It positively burned my bollocks yesterday to see a headline highlighting fresh complaints that members of Congress aren’t paid enough. As I was following the link I thought to myself that they better not be newly-elected members of the Tea Party circuit, who so egregiously dickered up this month’s mammoth budget slashings while maintaining the tax loopholes unnecessarily protecting America’s wealthiest. I suppose it shouldn’t have been such a great surprise to find that three of the article’s four citations came from Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL), Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), and Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC), all three indeed recently elected in the 2010 midterms as self-styled Tea Party juniors.
The comments the article cites speak pretty poorly of Southerland in particular; somewhat in Duffy's defense Talking Points Memo shows him to be among Congress' poorest peers, though his family's wealth is still considerably greater than those of his average constituents. (Although in an act of informational whitewash, Duffy and the GOP attempted to strike all evidence of his comments from the internet.) It is also important to note that comments made by Ellmers and by Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-CA) were both in the context of forgoing their salaries completely in the event of the potential government shutdown earlier this year.
But Steve Southerland, what gall! Complaining publicly that he ought to return to the private sector, and this after striving his hardest to drive the near-ruin (well... tarnishing might be a less loaded, more accurate phrasing) of America's economic standing, and the decimating of its fiscal obligations and social programming. I suppose all I can say is "Go, sir!" Your ilk is not what America needs now, or ever.
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