The Deadbeat From Stillwater
originally published in the Stillwater Gazzette
March 3, 2003
To the Editor:
When I think of State Sen. Michele Bachmann, hard-working aren't the first words that come to mind. Self-serving maybe, but not hard-working.
Bachmann has the lightest workload of any state senator. Although she serves on only three committees, two of them meet at exactly the same time. That means Bachmann only attends a maximum of four committee meetings a week. The rest of her colleagues' calendars, with the exception of two in leadership positions, are filled with anywhere from six to 11 committee meetings a week.
According to the Secretary of the Senate's office, senators are "strongly discouraged" from requesting assignments to committees with conflicting schedules. An aide in Bachmann's office says she often attends committee meetings in lieu of the senator. Is this the kind of representation Washington County voters elected in November?
When Bachmann's not skipping committee meetings, she's promoting herself with meaningless resolutions-six of them already this session, dealing with such matters as a missile defense system and the federal estate tax. Bachmann is well-versed in the art of authoring these self-serving public relations gimmicks. In her first two years in office, she authored 21 of them-10 percent of all the resolutions proposed by the entire 67-member Senate during that period. When you add up the cost of drafting, printing, voting on and recording these resolutions, the cost to taxpayers for promoting Michele Bachmann starts to look like real money.
When Michele Bachmann's lease is up in four years-after all, she says she's just renting the office-the voters of Senate District 52 should evict this deadbeat tenant and elect someone who at least pays the rent.
Karl Bremer
It seems like she continues to pull the same stunts in congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment