U.S. House should mature

Let’s begin with a small story.

There are two kids playing around the house too much and end up breaking their mother’s vase. Both kids are responsible for the accident because they were horsing around, but now when mom finds out, they want to blame each other. But the problem is the vase is still broken, no matter who is to blame.

Does this situation sound a little familiar to anyone?

Washington seems to be basically doing the same thing. We have a broken economy, health care system, education system and many other problems that need to be addressed. But the people in Washington don’t focus on that part, they just focus on who’s to blame for the problems in the first place. As if that gets us anywhere.

When the House Republicans had a question-and-answer session with President Barack Obama last week, both sides said that it was constructive dialogue, but who really believes that any of that will come out to real substance and solutions? Within hours of it ending, the bickering fired up again and it was business as usual. Hopefully no one is holding his or her breath on something like that ever happening again. Right after the session ended, there were GOP aids and officials quoted as saying that bringing in a camera like that was a “mistake” because Obama was able to refute every single GOP talking point for over an hour to millions of people.

Yes, it sounds nice to say that all branches of the government want to work on a bipartisan basis but the reality is, this is Washington. It’s not public policy that dominates Washington, it’s politics. It’s politics first, with public policy coming in second, depending on whether it is an election year. The sad thing about this is that many times, if a Republican or Democrat does happen to try to genuinely work across the aisle, most likely they’ll get a challenger from their party accusing them of not being pure enough.

So apparently the solution is, seal yourself up within your party box, and then yell at each other for being partisan. Yes, politics is politics, but it is possible to have a healthy debate and also get things done. In the health care talks last year, everyone said that there was agreement on about 85 percent of what was in the bill. Maybe it’s a little naive of me, but if you agree on 85 percent of these things, why don’t you pass that 85 percent and work out the other stuff later? But, I guess during election season, doing things like that leaves you with no talking points because you both passed the policy together.

There are some people who work across the aisle and there should be more. Maybe the voting booth in November will be the first step toward making that happen.

Posted by Ian Bridgeforth on Feb 5 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry