What if Washington grid lock was the best thing that ever happened to us? What if it was the only thing keeping the rich and powerful from taking over, privatizing pretty much everything, and completely looting the government? Which would you rather have: Political paralysis or corporate big brother completely controlling everything?
It may be that when the founders of this country talked about “checks and balances” their intent was to slow everything down to a crawl. That’s why we have two houses in Congress, both of which have to approve in order to pass anything (and one of them by a super-majority). And if they do, the president has a veto. And after that the Supreme Court can still throw it out, even years later.
The Republicans may be the Party of No, opposing everything that Obama proposes. But the only reason they get away with it is because we are the Country of No. Maybe, just maybe, that is a good thing.
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Except for the problem of the 50 Little Brothers that are mandating vaginal probe ultrasounds, gutting environmental protections that kept companies from dumping tons of crap into places like Lake Michigan, eliminating collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public employees, cutting funding for schools to give tax breaks to bring exploitative big box jobs that destroy small businesses, pushing religion into public schools and pushing evolution out, etc., etc., etc.
A functioning federal government is the only check on the bad actions of states.
I wasn’t saying gridlock was a good thing. I was just wondering if the alternative could possibly be worse.
Unfortunately, the gridlock we are stuck on is a gridlock with (seemingly) all of the big bad ideas already in place. Corporations are people, our tax system is crazy, the wealth gap is now a wealth canyon, and as Michael points out we have no means of stopping our states from turning into third world theocracies.
In theory, gridlock can be good. It’s much better to be sat in traffic than launching off a cliff. We’re just in the lamentable state of it being too late for gridlock to be better than the alternative because we’re already dealing with that alternative.