It is astonishing how admittance to the ruling class can change someone.
This happens when people get elected to public service an oxymoron if there ever was one.
When covering the Florida Legislature in the 1970s, one of my friends, a legislative aide, inevitably got the bug and ran for office himself. The next year he was a representative.
Suddenly, people who barely noticed his existence were bowing and scraping, and showing great deference to him as if being elected to office had suddenly bestowed special ability and achievement upon him.
Legislators get prime parking spaces, plush offices, assistants, health care and many other perks. Lobbyists grovel before them even those they privately acknowledge are ignorant bumpkins.
Even politicians who had a modicum of humility before election are bound to be affected by the undue adulation, and the longer they serve the worse it gets.
Multiply the Legislature's effects a hundredfold and you have the Congress of the United States.
The perfect example is how Congress has managed to escape from the train wreck that is Obamacare.
Politicians try to justify this exemption by saying the law only requires people to have insurance and Congress gets theirs from their employer the government.
But millions of Americans are losing the health insurance they were happy with and being forced into what liberals have admitted is just the first step toward socialized medicine.
Even the New York Times has conceded that people will not be able to keep their own doctors, despitePresident Obama's assurances. Also untrue was the claim that everyone would pay less. In some states, such as Tennessee, premiums are rising 290 percent because of Obamacare.
But apparently what is good for the proles is not good for the pols.
Then, they claim that losing the perk will cause a brain drain among staff members, who also get the special privilege.
ROFLMAO.
It was, I understand, staff members who stuffed this exemption for themselves into the 425,000-word bill that members enacted without reading. Such cunning brains we could well afford to drain.
People also are outraged by the practice of handing out OPM (Other People's Money) to the families of members who die. Recently, the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg's widow was given $174,000 tax-free. Condolences to the widow, but she is not starving. Lautenberg was worth some $57 million when he expired.
Members say it is a tradition. Would that many American traditions liberals work so hard to destroy got such reverence.
I've never been a fan of term limits, but placing them on Congress is looking better, despite the fact that they throw the good out with the bad. At the least, it might save the good from turning bad.
Amending the Constitution also has little appeal for me because there is too much chance for mischief, but an amendment requiring members of the federal government to live under the same rules as the common folks would not be out of order.
Lloyd Brown was in the newspaper business nearly 50 years, beginning as a copy boy and retiring as editorial page editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville. After retirement he served as speech writer for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
