Why couldn't the U.S. House, on the budget issue this past summer...

glennmagusharvey

...just generally say "fuck you" to the tea-party folks who wanted to shut down government, and then form a coalition of most Democrats and some moderate Republicans, enough to get to 218 votes (or however many they needed, maybe 217 due to Giffords's absence), and passed a realistic, reasonable budget?

Edit: Oh, right, some people are afraid of not getting re-elected.

I think everyone needs to be taught a good lesson that legislators are supposed to GOVERN, rather than use their office to brandish their political agendas/ideologies/cred/etc..

glennmagusharvey

In other words, the only question is how much they are to blame themselves for short-sighted selfishness, and how much blame ought to be assigned to the fact that they operate in an social environment that encourages such short-sighted selfishness because it also helps their team but not the broader society as a whole.

Considering how great of an emphasis conservatives frequently put on personal responsibility, I guess we can just heap the blame on the Republicans in question themselves.

FrodoGoofballCoTV

The U.S. was designed to be a social experiment of sorts, and I sometimes wish we'd be more willing to replace compromises intended to win votes with compromises designed to test political ideas.  Of course anyone who supported that could never get elected.

A phenomena that I find interesting is that "farther" (which is less far than "far" but farther from center than "moderate") left and right politicians usually are elected in safe districts, so ironically it's usually moderates whose political careers are cut short by angry voters on the other side.  But because we have primaries, moderates are more politically motivated to compromise with the "farthers" on their side than moderates on the other side.

Gelzo

At this point I've ceased to be surprised at any form of lack of productivity in Congress. I'm simply happy when there's anything at all positive.

The system is tremendously flawed, yes, but all I can do is vote. There's already enough people complaining.