The legislative system has become so convoluted and corrupted that not even the legislators know what is in the bills, where the bills are being written, or what bills are pending. Given the current system, it should come as no surprise that a bill which would allow the Congress to audit the Federal Reserve should be stalled in a committee and will soon die.

By Robert Eugene Simmons Jr. at American Thinker

You would think that a bill supported by nearly three-quarters of the legislature should be a breeze to become law. Not so in today’s House of Representatives. The legislative system has become so convoluted and corrupted that not even the legislators know what is in the bills, where the bills are being written, or what bills are pending. Given the current system, it should come as no surprise that a bill which would allow the Congress to audit the Federal Reserve should be stalled in a committee and will soon die.

H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, was introduced in February of 2009 by Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and has gained an astonishing 320 cosponsors, which represents just over 73% of the 435 members of the House of Representatives — a number sufficient to surpass even a presidential veto. The bill is atypical of most congressional legislation in that it is just three pages with a single goal, devoid of pork, side projects, or other unsavory trappings of the legislative process. The bill simply requires the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to submit a full audit of their activities to Congress before the end of 2010. This is in stark contrast to the very limited audit powers that the General Accounting Office (GAO) has currently over the Federal Reserve. Knowing the simplicity and the obvious support the bill has, it should be a breeze to zip through Congress — but Congress simply no longer functions.

H.R. 1207 has been assigned to the Subcommittee on House Financial Services — the same committee that brought us the banking disaster which nearly crashed the economy in 2008. Barney Frank (D-MA), as the chair of the committee, has simply decided to ignore consideration of the bill and let it die by inactivity, a.k.a. pigeonholing. Since Frank sets the schedule for the committee, he has the power to exercise a veto on the proposed law — a veto that cannot be overridden, bypassed, or otherwise circumvented. Essentially, Frank, like all committee chairs, can decide on his own to kill bills referred to his committee that he doesn’t like — and he clearly dislikes H.R. 1207. Since this is a familiar game played in Washington by both parties with dozens of bills, the question might be, “Why should we care about this specific bill so much?”

Thomas Jefferson was clear on a number of occasions about what he thought of the concept of a private bank issuing the currency of the land. As president, in an 1802 letter to Albert Gallatin, the longest-serving Secretary of the treasury, Jefferson said,

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

FULL STORY

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