A particularly brutal piece of legislation has been passed. H.R. 3221 is called The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), but it neither aids students nor does it remotely suggest fiscal responsibility. Naturally, Rep. Rosa DeLauro is the loudest champion of this intrusive and ultimately abusive bill, and its passage was by a strict party-line vote.

According to the Congresswoman, H.R.3221 “reforms the system of federal student loans to save taxpayers $87 billion – and invests $77 billion of those savings back into education, particularly by increasing funding for the Pell Grant program and creating an Early Leaning Challenge Fund to increase high-quality early childhood education and development for low-income children.”

Ordinarily, people cannot contradict themselves after only two words, but Rep. DeLauro does. Taxpayers CANNOT save $87 billion and spend $77 billion of the same money at the same time. They can’t even save $10 billion of what’s left over.

That’s because We the People will be on the hook for an additional $50 billion, and any student who applies for a taxpayer-subsidized government-controlled loan will have to perform community service (yes, much like convicted criminals currently have to).

According to Neal McClusky at CATO@Liberty, the CBO reports that this thing will cost an additional $50 billion. The CBO identified a net cost to taxpayers of about $600 million a year. Then it estimated SAFRA would cost an additional $33 billion after accounting for lending risk. Now, CBO estimates the cost of expanding Pell grants could be almost $11 billion greater than estimated. If you add all of those things together, the cost of SAFRA has flipped from a promised $10 billion savings to a $50 billion loss.

Meanwhile, all of the subsidies that the government hands out as Pell grants will be prohibited from going to private lenders. Only government lenders will handle Pell Grants, meaning the private student loan industry is finished. (This sounds a bit like that “government competition in health insurance”)

The reason for this is because provisions of the GIVE Act and Rep. DeLauro’s own Summer of Service Act demand students and young people for a civilian “volunteer” corps. H.R. 3221 fulfills the body count. Of course, volunteering in GIVE-speak will mean “serve or don’t go to college” for many young adults.

Finally, many opponents of H.R. 3221 denounce a $500 million grant to the Department of Education in order to design a national curriculum. Its being called unconstitutional, since providing education is the domain of the states, not the federal government

The collision of government-managed student loans, compulsory community service, a national curriculum, and national pre-school is a shocking intrusion into the lives of our young people. And, Rep. Rosa DeLauro on the wrong side of the issue again.

UPDATE: 03/19/2010 3:33PM. SAFRA has been attached as Division III of H.R.4872, the Health care reconciliation bill. But Title VI, the Defund ACORN Act, has been left off the bill.The sex-slavery activists at ACORN will continue to receive public funding to advise criminals on how to import, enslave, exploit, and sexually abuse vulnerable women and children.

While the Boaz ItsHaky Campaign crew was scattered across the globe this summer, visiting family, looking up old friends, and enjoying a little R&R, the 111th U.S. Congress fast-tracked Rep. John Dingell’s H.R. 2749, which we called the “Fear of Food Act.” It passed the House 283 to 142 (Roll Call no. 680) with a good number of Republicans joining on the third vote.

Now, Rep. Rosa DeLauro had warned us that “sometimes the dangers that threaten the safety and health of American families … lurk in our fridges and on our kitchen tables.” The Congresswoman adds, “And yet, for too long, the cornerstone of our food safety system – the FDA – has had only ancient tools and an outdated mandate at its disposal.”

By this, Rep. DeLauro means the FDA could not hand out higher fines, and didn’t have a mandate to target local family and organic farms. Until now. Because that’s who will be targeted by the newly empowered FDA inspectors. It’s typical Washington irony that Reps. DeLauro and Dingell proposed legislation in response to a deadly salmonella outbreak in a large food production facility, and yet the legislation effectively exempts largest producers by virtue of their ability to comply. (That’s not a misstatement, but the harsh reality of this legislation: it gives the big PAC donors a pass while putting the screws on the small operations.)

Anyway, its the opinion of some obvservers that FDA did have enough inspectors and tools to spot salmonella threats, but still failed to do so!

Much like the IRS, whose auditors famously target thousands of small businesses for every corporation, the FDA inspectors will go after the local and family-owned organic farms while strategically avoiding large production facilities and international agro-corporations. Its a matter of laziness: small targets rarely have a cadre of lawyers at hand like the large facilities. And yet, our fridges and dinner tables are likely to have products from the large corporate farms.

Worst of all, small family-owned farms and organic producers are expected to pay astronomical permits to pay for the FDA’s expansion, which will create fields of paperwork and auditing. For example, an annual registration fee of $500 is imposed on any “facility” that handles food. But for what? To pay for FDA paperwork handling? In addition, warrantless searches of business records, directives on farming methods, widespread quarantine powers, excessive penalties are all part of the new American farming experience.

Frankly, H.R. 2749 incorporates the very worst of Rep. DeLauro’s much-maligned H.R. 875. The only real difference between Rep. Dingell’s bill and Rep. DeLauro’s is that the Congresswoman’s splits the FDA, creating the Food Safety Administration to handle the excessive bureaucracy that will arise from the new regulations. No doubt, Rep. DeLauro will have to strip H.R. 875 of redundant passages should H.R. 2749 be signed into law.

For the sake of our farmers, let’s hope it doesn’t.

Congresswoman DeLauro voted an enthusiastic YES to the Bush Doctrine along with the rest of the Democrat leadership. H.R. 2346, the immensely expensive Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed overwhelmingly by the party that was supposed to have won the 2006 election because of their opposition to the war. Now the veteran incumbent Democrats can’t wait to intensify war activity in Afghanistan while keeping Iraq on the burner. And all it costs is $81,000,000,000, or an extra $315 per person this year.

Hypocrisy, anyone?

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro finally got on the bus and praised the President for his efforts to reform the tax code. As her press release put it, this reform is designed to curb the abuse of offshore tax shelters and eliminate tax incentives for shifting jobs overseas.

“That our tax code contains advantages for creating jobs overseas and opportunities to avoid paying taxes, defies common sense. Tax havens allow individuals and businesses to avoid paying their taxes, which results in an extra burden for those who do pay their share. We need to close the loopholes so that offshore tax havens and tax shelters will no longer be an option to hide income and assets.”

We can thank the Congresswoman for taking a position, but she takes it with a vindictive tone, as though legal tax havens are a crime and she’s part of the posse.

“I welcome President Obama’s efforts to restore balance to our tax code and look forward to working with my colleagues to take steps to fix our broken system.”

One problem is, the potential side-effect of taxing income earned overseas is that whatever corporations still call America home may depart for cushier places to situate their headquarters. A great many white collar jobs could be transferred to Dubai or Ireland, especially those in the Tech industry, as the AP reports:

Collectively, HP, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and Google lowered their tax bills by a combined $7.4 billion in their last fiscal years by taking advantage of lower tax rates outside the United States, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. Through the years, these five tax companies have avoided U.S. income taxes and foreign withholding taxes on a combined $72 billion in undistributed earnings from their foreign operations.

Another problems is U.S. competitiveness in the global market, as the Wall Street Journal points out:

The President’s plan would limit the tax deferral on income earned abroad by tightening the rules, limiting allowable deductions and restricting eligibility for foreign-tax credits. Congress long ago created the corporate tax deferral to compensate for this competitive disadvantage. Under deferral, a company doesn’t have to pay the U.S. corporate rate until it repatriates its earnings. America now has the worst of both worlds: a high statutory rate and a tax code so riddled with complexity that it is both expensive to administer and inefficient at collecting revenue. The explicit goal of this plan is to reduce the incentive for U.S. companies to invest abroad, which Mr. Obama derisively calls “shipping jobs overseas.” This “solution” is antigrowth, job-destroying, protectionist and unlikely to raise the tax revenue he predicts.

Question is, why does Rep. DeLauro leap at idea of taxing corporations now? Why hasn’t our Representative opposed the hemorrage of blue-collar American jobs overseas? Why hasn’t she offered solutions to our broken system in the past?

This isn’t something that’s happened overnight, and yet Rep. DeLauro only “got the picture” early this year. Rep. DeLauro has had ten terms in Congress to push on saving American jobs, to encourage consumers to buy American goods, to promote manufacturing in America, but unfortunately, she has failed to do so.

