It's Time For Number 28

This post's logic gets a little twisty, but follow the dots and you'll eventually get to the point.

It all started last night - no, check that. It all started almost ten years ago.

Back then, we were deluged with calls from telemarketers. It got so bad that we were taking the phone off the hook when we sat down for dinner.

We weren't the only ones. In fact, so many people were getting so fed up with the situation that congress actually got off its big fat rear end and passed some semi-useful legislation. As a result, The National Do Not Call Registry was implemented in 2003. Intended to slow the flood of telemarketing calls, it has for the most part been successful.

Fast forward to last night. We were sitting down to dinner when the phone rang. It was a robocall from the democrats. Two minutes after that came one from the republicans. How could this be? Doesn't the National Do Not Call Registry protect us from these obnoxious invasions of privacy?

In a word, "no."

The congresscritters who wrote the do-not-call law were typical congressional weasels. They exempted themselves from the law: "Exempt Organizations include ... organizations engaged in political solicitations..."

That was, of course, not the first time congress has exempted itself from the laws it passes for the rest of us peons.

Congress has a long, checkered history of failing to apply to itself the laws it passes affecting everybody else. For years, key laws — including the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act — didn’t apply to Congress.

In 1996, Congress passed the Congressional Accountability Act, a measure designed to apply a series of workplace laws ... to Congress, which had previously exempted itself from a laundry list of regulations.

However, the Congressional Accountability, with its oxymoronic name, does not actually hold congress accountable to a wide variety of laws. Some of the more egregious examples:

• The Freedom of Information Act.
• Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
• Investigatory subpoenas to obtain information for safety and health probes.
• Protections against retaliation for whistleblowers.
• Record-keeping requirements for workplace injuries and illnesses.

One congressional exemption that's been in the news lately is their immunity from insider trading laws. But surely our beloved representatives wouldn't take advantage of their positions to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public ... would they?

An extensive study ... found that the investments of members of the House of Representatives outperformed those of the average investor by 55 basis points per month, or 6 percent annually, suggesting that lawmakers are taking advantage of inside information to fatten their stock portfolios.

“We find strong evidence that members of the House have some type of non-public information which they use for personal gain,” according to four academics who authored the study, “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

To the frustration of open-government advocates, lawmakers and their staff members largely have immunity from laws barring trading on insider knowledge that have sent many a private corporate chieftain to prison.

(Side note: contrary to what one might expect, the democrats turned out to be more proficient at picking stocks than their republican counterparts. "The Democratic subsample of lawmakers beat the market by 73 basis points per month, or 9 percent annually, versus 18 basis points per month, or 2 percent annually, for the Republican sample.")

All of the preceding is a long-winded means of getting to this point: it's time to pass a 28th Amendment. There are a few proposals floating around out there for doing just that. One came from none other than Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha and part-time obama BFF. In a July 7, 2011 interview with CNBC, Warren Buffet said:

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes ... You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election."

Not a bad start, but I was thinking more of something along these lines:

"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States".

Simple, basic, fair ... what's not to like?

And if that one doesn't fly, maybe we could go with the one below.

Hey, a man can dream, can't he?