Just Say Yes to Gridlock
The whole fiscal-cliff battle really demonstrated that our two political parties don’t get along these days. Neither of them seems willing to budge on anything, and the members of both parties even swear at each other and call each other things that usually only the voters call them. This distresses many people who say the parties need to learn to work together and agree on bipartisan solutions.
Are those people insane?
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine Republicans and Democrats getting along. They’d smile and laugh at each other’s jokes and pat each other on the back, and maybe John Boehner would make out with Nancy Pelosi… and then both parties would disappear into a back room to decide how to spend our money and what new government powers they should have. What a nightmare! We’d be completely defenseless.
Still, some say that the animosity between the parties keeps them from doing useful things, but these people are living in a fantasy world. When in history have politicians demonstrated an ability to do anything useful? When the two parties actually do come together, we get things like the TSA. Every time you get your junk touched before you get on a flight, you can just consider that bipartisan love.
Right now, politicians have the power to suddenly decide to tax us all at 100% and then spend the money replacing all of our roads with a high-speed rail system. What keeps them from doing that? Common sense? Come on, look at the morons we have in government — Congress is filled with idiots who couldn’t run a lemonade stand and who have grand visions to transform the nation. No, the only thing stopping them is that they’re divided into two parties who viscerally hate each other. If they ever got along, a big new government overreach like the Patriot Act or a giant boondoggle like Obamacare would be passed every couple weeks. By the end of the year, we’d have the government spying on our every movement as we lived flat broke in shanty towns, eating our government-allotted corn cob half we’d get every other day.
The separation of powers built into our Constitution was meant to prevent the government from going crazy with power, but that doesn’t really work. Too often, the executive and legislative branches work together on some harebrained scheme (“Let’s solve everything by minting a trillion-dollar coin!”). The Supreme Court is supposed to stop them, but the court is composed of nine of the greatest minds in our country, tasked to read and reread a six-page document, and they can’t even get that right half the time. We American citizens have nothing protecting us — except the two-party system. Playing half the government against the other half is the only thing keeping its power in check.
I bet the two-party system was thought up by the founding voters as the ultimate check on government power. They came up with the first two parties — the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans — and then made up some issues they pretended were important (I mean, really, a national bank? Who cares?) to keep the politicians fighting each other and thus slow the government’s growth. Some people say our two current parties are too much alike, but that’s the thing: The issues they espouse don’t matter. What’s important is that they hate each other.
That’s what we need to keep up. If we ever see the parties start to get along, we have to come up with some completely made-up issue to keep them fighting, like climate change. This may seem cruel, but it’s useful not to think of politicians as people — human beings don’t budget like that. And anyway, what else can we do to protect ourselves from government overreach? Yes, ideally the federal government shouldn’t have this much power, but that’s not the system we have. So right now we should hope for headlines about a bipartisan agreement that was broken up when the senators started to bite each other. Then we’ll know our country is safe.
More from Frank J. Fleming:
We have Federalism and the 10th Amendment if only we could find politicians with the backbone to defy the diktats of the federal government and exercise them.
Wake up!!
Every election we vote for someone and hope they will ‘do the right thing’. They never do, all politicians are exactly the same, they all want more power and more control and more money. Democrat or Republican it makes no difference, every day the Federal Government gets bigger and bigger.
Obama has averaged almost ten thousand new employees per month in the Federal Bureaucracy. This is not an abberration, every President if you chart new employees on a graph it is almost a stright line of growth year by year. Since this is happening then it must be a National Plan within each party. They all get elected on the promise of Change, but the only change we get is the pocket change we have in our pockets when they get though stealing all of our money.
What we need is ‘Term Limits of all Elected Offices’, State, County, City and Federal.
Then we need Anti-Corruption Laws with Capital Punishment if Convicted for any corruption in office.
Now, we may stand a chance to survive another 100 years of this Nation, but if we do not do something, we certainly will not survive another ten years.
Why don’t you run for office?
Of course, the fly in the Ointment is that all of the Gridlock will be represented as all due to the Right, the press will repeat the lie endlessly, and the witless fools who elected our Fool-in-Chief will lap it up.
Still, you make a good point. I’d rather have gridlock than this endless hemorrhage of our hard-earned money and our God-given rights.