Proving herself to be a veritable locomotive for the Democrat ideologues, Rep. DeLauro reintroduced a suite of bills into the House in order to bring the National Public Service Act of 1990 into line with President Obama’s vision of community organizing on a continental scale. (She introduced versions of these in 2007 but they died in committee.) DeLauro’s bills, H.R. 1151 through 1154, are summarized quite neatly by bethechange.org:

The Encore Service Act (HR1151) will take advantage of all older Americans have to offer communities by providing stipends and educational scholarships to citizens 55 years of age and older who volunteer their time and dedicate their knowledge to help communities in need.

The Semester of Service Act (HR1152) will give students in their junior or senior year of high school the opportunity to spend a semester participating in community service-learning for academic credit.

The Summer of Service Act (HR1153) will create a competitive grant program that enables states and localities to offer students making the transition from middle to high school an opportunity to participate in a structured community service program over the summer months.

The ACTION Act (HR1154) will not only help many young people realize their dreams of going to college, but will also allow them to afford it by updating the AmeriCorps Education Award to reflect 15 years of college tuition increases.

These bills are bereft of details save the command and funding structure, which has gotten many established community services and nonprofits excited about the federal money coming their way. Likely, the final rules will make many nonprofits rue the day they accept Federal funds and turn themselves over to government oversight.

Frankly, a government coercing its citizens into service as a graduation requirement, or exchanging service for college credit, or even cash payments is not volunteerism at all. At worst, its a draft. At best, it makes millions of more people government employees, which is hardly different.

Meanwhile, Rep. McCarthy’s H.R. 1388, the GIVE Act, came up for a vote. GIVE stands for the unwieldy “Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education” but, like Rep. DeLauro’s bills, “volunteerism” means payment for service to a Democrat Party objective.

Hidden in the GIVE Act is a statute defining who is forbidden from participating in the national service organization (meaning, anyone who runs a nonprofit who accepts government money):

SEC. 1304. PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES AND INELIGIBLE ORGANIZATIONS. (a) Prohibited Activities- A participant in an approved national service position under this subtitle may not engage in the following activities:

(7) Engaging in religious instruction, conducting worship services, providing instruction as part of a program that includes mandatory religious instruction or worship, constructing or operating facilities devoted to religious instruction or worship, maintaining facilities primarily or inherently devoted to religious instruction or worship, or engaging in any form of religious proselytization.

That’s right. To run a Federally-funded national service organization, you may not attend a church service, or lend a hand to help build a new church, or even get caught passing out a church pamphlet. According to Rep. Rosa DeLauro and the Democrat majority, only non-religious state servants are capable of volunteering, teaching our youth community values, helping the needy, and making America a better place for all.

Rep. DeLauro voted YES to the ill-named GIVE Act, which discriminates against church-goers, and forces Americans to “Volunteer” for Democrat Party causes.

“If there’s any good that can come from this tragic [salmonella] outbreak, it is long-overdue changes that can help protect the American public from the food supply.” So said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), concerned that food is dangerous for America’s health.

Nobody in Congress is more terrified of food than Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who introduced HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act, to give the FDA unprecedented powers over the food supply. And, like the intrusive and overbearing H.R. 4040, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, this bill also promises to target small producers: family-owned farms, organic farms, and your home garden. From the Federal Times:

The Food and Drug Administration is asking Congress to give it more power to regulate the nation’s food supply in the wake of another deadly salmonella outbreak. Agency officials told lawmakers they want hundreds of millions of dollars more in the coming years to hire new staff and improve food testing facilities, and the power to register food producers and to order recalls of dangerous products. The agency was embarrassed by several recent outbreaks of foodborne illness, most recently a salmonella outbreak linked to products from Peanut Corp. of America (PCA). FDA has acknowledged that it inspected the company’s Blakely, Ga., facility only sporadically: once in 2001, and then again this year. And it never learned about 10 salmonella tests, conducted by private labs, that found the toxin in PCA’s products.

