More Senate Corruption

GLYNN REYNOLDS is wathcing the Senate hold on the porkbuster legislation. It is worth taking a look at his post this morning. He points out a few things from articles by others. Here are a couple of things I think worth noting:

"It could be anyone -- Democrat or Republican -- Darling said. To place a hold, senators merely have to inform their leader that they don't want the legislation to move forward," he said.

AND

The same Senate rules prohibit those party leaders from disclosing which of them did this dirty deed, and at which senator's behest. It's treated like classified information.

It seems to me patently wrong in our system of political economy for an elected representative, in this case a Senator, to be able to act in an official way in secret. Even when issues concern national security, in general, I think the actions of those we elect (as well those in the bureaucracy) should simply be publicly announced and identified.

Further, in this case, we see that in our Senate it is apparently the case that one person is allowed the power to veto legislation. It simply makes no sense to me that one person can say legislation cannot move forward. Of course, it is even worse that this power is allowed to be exercised in secret. I suggest this is an enormous corruption of our system of government. I suppose it is ironic that this sort of corruption is being exposed because of a bill that would end the corrupt practice of allowing individual senators to secretly earmark government monies for expenditures directed at very specific projects and very specific people and businesses.