My Mother the Alien

Let’s talk about Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WI)!

George Bush may be president and all, but Sensenbrenner is Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Combine that with a majestic style, a love of family, and a willing spirit, and you’ve got real power.

Everything Sensenbrenner does, everything he wants, is for the good of us all. Jim wants to protect us from terrorists, so he sneaks the Real ID Act into law. The next thing you know, instead of the government having to prove you aren’t a native before deporting you, it’s your job to prove you are one.

My mother, whose original birth certificate was lost in a fire, couldn’t prove she was born in South Dakota. If only we had the Real ID Act back when I was a kid, I might have been able to get her a one-way ticket to Belize.

Before Sensenbrenner, your identity was defined by you and your family and how you chose to live. Now the federal government will define you. You will be a file linked to the electronic data on a card issued by the DMV. Only good upstanding citizens who deeply care about your welfare, such as DMV workers, will have access to all your personal information, and there is no possibility that the government will use its information on you except to send you to Guantanamo when you deserve it.

For the good of the Nation and the courts, Sensenbrenner wants to hold up new judgeships for an overworked federal judiciary until the supposedly left-leaning Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals can be split into three more manageable pieces. At the same time he wants to find a way to punish judges, short of impeachment, who stray from his interpretation of the law and the constitution, by means of an “office of inspector general” that Congress and the House Judiciary Committee would establish. He says "The appropriate questions are how do we punish and who does the punishing." My questions also!

Speaking of punishing, and how, check out Sensenbrenner’s new baby, HR 1528, AKA “The Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005.”

Here are two of the reasons this bill wins my nomination for The Legislation Most Likely in All of Human History to Have Been Written While High on Hallucinogens: 1) It provides two years mandatory prison time for failing to report a drug crime to the police even if the information is second-hand. 2) You get an extra year if the people you don’t snitch on include your own children.

Say you come home early from dinner with the husband or wife and you catch your three teenage kids passing a single joint around the living room. So you think it’s enough to just tell them they’re all grounded for a week, no keys to the car for a month, and no video games until next Whitsuntide? You honestly call that parenting? Sensenbrenner says if you don’t pick up the phone within 24 hours, dial 911, and report your kids to the police, you belong in federal prison. For three years! You drug-crime-tolerating scum!

Here’s another scenario. You’re walking down the street and you happen to see a pair of Nikes draped over a phone line. You can go to prison for two years if you then fail to tell the police you saw signs of drug dealing in that neighborhood. What’s that you say, you didn’t know that was a sign? Yeah, right. Tell it to the judge, buddy.

Just yesterday I was on a bus and overheard some teenagers talking about scoring drugs. I didn’t tell the driver to call it in! I’m so irresponsible, I’m threatening the safety of America and the American way of life. Thank goodness Jim Sensenbrenner cares enough about America to have me and everybody else on that bus put away.

We were all just abusing the Free Ride Zone anyway.