FEDERAL LEGISLATIVE ALERTS
June 25th, 2009These are some federal congressional bills you may find of interest. These bills are currently in committee and have yet to make it out to the House floor for a vote. Unless the American public expresses great interest in the passage of these proposed bills, these particular bills are all unlikely to make it to a vote in our predominantly “grow government” congress.
Should you decide to write or telephone your particular federal legislator in support of this pending legislation, legislator contact information is available in the “Correspondence Links” on the right side column of this blog.
Also, each bill description below has a small box with it listing bill specifics. If you click on the small orange icon within the box, this is a live, on-going, real time link to the status of that specific bill.
Save Money – Go Postal with the Census —HR # Not Yet Available
Freshman Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R) launched a bill June 24, 2009 calling for the U.S. Census to be conducted by the U.S. Postal Service rather than hiring a large quantity of transient workers.
Currently, a census form will be mailed out in March 2010 as is required of the government every ten years per the federal constitution. Any forms not returned by citizens in a timely manner will flag a personal visit by census takers. The government proposes hiring 750,000 workers to conduct these census activities.
The USPS already has 760,000 workers available. If Chaffetz’s bill is approved, the postal service would spend a single day postal holiday, declared April 1, 2010, for completing census functions at the door to door locations postal workers already visit daily.
Relief from hiring costs would save money for the taxpayers who will already be laying out $11 Billion for the count. And this would help USPS that currently operates on a persistent budget deficit in the billions.
This would also eliminate the specific Census Bureau hiring of several ACORN agencies already proposed to undertake the counting. The census, among other functions, establishes voter districting and ACORN is currently under investigation in several states for voter registration fraud.
Constitutional? Prove It – HR 450 – Enumerated Powers Act
This bill has had several incarnations through the years, and at this point has always failed to break out of committee. This act requires each Act of Congress to contain a concise and definite statement of the constitutional authority relied upon for the enactment of each portion of that Act.
Can We Contain the Money Mischief? —HR1207 – Federal Reserve Transparency Act
This bill would allow currently disallowed audits and oversight of the Federal Reserve to take place. Presently unanswerable to anyone, the Fed oversees trillions of U.S. dollars and is able to enter into secret negotiations with foreign banks and governments. This bill, that already has over 240 sponsors in the House would correct for that lack of oversight.
(Senate Equivalent Bill S-604) Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009
Pruning Government Expenditures – HR 393 – Federal Sunset Act of 2009
The bill is designed to provide for the periodic review of the efficiency and public need for Federal agencies, to establish a Commission for the purpose of reviewing the efficiency and public need of such agencies, and to provide for the abolishment of agencies for which a public need does not exist.
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