Contract with America: still fascist after all these years

The substance of new congressional bills is usually bad enough, but sometimes they can only pass because of past congressional wrongdoing.

There's a regulation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that rightly limits overdraft fees to $5, but Congress is taking an axe to that. Yet the Senate bill to overturn this commonsense rule passed by only 52-48.

What about the filibuster? Whenever any good bills come along, we have to listen to how it needs 60 senators to pass. Why is this bill different?

It turns out that it doesn't need 60, because it was approved under the Congressional Review Act, a stale relic that's part of the Contract with America Advancement Act of 1996.

We're still dealing with the Contract with America? Congress did lots of Nazi things under the Contract with America, but we shouldn't still have to put up with any of them. Yet President Clinton actually signed the 1996 bill into law, so we can't count on the Democrats to clean up the rubble.

We're ruled by unconstitutional laws passed by a Congress that hired an open apologist for the Nazis and the KKK as its House historian. It's just like how we're still affected by Reagan, who supported Francisco Franco and South Africa's apartheid dictatorship.

The Contract with America was America's Nazi moment. But for it, there might not have been so many Nazi moments since.