Attend virtual townhall with Congressman tonight at 9:30 p.m. Eastern

Posted by Publius Right on Sep 29 2009 Filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Rep. John Carter (R-Tx), a member of the GOP House Leadership and a former judge, informed us in a blogger conference call that he will be hosting a virtual townhall tonight at 9:30 p.m. Eastern and will be taking questions from members of the public. CSPAN will broadcast floor speeches covering the status of certain legislation on issues such as ACORN hearings, Obama’s Czars, auditing the Federal Reserve, and the Democrat abuses in running the House of Representatives. After that, Rep. Carter will return to his office, fire up the web-cam and take questions from the public by email or Twitter. The web-cast, as he’s calling it, can be seen here. Anybody can ask a question, so if you’ve got one, you can Twitter Congressman Carter at JudgeCarter or send him an email at JudgeCarter@gmail.com.

The MSM refuse to cover Republican alternatives to Democrat proposals, so the GOP is making great efforts to go around them and get the word out through bloggers and directly to the people via virtual-townhalls, web-casts, and other new media avenues. So, whether you are a blogger or just a right-winger on the DHS terrorist list, this is a chance to have a question answered and get the word out to folks on our side of the aisle.

Here is the audio of the conference call, which runs just under 17 minutes.

Bill asked Rep. Carter about President Obama’s unprecedented use of czars and whether Congress has the authority to curtail the power of such Executive branch officials. He stated that he supports Rep. Jack Kingston’s bill, H.R.3569 – The Sunset All Czars Act, to do away with the current czars and require Senate confirmation of any new ones. The text is pretty straightforward.

To provide a sunset date for all presidentially appointed czars, to require Senate confirmation of those positions, and to provide that appropriated funds may not be used to pay for any salaries and expenses associated with those positions.

Rep. Carter also supports Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-Tx.), bill (H.R. 1207) to audit the Federal Reserve. We asked, even acknowledging the prudence of auditing an agency that controls so much taxpayer money, whether an audit would nevertheless turn the Fed into just another political football, with members of congress politicizing monetary policy and rewarding cronies. Rep. Carter agreed that politicization is obviously a possibility, but that the bill is designed to provide congress with information via an audit and that the value of having the information outweighs the risk of potential partisan abuses.

Clyde asked:

Q: The malfeasance removed by the take down of ACORN is just the beginning. The SEIU worked side by side with ACORN. Is there any attempt in Congress to look at the broader failures manifested in ACORN from voter-registration fraud to mis-characterization as a non-partisan non-profit entity – and apply the lessons learned to all non-profit through honest and detailed audits?

A: Rep. Carter stated that the politicization of the review process of entities such as ACORN is a tremendous challenge. “All anyone had to do was turn on the television to see ACORN members out actively campaigning for the Obama campaign.” “The U.S. Government,” he went on, “is weak and poor at oversight. We simply do not watch our money – it’s our biggest failure. We are spending more money that at any time in history, and we don’t watch it. $55 million went to political operatives because of this failure of oversight, with $8 billion more sitting out there to go to ACORN’s web of companies or similar entities.”

The Democrats are in charge of the Congress, and therefore oversight. They had to be publicly shamed by the ACORN videotapes, he went on, before they distanced themselves from ACORN. We need better, more active oversight of where our money is spent.

Q: From the outside, it seems that the House Majority Leadership is pushing their agenda with ferocity because they realize that their window in the 111th is narrow. The illusion of a mandate will be factually wiped out once the NJ and VA governor races go Republican, the House primaries show strong races against their present majority, and the fundraising totals reflect the polls. Do you view the 111th as unique, or is this un-American behavior merely a more-reported version of what you saw in the 110th and earlier Congresses?

A: Republicans are not clean. When they were in charge, I also witnessed bills being rammed through, Rep. Carter told us. However, I have never witnessed anything close to what is happening now. We always had debate and amendments on appropriations bills. With this 111th Congress, they have changed the Rules to cut off open debate and amendments. Legislation is introduced at the 11th hour and will very little debate. It’s worse than I have ever seen.

Tune in to the web-cast tonight and see what other inside information we can get.

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