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Capitol Punishment: Or, Keeping House is too Expensive

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English: The western front of the United State...
The western front of the United States Capitol (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Politico reports on a letter to US Representative and House Ethics Committee chairwoman Susan Brooks (R-IN), from more than two dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus, requesting an investigation into “the legality and propriety” of lawmakers sleeping in their offices.

Among their complaints are that the free lodging and associated perqs constitute a “direct violation of the ethics rules which prohibit official resources from being used for personal purposes,” and that the risk of seeing a naked politician creates a “hostile work environment” for House, um, housekeepers.

It’s hard to disagree with the latter, but before unpacking this let’s observe a moment of grief-laden silence for those poor underpaid members of Congress (base salary: $174,000 per year plus a quarter of a million for “office expenses” including travel) and their need to maintain two residences (one back home and one in Washington while Congress is in session).

Before leaving Congress last year, Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) proposed an additional “housing allowance” of $2,500 per month to help cover the costs of that second residence.

I have a better idea.

Marine Barracks Washington DC (“the oldest post in the Corps”) is a little over a mile from the Capitol. The six-acre complex presumably has, or has room for, housing to accommodate the 435 members of the House and their 100 colleagues from the Senate in the same manner as that accorded active-duty military personnel. I’ll leave the question of four-person rooms with private baths versus open squad bays and communal showers to the reader. I’m betting the Corps maintains a pretty good chow hall there, too. And it’s just a 25-minute walk from work!

But back to that $174,000 salary and lavish travel budget. It seems to me that’s more of a waste of taxpayer money than some extra janitorial costs at the Capitol offices.

I suggest capping congressional salaries (before federal income and payroll taxes are deducted) at the previous year’s national median income (after median federal income and payroll taxes are deducted). Call it an incentive to legislate in ways that keep wages high and taxes low.

As for travel, one coach ticket to DC from the airport in or nearest a congressperson’s district at the beginning of each session of Congress, and one ticket home when Congress adjourns or recesses, with a cap of three round trips per year. If they want to go home each weekend, they pick up the check themselves.

Members of Congress like to style themselves “public servants,” but the congressional lifestyle doesn’t look much like the lifestyles of the servants who clean their offices. What janitor gets $174,000 a year and essentially unlimited travel? Or has to try to un-see a naked politician?

Back to you, Congressional Black Caucus.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

More Korean War is “Worth it?” To Whom?

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Urban combat in Seoul, 1950, as US Marines fig...
Urban combat in Seoul, 1950, as US Marines fight North Koreans holding the city. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Speaking to CNN on the possibility of resuming hostilities in the nearly 70-year-old Korean War (in uneasy ceasefire since 1953), US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says “all the damage … would be worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security.”

Worth it, Senator Graham? To whom?

The last period of open war on the Korean peninsula cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 million lives, including nearly a million soldiers on both sides (36,516 of them American) and 2.5 million civilians in the North and South.

What did the American taxpayer get in return for three years of fighting, tens of thousands of Americans dead, and nearly $700 billion (in 2008 dollars)?

Well, that taxpayer’s government got to decide who’s in charge of part of the Korean peninsula, which, last time I checked, is not a US state or territory.

And that taxpayer’s government got the opportunity to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more of that taxpayer’s money to garrison the North-South border along the 38th Parallel for 65 years. That excludes the off-peninsula costs of the US “security umbrella” covering other Pacific Rim nations.

And that taxpayer’s government got a convenient bugaboo to scare the bejabbers out of that taxpayer with any time peace threatened to break out.

Stability? Well, sure, if what we’re talking about is guaranteeing that the welfare checks continue to reliably arrive in the American military industrial complex’s mailboxes. But apart from that, continued saber-rattling on either side of some of the most militarized acreage on Earth — the so-called “Demilitarized Zone” — is pretty much the definition of instability.

National security? Not so much, if for no other reason than that North Korea never has represented and does not now represent a credible military threat to the United States. If it ever does come to represent such a threat, it will be because the US continues, at the urging of demagogues like Lindsey Graham, to involve itself in the affairs of people thousands of miles away who do not welcome such involvement.

So far, the Korean War hasn’t delivered any benefit of note to the American people, especially in the areas of “stability” or “national security.”

America’s long misadventure on the Korean peninsula has only been worth it to US “defense” contractors and the politicians they own. Yes, Senator Graham, I’m looking at you.

The sooner the US government notifies the South Korean government that America is going home, the better.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

America’s Democracy Hypocrisy

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

In late February, Venezuela’s government began accepting presidential candidate registrations and announced a snap legislative election for April. The country’s opposition denounces the process as a sham and Maduro as a dictator, both of which may be true.

Oddly,  a third voice — the US government — also weighed in. Per US state media outlet Voice of America, “the United States, which under President Donald Trump has been deeply critical of Maduro’s leadership in crisis-torn and economically suffering Venezuela, on Saturday rejected the call for an early legislative vote.”

Given the perpetual public pearl-clutching over alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, that’s some major league chutzpah.

The US State Department wants “‘a free and fair election’ involving full participation of all political leaders, the immediate release of all political prisoners, credible international observation and an independent electoral authority.

Let’s take that one at a time.

Participation of all political leaders? In some US states, it’s harder for a third party to get on a ballot than in, say, Iran.

The immediate release of all political prisoners? Last I heard, US president Donald Trump hadn’t pardoned (among others) Leonard Peltier.

Credible international observation? The US proper committed to admitting international election observers in the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe’s 1990 Copenhagen Document, but many US states forbid international observers or, for that matter, local observers who aren’t affiliated with one of the two ruling parties.

Electoral authorities? The two ruling parties control them all and routinely use them to suppress threatened competition, as do pseudo-private entities like the Commission on Presidential Debates, which makes giant illegal (but government approved) in-kind contributions to the Republican and Democratic candidates in the form of televised candidate beauty pageants which exclude the opposition parties.

Writing in The Atlantic, veteran election meddler Thomas O. Mela — formerly of the US State Department, the  US Agency for International Development,  the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House — argues that election meddling is different when the US does it, because … well, “democracy.”

Mela asserts a “difference between programs to strengthen democratic processes in another country (without regard to specific electoral outcomes), versus efforts to manipulate another country’s election in order to sow chaos, undermine public confidence in the political system, and diminish a country’s social stability.”

The US government spends a lot of time and money (USAID’s budget alone is about one-tenth the budget of the entire Russian government) on foreign election meddling, and somehow “democracy” always gets interpreted as “whatever outcome the US government prefers at the moment.”

Perhaps we should get our own democratic house in order instead of, or at least before, presuming to tell the rest of the world how democracy does or should work.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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