After Election 2014, Media Bias in Full Force

I’ve never understood why conservatives and ostensibly conservative newspapers use metrics supplied by the left to evaluate Congressional productivity. Since Republicans took control of the House there’s been a steady drumbeat of negative headlines.

TheWashington Times:

• January 16, 2012, 'Congress Logs Futile Legislative Year'

• January 9, 2013, 'Least Productive Congress Ever'

• February 24, 2014, 'For January, a Do Something Congress'

• December 26, 2014, '113th Congress Narrowly Avoids “Least Productive” Status'

The Washington Examiner:

• December 30, 2012, 'Outgoing Congress Remains Unproductive to the End'

You’d expect the New York Times to sniff, “As Congress has become less and less efficient, the numbers are all the more striking In the 111th Congress, which met from 2009 to 2010, members passed 383 statutes, 70 of which named post offices. In the 112th Congress, the last Congress to meet before the current one convened in January, members passed 46 measures naming post offices, out of 240 statutes over all.”

But why would the Washington Times join? “Thanks in part to a spurt of relative productivity during Capitol Hill lawmakers’ recent lame-duck session, the 113th Congress narrowly beat out the 112th in terms of legislation passed to avoid a potential label of “least productive” in modern history. The Congress that will give way to the 114th next month enacted 296 laws, 13 more than the 2011-2012 Congress, according to Pew.”

The Left wants to control us and reform us. The path to achieving this nirvana of social justice is paved with laws, regulations and busybody bureaucrats. The federal government weighs in on everything from the diameter of peas in your child’s school lunch, to the diameter of particulates in a smokestack. And it doesn’t limit itself to tangibles. Right now the EPA is looking seriously at cow flatus.

So it makes sense for these cultural Marxists to judge Congress by the number of laws passed, as if it were the world’s only coat–and–tie wearing widget factory.

But it’s counterproductive for conservatives to adopt the same standard when the usual Congressional production is to limit liberty, scrub away personal responsibility, and force–feed Beano to Bossy.

It’s like grading General Motors on the number of automobile recalls it initiates each year. Or, Maker’s Mark on the number of DWIs.

Conservatives don’t want Congress to control, they want Congress to govern and that’s a big difference. In the country’s current state a Congress that governed wisely would be analyzing previously passed laws and repealing the counter–productive, the wasteful, and unnecessary.

The usually all–knowing Library of Congress is unable to put an accurate count on the total number of laws currently in effect. That incalculable number doesn’t include regulations issued by agencies that have the force of law.

Even Speaker of the House John Boehner has agreed Congress should not be judged on how many laws it passes, but rather on how many it repeals. But like most Boehner promises, that hasn’t happened either. There’s not so much as a United Way thermometer on the grounds of the Rayburn House Office Building — displaying a rising red bar indicating the number of repeals.

A Congress that did nothing but name post offices would be preferable to one that was productive in the eyes of the Left.

If conservatives are going to fall for that metric then the Obama administration has been a paragon of government unsurpassed in the nation’s history. In 2014 alone between his busy pen and bossy bureaucrats 75,000 pages of new regulations were issued.
Now that’s productivity with a vengeance.

What’s more, the hero agency that stands out in that blizzard of paper is the EPA. God knows when a sparrow falls, but EPA Director Gina McCarthy keeps track of when a cow passes gas. The EPA idea of  productivity is extending extra–legal control of our lives to carbon dioxide, which will essentially give Greenpeace control of the entire economy.

The cost of this Leftist measure of productivity is crippling the economy. A study from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) estimated existing regulations were costing taxpayers over $2 trillion in 2012. Alex Newman reports the American Action Forum calculates the 2014 Regulation Vortex will add another $200 billion to that total.
Newman concludes, “While Republican lawmakers have become adept at loudly complaining about the administration’s non-stop executive power grabs and regulations on the campaign trail, so far, they have done virtually nothing to stop it.”

That is the measure of productivity conservatives should be using.

Don’t applaud your Congressman or Senator when he boasts about passing a bill. Demand to know how many he’s repealed. Productivity for conservatives means pruning government.

Horticulturalists agree that winter is a great time to prune trees and scrubs. It’s also an excellent time to begin whacking away at government.