Very interesting article. The two sides seem to be getting further apart and not closer together. To me, it's a sign of weak leadership in the oval office. Clinton, Bush, JR and now Obama are unable to get Congressmen to work together for acceptable compromise. We need a President who can build a consensus in Congress and not play the partisan politician. Those are hard to find.
to me it's a sign of wanting to get elected by any means necessary and vilifying the other party such that they can't work with them for fear of joining the "evil" that got them elected.
I agree with that point. This started when Bush, Sr was well on his way to reelection and the dems devised a scheme to completely stop government. Bush, Sr handled it poorly and then lost the election. The righties reciprocated, then the left, then the right, then the left... and now it's to the point hardly anyone will work tegether and they spend most their time working against each other. Like watching children fight.
I say we clean both houses out completely. Cancel their insane pensions, make 'em buy real health insurance, and limit them to a maximum of ten years in Congress. Two terms in the House, and one in the Senate.
Doesn't this all coincide with the change in the filibuster rule? Used to be that you actually had to filibuster, to stand up there and talk as long as you could (read the phone book or whatever), but at some point the rules changed so that you didn't have to actually show up to filibuster.
It gets more appealing to me all the time too. If politicians knew they only had a brief span to actually accomplish something, they'd be much more inclined to get things done. Anyway, the inability to reach reasonable compromise is simply a reflection of our increasingly fragmented society. Parties are becoming more partisan as extreme media push them more and more to the extreme. To paraphrase Obama, it's pretty hard to demonize somebody in the other party to get elected one day, and then try to negotiate with them on a major program the next. Once you classify somebody as stupid and/or evil, you've ended discussion. I don't see this as a weakness on any recent president's part. The system is just broken. You could have Reagan or FDR or Abe Lincoln in the office and it wouldn't make a difference.
There's gridlock within the Democratic Party. They had 60 votes in the senate and couldn't pass anything but a bigger debt payment for future generations in exchange for nothing. We've had "do nothing" congresses before, but we've also had congresses without 60 vote majorities that passed plenty. For example, the largest spending bill in history was the so-called stimulus. The 2nd largest? Federal Highway Bill passed in 2005. In any case, they're passing the spending bills and approving massive spending increases and increases on the debt ceiling, so it's not like they're actually doing nothing. A good read: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nati...cit-scary-forecast-taxpayers/story?id=9854459
To be fair, it wasn't exactly 60... Joe Leibermann held his vote hostage for a lot of shit, and there's plenty of blue dog dems in that list of 60, the blue equivalent of RINOs. That the democrats painted their majority as anything other than illusory is entirely their own fault, though.
You defined gridlock nicely. They did play their hand like they had the 60 votes, though, and scored nothing but a massive increase in the debt. I truly prefer gridlock so they don't pass anything that costs us 150% of what it should.
