Senate Wants to Punt Constitutional Duty to Advise and Consent

Does anyone in Washington understand the concept of reading your job description and then doing your job? Apparently the esteemed members of the U.S. Senate – including both Republican and Democrat leadership – do not.

Advertisement

You see, they would rather have time to meddle further in the lives of Americans than in performing their constitutionally prescribed duty to advise and consent to Presidential nominees. As David Addington of the Heritage Foundation notes in Heritage WebMemo #3211, Senator Schumer has introduced S.679 and, along with 15 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, would like to reduce the number of Presidential appointments that require consent of the Senate while also establishing a “Working Group on Streamlining Paperwork for Executive Nominations” within the executive branch.

Addington properly dismisses this idea as detrimental to the Constitutional safeguard against the accumulation of power in one branch. In short -the idea is stupid and the result of busy-bodies who are too lazy to do their actual job effectively rather than coming up with yet another bill to tell us how to live our lives.

The job of a U.S. Senator is not that complicated. How about starting with the basics – like, I don’t know – balancing the budget sometime before the year 2100 and confirming only Presidential nominees who are actually qualified and believe in the Constitution (at this time, I’d like to give a little shout out to the absurdity of those Republican profiles in courage who voted for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – you know who you are… or see here , e.g.).

Advertisement

But, because the Senators of today are more interested in offering the 4000+ bills they offer each Congress so that they can tell you what kind of light bulbs to use, what restaurants must post on a menu in terms of calories or whatever other nonsensical waste of time and abuse of the Constitution they have in mind – they refuse simply to do their job.

And how about going one Congress – just ONE – without creating yet another working group, advisory committee, agency or other group of bureaucrats or politicians who will sit around and advise us on something. Can you do that? Please?

It is almost like Congress – and often, in particular, the Senate is a live parody of itself… carrying out a bad SNL skit before our very eyes on how to be both meddlesome and completely incompetent while offering non-solution “solutions” to problems that were generally created by them in the first place.

This bill is ill-advised, and worse yet, symptomatic of the problem with Washington… failure to do its actual job while coming up with jobs it has no business doing in the first place.

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos