On Ash Wednesday, a
formerly prestigious newspaper that's published in New York ran a front-page
story titled "Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds New Fear of a Debt
Crisis." It's unclear why what the
paper calls "gridlock" should contribute to fear of a "debt
crisis" (as if we weren't undergoing such a crisis already), especially
since it might help to prevent Democrats from burdening the country with
spending programs that would balloon the national
debt; the lurid headline, though, exemplifies one of the many annoying
characteristics of leftists, which is that they whine about
"gridlock" whenever things aren't going their way. During Clinton's presidency, even before
public disgust at his incompetence and corruption resulted in the loss of his
party's majority in each house of the US Congress, the Left was condemning
Republicans with this same word; an observer who didn't know how our political
system is intended to operate might have thought that some sort of gentlemen's
agreement bound the opposition not to oppose bills favored by the chief
executive, even if those bills would, should they be enacted into law, have a
detrimental effect on the country. Now,
however, things are even worse; the same blowhards are complaining of
"party gridlock" even when Democrats have majorities of 37 seats
(236-199) in the US House of Representatives and 18 (59-41) in the Senate! What the ruling party seems to not understand
(or, more likely, to understand but to not care about) is that when you hold
that many more seats than the opposition does, and you're still unable to run
the USA in the way that you want without resorting to disingenuous tactics like
budget-wreckin'ciliation, your agenda must be really unpopular.
In a way, the Leftists are right to
say that "the system is broken" (although, as explained above, they
are right for the wrong reason); one of the prime reasons why our government
hardly ever gets anything done is that the president and one or both of the
legislative majorities are so often of mutually antagonistic parties. Nonetheless, lack of change is preferable to
change for the worse. (Or, at least, it usually
is; very often, lamentably, under our system, the only way to discredit a party
in the eyes of the voters is to allow it to discredit itself through
misgovernance, as the Democrats currently are.)
