From my employer, Raw Story:

A Republican Indiana congressman has a new plan to protect members of Congress from a terrorist attack: enclose the Capitol gallery with a Plexiglas shield.

In a little-noticed proposed amendment to a bill last week, Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) sought a study to examine the feasibility of enclosing the Capitol gallery chamber with a protective shield.

“What this bill does is it would authorize a study to look at enclosing the chamber, the gallery chamber, with Plexiglas so that somebody can’t throw a bomb down on the floor and kill a lot of us,” Burton told the Rules Committee Thursday.

This, to me, is the perfect metaphor for the United States Congress of our time. A Plexiglas shield would complete the (apparently desired) effect of separating Congress, in every way, from the rest of America and the rest of the world.

Even as seventy-two percent of Americans say they want a public health care option, Congress is caving to pressure from insurance companies and the American Medical Association, and the public health care option is pretty much off the table.

Two-thirds of Americans oppose the war in Iraq; fifty-one percent oppose the Afghanistan mission. Despite this, Congress just passed — and Barack Obama just signed — a one-hundred-and-six-billion-dollar appropriations bill to keep those wars going.

Incidentally, the cost of the latest version of health care reform being considered on the Hill is estimated by the CBO to be about one trillion dollars over ten years, or about a hundred billion a year. So that one hundred and six billion — that’s one year’s worth of near-universal health care for Americans.

So yeah — build the Plexiglas dome. It’s the perfect expression of Congress’ attitude these days.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Antics and Pedantics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.