Ninja Lawmakers!
From the nytimes:
The New York Times is reporting that a mysterious Senator or Congressman snuck an ammendment into a bill closing down the main Auditing Agency in Iraq. This is the agency that discovered that tens of thousands of weapons have gone missing and that keeps a close eye on contractors spending US development dollars.
"Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.
And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip."
"Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill.
Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree.
“It’s truly a mystery to me,” Ms. Collins said. “I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time.”"
WHAT? What kind of a crazy system is that where ammendments can be snuck into bills just before they become laws with literally no record of who made the changes!!!
Seriously. Think about that. If you could find a place to hide under a desk or something in the congress and you brought a pen, who knows, maybe you could be a lawmaker too.
The New York Times is reporting that a mysterious Senator or Congressman snuck an ammendment into a bill closing down the main Auditing Agency in Iraq. This is the agency that discovered that tens of thousands of weapons have gone missing and that keeps a close eye on contractors spending US development dollars.
"Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.
And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip."
"Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill.
Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree.
“It’s truly a mystery to me,” Ms. Collins said. “I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time.”"
WHAT? What kind of a crazy system is that where ammendments can be snuck into bills just before they become laws with literally no record of who made the changes!!!
Seriously. Think about that. If you could find a place to hide under a desk or something in the congress and you brought a pen, who knows, maybe you could be a lawmaker too.
posted by Matthew Lie - Paehlke at 12:24 a.m.
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