MORE TALES OF REPUBLICAN NASTINESS

AUSTIN, Texas - Sheesh, what a performance by the Congress of the United
States.

These people are so bad that taking shots at them sort of feels like
picking on a 90-pound weakling. When was the last time you heard anyone say
anything good about Congress - except after that lovely man John Chafee
died, and even then many of the mourners promptly started screaming in
horror at the thought of his replacement as chairman of the environment
Committee.

Robert Smith of the New Hampshire is so right-wing that he quit the
Republican Party on grounds it isn't conservative enough, and then he came
back when he saw the committee chairmanship, Lord save the wilderness.

Take this little gem: "Efforts to soften a bill that would expand sanctions
against drug traffickers and the businesses that work with them have
touched off a furious dispute on Capitol Hill" (The New York Times). Sen.
Richard Shelby of Alabama says he is merely trying to fix flawed
legislation that "might allow overzealous government officials to seize the
assets of legitimate companies tied to drug trafficking by scant evidence."

For your information, overzealous government officials have been seizing
the assets of legitimate individuals in this country for years.

The excesses of the War on Drugs, particularly the nasty phenomenon of
taking everything away from people who are only tangentially or
inadvertently involved with someone else who in turn may be involved with
drugs, are well-documented.

This has been happening to people for years; but now, God forbid that it
should happen to corporations - businesses that have lobbyists and give
campaign contributions.

Another revolting development: The Republicans took the bill to increase
the minimum wage and loaded it with $30 billion in tax breaks for special
interests, more than half of which would go to wealthy families by lowering
the inheritance tax.

Oh, please. They vote to increase the minimum wage by $1 an hour over three
years, and then they "balance" this with a tax break for the Rockefellers.
I remind you again that the wealthiest 20 percent of the people in this
country already have 84 percent of all the wealth, leaving 16 percent for
the other 80 percent.

The disproportion is so incredible that Donald Trump has just proposed a
special one-time tax on people worth more than $10 million. He says that a
one-shot tax of 14.25 percent will raise $5.7 trillion - more than enough
to pay off the national debt in a single year. Imagine.

The minimum-wage bill written by Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma also changes
tax laws to give pension-tax breaks to highly paid executives, has
provisions that could reduce pension coverage for some low- and
middle-income workers, and raises the deduction for the famous
three-martini lunch from 50 percent to 80 percent. Quite a minimum-wage bill.

And of course no review of congressional nastiness is complete without a
special salute to Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. What a busy few weeks
he's had.

First, he scuttled the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Then he did his best to scuttle the ambassadorial nomination of former
Illinois Sen. Carol Mosely-Braun, a black woman, because she once had the
temerity to object to the Confederate flag in a federal patent. ("I'm going
to sing 'Dixie' to her until she cries," Helms told another senator after
getting on an elevator with Mosely-Braun during that flap.)

Then he topped even that by having Capitol police remove 10 congresswomen
to speak with him about a treaty to eliminate discrimination against women
- - a treaty signed by 165 nations, but not the United States. The
congresswomen came quietly into the hearing room to present Helms with a
letter about the treaty and were standing quietly in the back of the room
when Helms gaveled the proceedings to a halt and scolded Rep. Lynn Woolsey:
"Please, be a lady." Then he had them taken out.

You elected them, folks - especially those of you who didn't vote.