DeMint, Enzi, Vitter: Holy or Holey?
During the 110th Congress, Senators Jim DeMint, Mike Enzi and David Vitter teamed up to propose S. 2409, a bill to do… what? Solve the problem of the national debt? Help find a way to cure some new disease?
Uh, no. They penned a bill to mandate that the Capitol Hill Visitors’ Center always prominently display the words “Under God” and “In God We Trust,” and that it be against the law for someone to ask for Christian symbols or words to be taken down from the Capitol Hill Visitors’ Center.
The Enzi-Vitter-DeMint bill wasn’t about solving any of the great problems facing this nation. It was about Enzi and Vitter and DeMint making a public demonstration of their holy Christian natures.
But what do Mike Enzi and Jim DeMint and David Vitter do when not much of anybody is watching? We got an indication on April 2, 2009, when — you can’t get much more obscure than this — Senate Amendment 811 to S. Con. Res. 13 went up for a vote. The Amendment would have allowed for the creation of a national usury law, so long as it did not involve any additional spending to add to the budget deficit.
Usury — the charging of high interest rates — is condemned in many places in the Christian Bible, often directly by the Christian God. The implementation of this “Christian Nation” that Senators Enzi and Vitter and DeMint like to talk about would, if Enzi and Vitter and DeMint were consistent theocrats, include a prohibition of usury.
When given the chance, when no one was looking, Mike Enzi and David Vitter and Jim DeMint all voted against this amendment to create a national usury law.
