Buy Bye Bi-Partisanship

That the House of Representatives was willing to let the government screech to a halt over a tiny budgetary amount at the end of September, mostly targeting cutting disaster relief support, a just about a month after almost placing the United States in default of its debt obligations is nothing short of astounding. Gratefully, FEMA has a few extra shekels in its pocket to buy a little extra time, but global markets are skittish enough without “I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue” childlike behavior of our elected representatives. Our credibility as a nation is very much at stake, and it’s all about one party making the president seems so ineffective that the voters will presumably get rid of him in the November 2012 elections. In other words, political goals trump national needs? Might this strategy backfire as the president is now actively laying traps for Congressmen and women to fall into… like offering a tax hike on billionaires (and folks earning over $1 million) that Republicans look silly opposing in the minds of the majority of Americans?

There are folks like Republican Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who are breaking their butts to create a bi-partisan solution to the cost of operating our military. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he is proposing a non-doctrinaire approach that would reel-in unsustainable levels of military spending, fighting Democrats and Republicans alike in his efforts. He is clearly an example of responsible representation. But then there is the Tea Party-led House that really doesn’t seem to care what happens to the country, as long as they can advance their political agenda.

The September 27^th Washington Post summarized this House-driven impasse, likely to continue until the new House of Representatives is seated in January of 2013: “Republicans see cutting spending and tackling entitlements like Social Security and Medicare as the right path and anything involving raising taxes as a non-starter. Democrats advocate a combination of spending cuts and tax increases with any major changes to entitlement programs regarded as anathema.

House Speaker John Boehner ([R-] Ohio) summed up the chasm between the two sides nicely following his speech at the Economic Club of Washington earlier this month… ‘While we have a good relationship, sometimes the conversations that we have would be like two groups of people from two different planets who barely understand each other,’ Boehner said of President Obama and Democrats. ‘And I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, but there’s a reason why you’d have two major political parties with big disagreements.’

“There’s lot and lots of reasons for the widely disparate views the two parties in Congress now hold but one major one is that the 2010 election not only elected dozens of tea-party aligned fiscal conservatives but also saw the defeat of scads of moderate and conservative Democrats — a reality that means the two parties are now far more grouped at the far end of their own ideological spectrums making deal-making less likely.” A severally polarized elected legislature, each side able to block the other, is profoundly detrimental to the ability to act in the nation’s best interests. That this polarization seems to exist in only one of the two houses of Congress, the one where the term of office is two years, only makes the problem worse. A minority has the power to bring the country to its knees and seems to have no hesitation to do so. May the voters punish the children and expel them from the schoolhouse.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if average Americans ran their lives like this, everyone in this nation would be filing for bankruptcy at the same time!