Sen. Paul on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley- 2/10/2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PLX9ldBERc
Why is it a supposed free society we only have 2 choices? What would be great for freedom would be to end the two party cartel! Just saying!
Just because the two parties don’t get along, it doesn’t mean that they will be prevented from wasting money and growing government. There is really little difference between D’s and R’s today.
Fahrenheit 451 and the Flame of Liberty
Sen. Rand Paul discusses Americans’ continuous loss of liberty through the lens of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic “Fahrenheit 451.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9jBWjZWvI
Partisan politics is each party trying to screw the other.
Bipartisan politics is both parties trying to screw the country.
I recall a political cartoon published soon after the end of Republican control of the White House, when the Democrats controlled Congress, or maybe it was when Dems & Repubs had each one of the houses, and now the Dems had both.
It showed Mr. American Taxpayer, flattened out on the road, just having been run over a high-speed steamroller labeled, “Congress”.
The caption? “I miss gridlock already.”
Yes, gridlock is good, unless you have a majority of good people in BOTH houses.
When was the last time THAT happened?
Mr, Fleming,
Very well stated. I have slowly been coming around to this idea over the past four years. Keep the parties fighting each other so they’ll leave us alone.
Posted on February 11, 2013 Dr. Ben Carson On Criticizing Obamacare: “Somebody Has To Stand Up To The Bullies”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/11/dr_ben_carson_on_criticizing_obamacare_somebody_has_to_stand_up_to_the_bullies.html
Dr. Ben Carson doesn’t believe in evolution either. Or climate change. Dr. Ben for President! Or Senator. Or doctor. As long as he doesn’t treat MY kids.
Hasn’t his surgery personally saves thousands of kids, you silly little twit?
George Washington, in his farewell address, made very clear that he thought political parties (factionalism) could become the death knell of a Republic. He preferred to have every politician in competition with all the others, and defending their constituents. He declaimed against the rise of factionalism in the same way Eisenhower did the “military-industrial complex”. In part this was supposed to be held in check by the Senate, which was voted on by each State government, not by popular vote. The 17th Amendment changed the way Senators were elected, and the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax incomes. Both changes have led to the leviathan we now have in Washington DC. If we don’t repeal these two Amendments then we need something else to let our States reassert their sovereignty as a check against Federal power. Otherwise we remain on the path toward dictatorship, just like the ancient Romans, and just like the Old Republic from “Star Wars”, which was based on what happened to the Romans.
Back during the 1992 election, there was an older guy that I worked with who announced that he really didn’t care that much who won, as long as the same party didn’t control the house, senate, and presidency. His wisdom – which I didn’t really appreciate at the time but do now – was that with a split government, it made it hard to pass stuff that didn’t meet common sense requirements.
I saw just how right he was during 93-94, when the Dems controlled everything, again 2001-2006 when the GOP controlled everything, and the worst was 2009-2010 when the Dems ran wild.
Compared to those periods, gridlock sounds like a best case scenario! I think the country would be way better off if we could somehow repeal every federal law passed between Jan 2001 and Jan 2011 and start over again with gridlock.
td
Arguing that the Democrats could end Congressional gridlock if they’d just agree with the Republicans has never seemed to convince anyone. That line “When the two parties actually do come together, we get things like the TSA” is more succinct: I will use that from now on when anyone bitches to me about gridlock.
Considering the reference to TSA: I object to referring to any part of my body as “junk”. Junk is worn out, shoddy, worthless, and ready for the trash heap. None of that applies to me. Using “junk” this way suggests strong anti-male feelings.
For most of my adult life, I’ve been aggravated when they start referring to a “do nothing” congress, or this congress ONLY passed xx number of bills, etc. Like this is something horrible. In my opinion these were excellent congresses doing what they should – which is slowing the expansion of government. It isn’t rocket science. In general, fewer laws means less government.
Yes, imagine a USA where people of both sides didn’t try to create a war between Americans. Golly.
Everytime a new law is enacted, the result is less freedom.
As long as the Feds use Baseline Budgeting they will never shrink.
The amount of money they spend each year begins with the amount they spent last year … and goes up from there, sometimes by law.
It’s why simply decreasing the amount of the increase is considered a “draconian” cut.
When you automatically get enough money to hire another 100,000 people each year, you spend it.
We are well and truly screwed.