Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Patience and deliberation

Progressives and Obstructionists? Isn’t that pretty close to how the argument is framed? Liberals in politics often don’t seem to like being labeled as liberals – they prefer the term “progressives”. And of course, whenever they are balked in Congress their opposition are termed obstructionists. In recent years the Republican party has been called the party of “No”. We hear about gridlock in Congress and calls to “get something done”. We hear that Congress “has to get a bill passed”.

But, do we ever really hear why? I seldom do, except when the word is used in a childish, whiney way. In fact this whole notion of urgency to get bills passed and progress vs. obstruction seems to me to be pretty childish. It’s as if politicians are nothing more than children experiencing a sugar rush while it’s raining outside. They’ve got to get up and “do something” – patience and deliberation are beyond them.

A few years ago – Have I really been blogging that long? Well, even if you skip the periods of extremely light blogging I guess I have. Anyway, a few years ago there was a question about the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007… was it amnesty or not. I decided that I couldn’t really answer the question until I had read the bill. That bill was huge for the time – close to 1,5oo printed pages. I read it overnight, but then it took me a couple of weeks to fully grasp and understand it all.

What made it even worse was that you couldn’t read it by itself. The way bills are written these days they’re whole passages of “this section of that law over there is amended to read as follows, by striking the first paragraph and adding the next two then by adding the word all in place of the word none in the fourth paragraph second sentence.” When it amounts to thousands of pages of that sort of thing it can take weeks or even months to read and fully digest what a bill being moved through Congress actually will do. Some recent bills blew that one away for length and complexity, going well over 2,000 pages of nearly incomprehensible legalese.

And of course, our Congress doesn’t have time to read them. Patience and deliberation are beyond them. That’s why we get statements like Nancy Pelosi’s famous “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Sure, she added “away from the fog of the controversy” at the end of that but I think the point is made. And even with the added phrase “away from the fog of the controversy” she was lying. All it really takes is reading the bill – and access to the text of the other bills referenced – and time, patience and deliberation.

If a congressman doesn’t have time to read and understand a bill up for debate or a vote, then what business does he have voting for it? After all, if you are given a mortgage contract and don’t bother reading it before signing it you’re still bound by the terms of the contract aren’t you? Oh wait, never mind. You and the thousands (or is it millions) of other people that find your mortgage under-water when interest rates go up and housing values fall can just blame those evil, greedy banks for your misfortune and failure to live up to your own obligations and responsibilities. Whine loudly enough and you might even get a bail-out from a future congress… I guess it’s not important to read things before you sign them – or vote for them. But that’s another story, and a side-trip as well.

If a congressman doesn’t have time to read and understand a bill up for debate or a vote, then I have to ask – who had the time to understand and write it in the first place? It’s a fair bet that it wasn’t a congressman. More likely it was a group of congressional staff members. That’s right – unelected administrative assistants are probably the ones actually writing these monstrosities.

So, if our congressmen can’t take the time to read and understand the bills they vote on, if it’s even unlikely that they wrote them themselves, what exactly do they do? It isn’t legislating. It isn’t debate, that’s just the currently label we stick on the gotcha sessions that the media presents to us. It isn’t even deliberation. No, I’d say it’s merely political grandstanding and that it doesn’t matter if the politician doing the grandstanding is a Republican or a Democrat, only that they’re the incumbent and need to preserve that prestige at all costs.

Why else is it that when the majority of the nation responds to polls saying that our federal government is headed in the wrong direction Congress ignores it. What are they making progress toward? If we’re pointed in the wrong direction, moving forward isn’t necessarily a good idea.

So what happens to a freshman congressman? They go to Washington with high sounding ideals – often with the mandate to turn things around. Altogether too often they become part of the relentless march toward progress – whatever that is. A congressman that looks to what is constitutional and right is almost always ineffective. And ineffective congressmen don’t get re-elected.

This is what bothers me about the status quo. I hate what our government has become, although it’s still far superior to other governments. We’re advised by many that the only way to fix it is to work within the system and try to steer it back toward the course originally set by our founders – to steer it ever in the direction of more liberty. The problem is we’re told it will take years, even decades to turn the course of the juggernaut. We’ve been told that for decades already and I don’t see any indications that it’s working.

Progressive or Obstructionist? With the way things are going, I’ll take obstructionist. But I’d really prefer to see someone at the wheel with the intelligence, foresight, will and determination to change the course altogether. But I’m afraid I’m just old enough to think that it’ll never come to that.

The grand experiment in liberty has been a failure. More’s the pity for future generations of Americans.