senate goes, why did they only convene for one bill when the House spent their time on five different bills. I understand that the Senate has will filibuster a bill but are there other reasons for this. I also noted that the list of committees was much longer for the House than what it was for the Senate. Is this basically because of size or are there other reasons for this. Piggy-backing on this I will say the Senate sets up a better schedule than the house and seems to be a little bit more organized than what the House. But with a quarter of the people to corral I guess it might be easier to be more organized.

I'm gonna Google this David Waldman guy because I want to know what I am reading. I have a hard time reading stuff like this because I don't really care about what other people wonder or their opinions. I have my own so when I'm reading something like this I want "just the facts." So I'll have to do some personal homework after I send this in.