Congress Is Broken
January 21, 2010 by Rachel Baker · Leave a Comment
Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent or a member of the Tea Party Movement, as an American Citizen, you know Congress is broken.
With out-of-control special interest contributions to politician’s war chests, there’s little hope of anything being done to fix it. Today, the AP is reporting that the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for President and Congress. This is despite the decades-old limits on business efforts to influence federal campaigns.
This, also, makes it more likely that candidates both in their campaigns and in their elected positions will be more likely to respond to legislation in the way the major corporations and possibly labor unions want them to respond.
What happened to “for the people?” A Supreme Court decision to relax the rules on how much influence one has over federal campaigns is not indicative of people electing someone who will act on what is truly good for the people.
The argument for this decision is the previous regulations hampered the 1st Amendment – Freedom of Speech; and that anyone should be able to voice their opinions on a candidate for a federal office any way they choose.
While I completely recognize that one cannot put restraints on our freedom of speech, we also cannot be sure the person we elect will vote for what is actually best for the people when the elected official owes political capital to big business – oil companies, insurance companies, etc. and other special interest groups.
It’s disgusting the way congress is working right now, on both sides of the aisle. Democrats don’t know what to do with the majority vote they have, and Republicans are not allowing major votes to go through. Very few things in Congress actually have to go through the infinite duration of a filibuster. Democrats are not holding Republicans to the filibuster. If the Republicans threaten it, which they have more last year than in any other Congressional Session in the history of the U. S., then Democrats put their tails between their legs and give in.
Over the last few days, in regards to the Massachusetts election of Scott Brown to the Senate the most common refrain is “The People have Spoken.”
No, the people of Massachusetts have spoken. It’s hard to believe that the people of all 50 states have spoken with an election they had no voice in.
But Democrats have once again begun putting their tails between their legs, cowering in fear and showing their incredible incompetence at leading. And the Republicans are chalking the win up to how the American people don’t like what the Dems are doing.
What the people of Massachusetts have said by voting for Scott Brown is that Coakley ran an incompetent campaign, and they are just sick of the way things are going.
But how do we, the American people, fix this epic fail of both parties in Congress? The answer is not to constantly flip-flop on which party we vote in office because we are unhappy with the way things are going in congress.
The problem is not whether Health Care is passed or not passed, whether Cap and Trade is passed or not passed, whether a jobs stimulus is passed or not passed or whether there is climate legislation passed or not passed. The problem is that the people who are our elected officials are not behaving in the way we expect our elected officials to behave.
They are blocking votes on important issues, they are cowering to the opposing party and they are not running this country in the way we voted them into office to run it. Were they absent on they day they taught how to work together in kindergarten? Have any of them ever been a part of a team? Why is it that small committees can work together but as a whole, the Senate body can’t?
Democrats didn’t just win the majority by riding the coat-tails of the Obama campaign. Democrats won the majority because we, as a nation, from all walks of life, were tired of the way the country had been led. We spoke loud and clear in the 2008 elections. We wanted Change. But the representatives we elected have never even given the change we voted for last time a chance to work. How can you block a years worth of proposed legislation, and then argue that nothing has been done, and that we’re going in the wrong direction?
What we did by changing the majority party, and voting for Democrats was not say we want the Democratic platform to be the complete and only agenda for legislation, but rather that we demand things be better – that political discourse should be more intellectual, that both parties should stop slinging political rhetoric at each other and actually pass legislation that is inherently better for the people and future of this country.
But…that’s not what we are getting. Instead, what we are getting is one party who can only pass things in the House but not the Senate, and one party who does everything they can to block every major piece of legislation they can. We are getting one party who is cowering at the very thought of opposition and one party who is grandstanding on what it is they think people want to hear.
It isn’t that the Change we voted for isn’t what it was supposed to be. It’s that the Change we voted for was to put an end to the self-serving political partisanship and work for the people instead of your self-serving corporate funded political career. And instead we’ve gotten more of the exact thing we voted to change.
Our representatives need to ask themselves, if you weren’t in your position and you didn’t have all the lobbyists and corporate funding, what legislation is actually good for the country that you’ve blocked or changed because you were fearful of the opposition? How is it exactly that you’d want your grandchildren and their children to benefit from the choices you’ve made today?
Which brings me back to campaign financing and the loosening of regulations. There is no way elected officials can do what’s right by the American people if they are taking millions and millions of dollars from corporations and labor unions – this is not what the American people said when ‘The American People have Spoken’.
The Supreme Court is the law of the land, but there are a whole lot of ethical and moral decisions that should be made by individual candidates on what they decide they can allow to happen in their quest to the top. And right now, there’s a whole lot of elected officials in both parties who should be sitting down and pondering the ethical and moral ramifications of their actions.
One last thing to ponder: Did the American people elect officials to immediately respond to the needs of people around the world to alleviate their suffering or did we elect them to respond to the needs of the American citizens who face some pretty horrific disasters of our own? This is not say it isn’t noble to send relief to Haiti (it absolutely is), but why does it take hours to help others around the world and over a year to get the same response here at home?
