An Open Letter to the New 2019 Congress

Well, congratulations! You got what you wanted -- to be in the driver's seat again. I'm neither elated nor disappointed, as I voted for an independent two years ago for president, and in the most recent congressional elections, I voted third party for congress. I have no problem with having done this. So you might think I don't have a dog in the fight, but I tend to be interested in who gets elected because I expect you all to work for me, since that's the way it's supposed to be done.

Unfortunately, you really got off to a bad start yesterday. You have 235 Democrats in the house, and you elected one of the least popular and least capable for Speaker. You are going to have a tough time convincing me that, of 235 Democrats, Nancy Pelosi is the cream of the crop. She recently told a press conference that she was not going to allow "President Bush" to bully anyone. Please let her know, for starters, that one President Bush has been out of office ten years, and the other one died recently, and that the current occupant of the White House is named "Trump." Maybe that will help.

And if any of you Republicans are listening, why did you vote for a Republican for speaker? You knew you couldn't win that one. Why did you not get together with some of the intelligent Democrats and see whom they really wanted, and promise to help out? You had over 190 votes available, and you could have made a difference, but anyway...

Back to the new majority leadership: I know you are sharpening your axe now. You are going to take down this president. I have all confidence in you that you will do this. At least, everything in your power. And you have some options:

• Censure him. That's easy enough, and it has happened before.
• Subpoena him: If you can't get him, you can at least subpoena everyone who works for him, lives in his house, and works at his hotels. Have fun.
• Impeach him: Go ahead. Make it a trifecta. He would be the third president to be impeached, and you see how much damage it did to the other two. Andrew Johnson finished out his term, left office, and probably said, "good riddance." Bill Clinton finished his term, got full retirement and lifetime secret service, and almost made it back to the same White House where he spent 8 years. The bottom line is, impeachment looks like fun, but it does very little by itself. To make that work, you need the senate to help, and I have bad news for you: the Senate has too many Republicans in it to make anything bad happen to Trump. If you manage to impeach him, it will not be the worst that has happened to him. He's been through bankruptcies, and worse, divorces. He won't lose any sleep. And like his worthy opponent, he's not ever going to jail.
• Pass bills against him. Get him declared the antichrist. Pass a resolution that he's the worst president in history. Pass a bill that denounces him and everything about him. I would like to see you do all this for the next two years, because it's very inexpensive, compared to what you could be doing: pork projects, good-old-boy legislation to get favors, money to holding companies that secretly support the companies that got you here. You know, what the Republicans do, too.

But I'm afraid that there are some of you that are suddenly going to realize that you at least have to pretend to make laws, and you are going to press Madame Speaker to do that occasionally. Oh, I'm not talking about unfreezing the budget. As long as there are chauffeurs, people to hold the doors in the capitol building and the White House, and food in the dining halls, I don't think you are going to worry much about whether those people making minimum wage start taking tickets at the Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument any time soon. You will make the same overtures the president is making, but neither of you will really worry about it as long as your rent is paid and your expense account is still liquid.

But there are a couple of things I would like you to consider if you really, really care about the people you represent, whether we voted for you or not. I put these things in no particular order:

• Taxes. Keep it like it is. Whether we liked Trump and his congress or not, we like the larger standard deduction and the lower taxes, and no, we do not think we are causing the deficit by paying less taxes. We think you are causing the deficit by spending nonexistent money, and of course, you know that the Fed no longer has to even print it. Now it just generates it electronically, like government-sanctioned bitcoins, so spare us the tax increases that supposedly can balance the budget. You could double all our tax bills, and you still wouldn't balance this year's budget, unless, of course, you are planning to spend money only on subpoenas, censures, resolutions, and impeachment votes. Then, you might just balance it.
• Medical care. Please realize that those big, greedy insurance companies are not the sole culprit in all of our problems. For me, it's the twenty dollar Tylenol tablet that they give me with a tiny cup of water. It's the 90 dollar box of facial tissue that was an off-brand, not even Kleenex, that I got charged for, and I didn't even use but one or two of them. It's the hospital room I was in, built some time in the fifties, with the metal bed, and the leaking catheter bag that the nurses were "gonna fix" in a little while, but never did, because, as they barked to my wife, they were "under staffed." But I was better off than most, because the echo from the hallway, "I huuuuurrrrt!" "I need a nuuuurrrse!" made me count my blessings. For that one night stay, I was billed the cost of five Alaska Cruises. One night. And that was just the room. Not the consultation. Not the leaking catheter bag. Not the pills or the tissues. No wonder you have to have an act of congress (excuse the outdated expression) to get an itemized bill, and then, if you are lucky, you can figure out what all the codes mean.
• Medical Care II - oh, and those bills. You don't get them all at once. You get one from this doctor, from that anesthesiologist, that radiology reader that lives in Maine, and -- oops -- that lab technician that was, er, "out of network," even though your medical team and hospital were not. And the double bill that, when you finally prove it to them, they say, "Oh, okay." No apology or admission of a mistake or -- worse -- intentional work. That's what's killing us. Literally.
• Medical Care III - But of course, you have been bravely fighting for us. Privacy. All those privacy notifications, the ones that mean that even our family members who take care of us and maybe pay our bills can't find out how we are because you were more concerned about HIPAA than you are about hip replacements, which can cost 1500 or 15000, depending on where you go and who does it, but you never know until it's over. Oh, that privacy you worked so hard for us to have, so that now we only have initials on our doors, so family doesn't know if the two JJ's next door to each other -- if one is the "Jane Johnson" you wanted to see, or the "John Jones" you never met, so you knock on a stranger's door, hear "come in," and make eye contact with someone you've never met because of, you know, "privacy." If you are not too afraid of the powerful medical industry and their lobbies that will fight you for status quo, you might drum up the courage to organize a bipartisan task force or two and get to work on some medical reform that will stop this powerful group from attacking the people you are representing when they are at their weakest, their sickest, and their most vulnerable, often bankrupting them.
• Other minor things. Today, I got two cloned calls on my cell phone from local numbers with normal names, and both were warning me that this was the last day to lower my interest rate on my credit cards. The third call was from a local man I had never met who was returning a missed call that I never made, probably because a credit card interest rate company cloned my number and called him. I have heard that, this year, over half of all wireless calls will be spam. I have problems believing that 435 elected officials can do nothing at all about this problem which has exploded in the past two years. At work, driving, sitting at business meetings and in funeral services, robocallers are dialing our numbers like never before, and you seem to do nothing. Is it because someone else answers your phone? This is only a tiny example of the many things ordinary people like us face every day, people like you used to be. This year, in record numbers, people stole packages from front porches because most families have two working parents and no way for a housewife in an apron to answer the door when a mailman calls. And you know this. And just in case you don't know, I don't think the first amendment was intended to protect and propogate any of this.

I could go on, but you get my drift. We really want to know that you are out there. I quit voting for one congressman because he refused to answer my emails with anything except a boilerplate that he needed the last extra four digits of my zip code to make sure I was in his district before he would read my letter. Are you all like that?

Part of the deal you brokered with Nancy Pelosi, the most capable leader of the majority party, it appears, was that she promise to be speaker for only two more terms. Let me tell you that, unless you can show you care, in two more terms, it will be given back to the other side so they can elect a speaker as competent as the one you just elected.

Please show me you care. Please pass some legislation that eases my burden instead of costing me more. Please work to lower medicine prices. I know that pharmaceutical companies got you in there, but they gave money to your opponent, too. Show them how grateful you are by voting for fair pharmaceutical prices.

Oh, and one more thing. I have been paying social security taxes for 50 years this year -- ever since I started sacking groceries as a teenager, hoping to buy a red Volkswagen, which I never got, by the way. Had to pay for college. Anyway, 50 years later, I am going to get my first Social Security check. I will disregard the fact that I paid my SS taxes with taxed money, and will get the privilege now of paying taxes on what I get paid, though you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for that. I will disregard that you constantly "borrow" from that money for other things. All I ask is, "Would you please quit thinking it's welfare for old people?" No, it's a return on the investment of people who have worked for half a century, and there is no reason at all for you to be messing with it.

So, what kind of congress will you be? While your new speaker is washing and waxing the private plane she once again has, you might draw up a list of some things that we really care about, and try to do something about it.

If you do, I will not only vote for you next time around, I will even campaign for you. But I have been promising that to every party in power for some time now, and no one seems to care. I hope maybe you do, because I am a baby boomer, and there are still a lot of us, and we all vote.