As best I can understand the situation in Washington, it seems to be as follows...
- One political party had control of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first six years of the current presidential administration.
- Little was accomplished. A war was started with inadequate justification and is being continued based on an idealogy of political extremists of one party who do not represent the majority of Americans. Taxes were cut but federal spending ran amuck, creating the largest federal deficit in the history of the nation. Little or no legislation was passed addressing increasingly critical domestic problems. Legislation that was enacted has repeatedly proven to have been created to satisfy special interests who basically bought the votes of members of Congress. Our national economic competitiveness and our role as a world power have begun to deteriorate, possibly to the point of being irreversible.
- The voters were so disgusted with the situation that in the 2006 mid-term elections they voted in enough candidates from the minority party to change the majority in the House of Representatives. But the plurality in the House was not enough to override a Presidential veto of legislation, should one occur. And the Senate remained in control of the other political party.
- Now, in an effort to discredit the newly-elected majority in the House, the Senate refuses to even attempt to negotiate mutually acceptable forms of legislation between the House and Senate in conference committee between the two houses of Congress, however necessary such legislation might be for the country.
- The President, equally complicit in the effort by Congressional leaders of his party to discredit their political opposition with the objective of regaining control of both houses of Congress in the 2008 elections, has threatened to veto any and all bills sent to him that found their source with the newly-elected majority in the House. The threat of a Presidential veto extends even to the most basic of necessary federal legislation, a federal budget.
- So, our democratic form of government is completely stalemated and held hostage by the political extremists from both parties for purely political purposes. Neither party is willing to modify their positions, regardless of the need of the country for the legislation such statesmanship might produce. Positions being taken by both legislative and executive elected representatives have everything to do with a struggle to the death of the political parties to maintain control of the Congress and nothing to do with the needs of the country.
I have occasionally opined, in an attempt to provide some humor to the situation, that a benevolent dictatorship might be a better form of government than the form of democracy that seems to exist in Washington. Living in Chicago for more than four decades teaches one that such a form of government under the leadership of two generations of the Daley family produced pretty good results. Even here in The Villages the plans and decisions of the developer of the community, certainly a form of "government" far from anything that could be called democratic, has had pretty good results.
But the situation in Washington has me completely frustrated and unable to imagine even a basic list of what needs to be done or how long it will take to reverse the current situation. Eventually the American ship of state will be righted, I'm convinced of that. But will it occur in my lifetime? I doubt it. In the lifetimes of my middle-aged children? Unfortunately, I think that's doubtful as well.
This whole situation is very, very sad.