Has Francis Rooney gone looney?
Possibly. But is Rooney more looney than some wild-eyed folks in California, Georgia and Texas?
Francis Rooney is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He's the holder of Florida's 19th District congressional seat.
Earlier this week, Rooney unleashed a legislative proposal that he calls the "Thomas Jefferson Public Service Act". Cutting through the whereas and therefores, Rooney's looney bill would reduce the annual salary of federal lawmakers to $1 a year if they serve more than 12 years in Congress.
This isn't a joke, folks. Really it isn't. Rooney says it would establish term limits without amending the Constitution.
"The idea of citizen legislators, espoused by our Founding Fathers, centers on the discussion of term limits," said Rooney who didn't share where that's mentioned in the Constitution, possibly because it's not there.
"Many voters across the country and legislators across party lines have expressed support for term limits, making the idea one which attracts bipartisan support," Rooney said.
Rooney was born in Muskogee, Okla. on Dec. 4, 1953. That's 16 years before the late county singer Merle Haggard released his hit song, "Okie from Muskogee."
The opening lines in "Okie" say, "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don't take our trips on LSD..."
Maybe not. But with Rooney proposing legislation that would cut congressional salaries from $174,000 a year to a buck, one might think Rooney either ingested or smoked some kind of hallucinogen on the streets of Muskogee during his formative years.
Apparently, Rooney hasn't learned that federal lawmakers talk term limits on the campaign trail. After winning their seats, however, they blame their alleged inability to get term limits in place on fellow lawmakers from other parts of this great nation where voters don't share Rooney's down-home conservative beliefs.
While seeking re-election next year, Rooney can boast that he tried to get term limits but the liberals and career politicians shot it down.
We'll see if Rooney hangs it up after 12 years.
Meanwhile, some folks in California want to secede from the union. But unlike those Georgia and Texas malcontents that wanted to pull the plug after Barrack Obama was re-elected in 2012, those Golden State dissidents want out because Donald Trump won the presidency in the 2016.
Those Georgia folks aren't talking secession anymore. They've pulled their secession billboards from the interstates and they're spreading the word that things are rosy now.
They say that's because Trump is fulfilling his promises to cut taxes, bring jobs back to the country, get rid of those illegal immigrants and grow the economy.
Should a Democrat win the presidency in the 2020 election, the secessionists would be expected to dust off those secession billboards and slap them back on the interstates.
While the Constitution lists procedures for becoming a state, it doesn't have any provisions for seceding from the union.
So the secession movements have about as much chance of succeeding as Rooney's proposal to limit congressional terms. They both provide fodder for late-night comedy quips or material for new series of looney-tune cartoons.
