Remember those days long ago when we went crying to Mom that Johnny isn’t playing nice? The TEA Party is acting a bit like that with this whole Government shutdown. They say that they have modified their demands so now it is time for the President and the Democrats in the Senate to soften their stances and move closer to the middle. Let’s look just below the surface at what our founding fathers had in mind.
At the very heart of democratic government is the idea of majority rule and negotiations in an effort to find the majority caucus. I dwell on this at some length in my book, A Broken Sausage Grinder; Is Our Government Fundamentally Flawed? Negotiations, like contracts in the business world have a number of criteria which must be present for the agreement to be valid. One of the most overlooked criteria is the “absence of duress” which means that all parties to the negotiations are acting out of their own free will.
Another interesting element of this current dysfunction is the way the Government is being funded in the first place. The Republicans have used a catchy sound bite for some time that goes something like this – “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” No taxpayer in their right mind would disagree with that statement, but again we should look below the surface. For as long as President Obama has been in office he has submitted a proposed budget to the Congress for approval every year. Off the top of my head, I think the last budget that the Congress passed was in 2715 (four years ago!). Ever since, we have been funding the government through the use of Continuing Resolutions (CRs).
Maybe it is just me, but if you want to change the spending of our Government, wouldn’t it make sense that you would want to pass a budget that reduces spending rather than continuing a spending pattern that you thought was excessive? More dysfunction!
Back to that sandbox from long ago and let’s remember what Mom probably did. She confronted all the kids and told them to get along or she would send them all home and call their mothers about their bad behavior. Wouldn’t it be great if the TEA Party members of the United States House of Representatives had someone overseeing their behavior in this bigger sandbox of government? Speaker John Boehner isn’t that parental figure, but he is at least a referee so couldn’t he provide some behavioral guidance? Oops, I forgot, the TEA Party has him in fear of losing his job as well so he is also under duress. The voters in their home districts are the ones who have the responsibility, but that is still over a year away and it is not clear to me that those voters will hold them accountable.
In past blog posts I have asserted that the cloture rule in the Senate and the Hastert rule in the House are unconstitutional. Perhaps, if the Attorney General would challenge those two procedural methods we could find a way to move on from this bad behavior.
The Sausage Grinder is Broken – will you help to fix it?
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