Worst. Congress. Ever. Americans have complained for years that their government is broken. This time they're right. So what went wrong? Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier. The session's legislative accomplishments occurred because Democrats maintained enough discipline -- and had large enough margins -- to enact their bills with the support of Democrats alone. The health-care bill was able to make it past a Republican filibuster in the Senate because Democrats, for a brief moment, had exactly enough senators to overcome it. Both parties acted as if they were parliamentary parties, indivisible blocs rather than groups of individual actors casting votes for reasons besides partisan loyalty. But in a non-parliamentary system, built on checks and balances and a separation of powers, parliamentary parties simply cannot work. Accomplishments get delegitimized, and some areas like climate change, end up in total gridlock. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articl...ess_ever?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full
Democrat led congress 2006-2010 5 trillion added to the debt millions of jobs lost unemployment skyrockets to 9.5 percent unemployment deficit goes from 300 billion to 1.6 trillion complete collapse in housing misery index soars record number of people on food stamps record number of people on unemployment record number of people on welfare You sure about that?
His reply is off topic. He's displaying the economic results of another gambling bubble that's burst, and the OP is talking about the ability to legislate. There is some relationship there, but they are not the same things.
My reply wasnt off topic at all, he said republican led congress worst ever, i merely was showing him the results of the last democratic led congress for comparison.
You're showing the results of a recession and he's describing legislative gridlock. Two different topics.
Like all of his nonsensical drivel, I could tell who started this thread before I opened it for the first time. Possibly buy a core level civics textbook and read it - FT you sound like a petulent, spoiled child who does not play well with others.
The health care bill is a disaster, so if the Republicans have blocked other Democratic schemes that can only be to the good. Have the Democrats gotten us out of those Middle Eastern wars? No, they have not. So on the only issue where the Democrats are supposed to be better than the Republicans they have failed totally.
From the same article quoted in the OP. >>If you doubt that politics in Congress has become more partisan, consider this: For the first time ever, in the 111th Congress that convened during the first two years of the Obama presidency, the National Journal's vote ratings showed that the most conservative Democratic senator was to the left of the most liberal Republican. There is now no overlap ideologically at all between the parties. Only nine of the remaining small number of conservative House Democrats (now called "Blue Dogs") were to the right of the most liberal House Republican. That Republican, Mike Castle of Delaware, was dumped by his party in a primary as he ran for the Senate and is now out of Congress, as are the bulk of the Blue Dogs. << Despite this, the author of the article somehow draws the conclusion that the republicans are to blame for a dysfunctional government. An alternative expalanation, and one that has the virtue of being aligned with polling results, is that Americans were shocked at how radical obama was, after being assured by the media that he was a unifier and a post-partisan transitional figure. Instead, we got a radical and highly unpopular obamacare program, an obscene union payoff bill called stimulus and myriad efforts to either raise taxes or hamstring business with regulatory burdens. Now w e wake up to an unprecedented debt burden with nothing to show for the expenditure, and a Presdient who demagogues any halting attempts to get a handle on spending. Why is the onus on the republicans to be the one to compromise their principles? We have a huge spending problem and a president who refuse to even consider any actual cuts. Yet somehow it is the republicans' fault for not going along? And with what? Obama has never presented any concrete proposals. Leaders lead. His spending got us to this point, but he wants republicans to pay for it. For republicans that's not compromise, it's surrender.
I cannot think of a clearer reflection that would appear in the structure of government, of our stratified society, than this fact. Edit: in other words, as the citizenry polarizes, so do their representatives. As a commie, I believe the polarization is around economic concerns.