Congressmen above the law?

Well, well.  Nobody is at all surprised when Congressmen think the law doesn't apply to them, but even so, sometimes they still manage to surprise me. 

According to Mr. Gohmert's aide, the officers apologized and rescinded the ticket upon realizing their folly, and all was well with the world.

According to the officers, however, Mr. Gohmert was kind of a jerk, and wasn't actually allowed to park there even as a Congressman.  The Park Police say that he would not have been permitted to park in a reserved spot near the Lincoln Memorial despite his status.  As a side note: this was done to avoid a fine of - gasp! - twenty five dollars!

No, really.  A Congressman flips out, acts rude towards cops, and simply walks off in direct defiance of the law all over twenty.  Five.  Dollars.

As with many articles, this is really about a much, much bigger issue than ignoring a $25 fine.  This is about how our lawmakers see themselves.  Again and again, we see it demonstrated that they believe they are above the laws that they themselves write.  This is a dangerous mentality; even in 18th-century Great Britain, the King himself was subject to laws.

It's gotten very, very bad.  You see, this is just a semi-amusing, pretty irritating and unusually visible expression of the belief that our lawmakers do not have to follow the law.  When the U.S. was founded, the intent was that the government would be, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "bound by the chains of the Constitution."  The Constitution was supposed to be the highest law in the country.  Now, however, it's whatever they feel like.  If you were to select five bills completely randomly that were passed in the last year, odds are frighteningly good that they are flagrant violations of Constitutional restrictions.

This is more than the fake Democrat-Republican paradigm.  Gohmert is a Republican; both parties routinely violate the aspects of the Constitution that they don't like, and it's to the point that it's almost not worth trying to figure out a bill's legality under the Constitution.

There is a reason that Congress's approval is so low, right now.  A disturbing number of them think that they are "above" the rest of the population, and so they don't care nearly as much as they should about the actual effect their laws will have.