One Suggestion For A Budget Cut

The Washington Examiner is reporting today that the taxpayer-funded Office of the Former Speaker is paying two aides to former Speaker John Boehner more than $10,000 a month.

The article reports:

Boehner stepped down at the end of October. Rep. Paul Ryan was elected to replace him. Boehner’s office opened in November.

The Office of the Former Speaker is an official office that provides space and staff to former House speakers for some five years. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert ran up a $1.9 million bill, according to reports.

Might I suggest that we abolish the concept of Office of the Former Speaker and any funding that goes with it. I see no reason for extra staff once the Speaker leaves office. This is the culture in Washington that we need to end.

“Throw Them All Out”

Seal of the Speaker of the United States House...

Image via Wikipedia

“Throw Them All Out” is the name of a recent book by Peter Schweizer. It deals with insider trading and crony capitalism in our government. There are multiple stories on the internet about this book and its information, my sources are CBN News and Big Government.

CBN cites the following examples:

When California Democrat Nancy Pelosi was House speaker in 2008, she got preferred treatment to invest in a credit card company at the same time Congress was considering credit card legislation.

Another former House speaker, Republican Dennis Hastert, returned to his home state of Illinois after making millions on a land deal that involved a congressional earmark.

Big Government reports:

Media Matters has offered up a ridiculous post that tries to distort the fundamental facts about Barack Obama’s green energy program. I hesitated whether to even comment on it because they fail in the basic tenets of honest journalism. George Soros is a large contributor to Media Matters.

The article at Big Government lists the approved loans to green energy companies that included major fund raisers for the Obama campaign. All of these loans did not go through for various reasons, but all were approved.

I’m not really supporting the idea of throwing them all out. There were some Congressmen elected in 2010 that are not involved in this sort of thing. There are also some Congressmen that have been there for a while who have not used their offices for personal gain. We need to make sure we differentiate between those who have been dishonest and those who have not. I am, however, willing to throw anyone out who has profited because of insider knowledge or has used their office for personal gain. We just need to make sure we do our homework before we throw anyone out of office!

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