A reader of the Herald (Oct. 15) wants to show us how
Washington is broken, but he missed the point entirely of the article he used
to illustrate and prove his case, and he misunderstands the nature of the
divide in Washington.
Suppose your spouse had maxed out all your credit cards and
was borrowing money to pay the minimum balances of them every month. Your spouse won’t stop, so you go to marriage
counseling, and the counselor advises you to compromise. But what would a compromise look like? A new credit card with a lower spending
limit?
A compromise in Washington in such a situation is to lower
the rate of spending increases. If
interest rates were to go back to normal, we will be paying almost a trillion
dollars a year in interest alone. Some
people in Congress believe that this has to stop. A compromise will only mean that spending increases
and borrowing won’t end; they will just increase more slowly.
The writer also apparently missed the point of the reference
in the article to Article 1. That’s the
part in the Constitution that spells out the role of Congress. The Federalist Papers, that were written to
explain the Constitution in order to help get it ratified, states that the powers
of the Federal government are few and defined.
A lot of Congressmen believe that the federal government is doing a lot
of things that it is not authorized to do, which is one of the reasons for its
massive spending.
They believe we need
to follow the Constitution better, otherwise our country won’t be the country
we started out with. When we followed
the Constitution more closely, things have worked out quite well. If we start a new course, it’s not likely to
be an improvement, seeing already this massive debt we have incurred so
quickly.
There is strong opposition to our President and his
administration, because many in Congress see an eager willingness on their part
to bypass the Constitution and a continual failure on the President’s part to
execute the laws of the land. He chooses
which laws to obey, and he has often just changed laws as he sees fit. So, while there may be some Republicans who
oppose Obama for political or other less noble reasons, there have been too
many instance of this lack of regard for the Constitution to make general
opposition to the administration justifiable.
And, finally, Republicans want to be more aggressive with
the media, because the media are painting a picture of Washington that the
Republicans assert is false.
For example, the House is supposed to control the spending,
but if they don’t fund everything the President wants, he threatens a
veto. The government could then shut
down for a lack of a budget, or authorized spending, and the media and the
Democrats blame the Republicans.
The House could fund everything but one thing, like, say,
Planned Parenthood, and the President threatens a veto, and the Republicans are
accused of wanting to shut the government down over something as silly as
this. Everything else is fully funded,
but the President won’t accept it, and the whole government shuts down?
Years ago, the House used to fund the government piecemeal,
approving appropriations for different parts of the government at different
times. If the funds are approved, there
is no reason to shut anything down. The
choice to shut the government down is the President’s, not Congress’. But the media and the Democrats will blame
the Republicans. And the public seems to
buy it.
So the Republicans see that they need to be far aggressive
in telling the public how things are supposed to work, because they are not
hearing it from the media or the administration.
As I see it, our country is going through an identity
crisis. We used to have a consensus on
what America is all about. Now we have
differences of opinion, so we need to be patient while we all work this out.
