Monkey Business Update: FOREIGN travel by Members of Congress
We got a tidal wave of enthusiastic support of our post on taxpayer-funded travel by US senators. Many readers asked us to look into taxpayer-funded trips OVERSEAS. You ask, we deliver.
We paid for Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC10) to visit Switzerland as part of a “congressional delegation” on January 23. We paid for congressman Robert Pittenger (R-NC09) to visit Israel in December 2013 — reportedly under the auspices of his role on the House Committee on Financial Services.
We paid for US Rep. George Holding (R-NC13) to visit India in December — reportedly as part of his role on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
In 2011, we paid for US Senator Kay Hagan (D) to visit The Dominican Republic as part of a “congressional delegation.” That same year, we paid for US Senator Richard Burr to visit — as part of a “congressional delegation” — Kuwait, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the UK.
Do they realize this country is over 18 trillion in debt and has over 100 trillion in unfunded liabilities? We must make their jobs part time with no benefits.
I know Kay Hagen is supportive of the Obama Welfare Refugee Program, but has Rich Burr expressed his opinion on this serious matter?
Washington cannot be counted on to fix Washington. North Carolina needs to once again become “first in freedom” by having an overwhelming majority of it’s citizens registered as unaffiliated independents. Both parties are welded to the status quo. Unaffiliated voters are the second largest voting bloc in 44 of our counties. We are on the way.
That is a foolish suggestion, since that means conservatives would then lack influence within either party, leading to more twiddle-dee, twiddle-dum choices like our current US Senate race. We need conservatives to actively get control of the structure of one party, and the only option out there is the GOP. Getting in a snit and registering Unaffiliated just leaves control of the GOP party structure to the Big Government Republicans and impedes the nomination of conservative candidates.
The much better approach is to organize a conservative independent political organization that would recruit and back conservative independents in selected races. For example there are a number of Big Government Republican incumbents in the legislature and even one in Congress, without Democrat opponents. This would be the ideal chance to run conservative independents in the general election against them, because you would probably pick up quite a few knee jerk votes from Democrats. Skip Stam, one of the most liberal Republicans in the House, for example, has neither primary nor general election opposition. Also, where both parties have nominated Big Government candidates, inserting a conservative independent might actually win the day, like US Senator Jim Buckley (C-NY) who won a three way race running as a Conservative against liberals nominated by both the GOP and Democrats, the GOP liberal even being the incumbent..
An effective strategy based on the unaffiliated / independent approach is not based on registration, but instead on running candidates. Maybe then, NC can see headlines like this one from a Pennsylvania special election for State Senate this year:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/tea-partier-wins-write-in-race-for-pennsylvania-state-senate-seat/article/2545887