Rep. DeLauro has introduced this bill before, and it died in committee. However, the new Administration is far more receptive, especially in the wake of the peanut butter salmonella outbreak. Basically, the bill would:

1. Require food companies to implement preventive plans and meet performance standards for food contaminants.
2. Create a system for certifying the safety of imported foods.
3. Establish a strong risk-based inspection regime for food companies.
4. Grant the government explicit authority over all food-production facilities.
5. Enable enforcement tools: Mandatory recalls, civil penalties

As usual, nobody can argue that food safety is unimportant. What can be argued, however, is how H.R. 875’s broad regulations will strain, crimp, and ultimately shut down small businesses that are unable to meet its rigorous requirements. Just like the Consumer Product Safety Act, even the smallest producer is required to comply. So far, roadside vegetable stands, hot dog sellers, and children’s lemonade stands have slipped through the FDA’s grip, until now.

DeLauro’s bill would also mean a big reorganization at the Health and Human Services Department: It removes food safety functions from FDA and places them in a new agency within HHS. FDA would still handle drug and medical device inspections. The new Food Safety Administration would also absorb part of the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service, which runs a seafood inspection program. That change might prove controversial: GAO recently dropped its recommendation that food safety functions be consolidated under a single regulator.

Last week’s House Votes typefy the damage being inflicted upon our great country by our irresponsible, out-of-touch 111th Congress. As usual, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro was on the wrong side of every vote.

HR 1105 was the $410 billion omnibus that has been sold as “last year’s business” but in reality has been inflated with this year’s irresponsibility. Rosa voted YES to expanding federal waste while her constituents are tightening their belts.

HR 1106 was to fulfill President Obama’s promise to lend a helping hand to middle-class families who “played by the rules” but face foreclosure. Unfortunately, neither the bill nor anyone of responsibility in the majority party offered a way to discern between honest families in jeopardy and land speculators or irresponsible homebuyers. Rosa voted YES to let speculators and trouble-makers off the hook.

Keep in mind, the President promised to take a fine-toothed comb through the federal budget and save untold billions by removing waste, but leading Democrats have scoffed at auditing troubled mortgagees, claiming “there are too many of them.” Rosa’s YES vote forces her constituents to pay for other peoples’ bad gambles.

HR 80 is the sort of legislation that is better left unvoted: a ban on interstate commerce of primates. It is a weak response to the horrific chimpanzee attack in Stamford, an unnecessary extension of federal law, and a waste of time. Nearly half of the states have laws controlling or banning chimps as pets, and yet the 111th Congress proved its authority in chimp-control by this vote. Rosa voted YES to keep primates from crossing state lines.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, H.Res. 189 was voted down. This resolution would have opened an Ethics Committee investigation into the connection between Representatives and campaign donors whenever earmarks would benefit specific government contractors. One would think this is required business, or should be in this era of high corruption. But it is not. And it won’t be. Because Rosa vote YES to kill it, and any chance of keeping our Representatives honest.

This has not been a good week for the United States or for the Third District. But there is a remedy: take heart, have patience, spread the word, and vote for Boaz ItsHaky in the next election!

And of course, our Connecticut delegation were everywhere to be seen upon passage. The picture above and another one by the New York Times, shows both Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, and John Larson, D-CT, at the sides of Speaker Nancy Pelosi as they laughed with tax cheat Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY.

Wow, was that vote a riot!

Rep. Rosa DeLauro voted Yes on H.R. 7321: To authorize financial assistance to eligible automobile manufacturers, throwing a handout to GM and Chrysler, two of the ailing Big Three of the ailing U.S. automotive industry. Ford opted out; though they came to Congress begging last week, they stated this week they had enough cash to stay afloat. Perhaps they read the fine print of what H.R. 7321 would do to their business.

Although the Big Three are the last giants of U.S. heavy industry and their success (and survival) are important to the job sector, critics of H.R. 7321 suggest its nothing less than a stock swap, putting the Federal Government into the car business, without demanding a business plan to bring the giants back into profitability. As Rep. Barney Frank said, “If we are lucky, we will come out with a bill next week that nobody likes,” furthering the theory that our 110th Congress is incapable of formulating legislation that can meet the needs and expectations of the nation.

Rep. DeLauro herself has insisted that “doing nothing [on the economy] is not an option,” opening the door to the “bad legislation is better than no legislation” attitude that nearly all long-serving veterans of Congress hold. It is a dangerous point of view in terms of our civil liberties, as Representatives who hold this view must feel themselves infallible in the long term, and that history will judge even their worst actions to be just in the light of their good intentions.