Did the Tea Party really shut down the government?
With the last federal shutdown behind us and the
possibility of another one looming in the months to come, there is a lot of misunderstanding
and blame-shifting going on. I hope to clear up the smoke and mirrors both parties, and the media throw up. Please understand there is a
big difference between political theory and political reality (most of the
time).
I’m going to save us all time and myself some embarrassment
by leaving out, for the most part, political reality. I’m not going to get into political reality because it is rarely taught in college or high school, and most people who are involved with politics or follow it closely are truly clueless about how things work. Let’s not pretend we are
an informed public; instead, let’s ensure we all are on the same page with
how things are supposed to work.
In theory, how our government was designed to function “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is much better understood than how it works. The reality is that rarely does our government function in
the way I am about to describe, but from time to time, it does function to at
least some degree in the following fashion, now being one of those rare cases.
The government was shut down! Whose fault was it? Was it
those darn Republican right-wing Tea Party extremists who demanded their way? “How
can a minority of a minority be driving the Countries policy, threatening to,
and following through with the shutdown of the government? Don’t they
understand that they have lost, the people have spoken, the courts have spoken,
Obama was re-elected and the Affordable healthcare was held up as
constitutional and passed into law?” Or is it those left-wing non, compromising
socialists? Who is to blame for the parks being closed etc.?
At the time of the Constitutional Convention, there was much
debate over the federal government's powers. In the end, we ended up with
three branches and two separate houses in Congress. For the sake of time, let's skip the President, the Supreme Court, and even the Senate and focus only on
the House of Representatives.
The average American knows less than the reporters
and pundits that pontificate upon such matters. While it is possible, and even
likely the case with some, that the media talking heads know more about the
process than they lead on, they all still engage in semantics and the game of
blame-shifting and hybrid arguments of political reality crossed with political
theory shrouded in a mist of misconnections and misunderstandings.
While it is true that much of what happened was a theatrical
game of chicken, all strategy and games aside, the Country elected several
representatives who ran on a platform to reduce spending and stop The
Affordable Healthcare Act. By voting to authorize all of the government, except for funding the ACA, some might argue that these Tea Partiers were falling short. The fact is that the Republicans tried to
keep the government open, but the Democrats refused o even consider the
compromises passed by House Republicans to keep the government open; it cannot
be argued that they did not pass legislation that would have kept the
government open.
Some might argue that the people re-elected Obama, but that
does not necessarily mean the people approve of him; more likely, they preferred
him to Romney. In any event, this is all irrelevant, it was the House’s job to
pass a funding bill, and several of them did. The Senate did not approve
any of them without amending them and sending them back to the House; in fact, the president promised to veto any bill that funded the government that did not
have what he wanted in it.
We can go back and forth; the bottom line is that this is how the government is meant to run. If I elect someone
to represent me, I expect them to vote and act as they campaigned. I have never
voted for someone to go and compromise on going in the wrong direction. A good
compromise if I want to go right and you want to go left is to go nowhere. Many
people wanted less spending, not a decrease in the proposed increase. Every compromise is a compromise to increase the size of the government.
Who Shut Down the
Government?
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