Molly Ivins November 11

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 New Hampshire is so right-wing that he actually quit the Republican Party on grounds that 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."

Thank you very much, Sen. Shelby. 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 so well-documented that we need not dwell on them. This has been happening to people for years; but now, God forbid that it should happen to corporations — businesses that have lobbyists and give big campaign contributions.

Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida said on the floor: "We have discovered in this Congress that we are not insulated by the efforts of the kingpins to buy influence and corrupt our political institutions. Their narco-lobbyists were paid well to try to shape and gut this bill."

Duh. You're also not insulated from the sugar lobby, the ethanol lobby, the oil lobby, the defense lobby, the telecom lobby, the tobacco lobby or any of the rest of them that buy influence and corrupt our political institutions.

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. Like Cameron Wooster Stanford IV really needs a tax break on his daddy's millions. 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, that man of the people, 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 because we're so much better off with nuclear bombs going off all over the globe.

Then he did his best to scuttle the ambassadorial nomination of former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley-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 Moseley-Braun during that flap.)

Then he topped even that by having Capitol police remove 10 congresswomen from a Senate hearing. Helms had ignored all previous attempts by the 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.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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