Surviving in Congress

Sadly, surviving to get reelected in Congress means you do nothing. If you successfully get a bill passed, you have alienated half of the electorate who didn’t care for it. Get two bills passed and you alienate a different 50 percent. From that point you will not get reelected. Sit on the fencepost and do nothing, everyone is happy.

The big thing you need to realize is the issues the voters want fixed are a great item to run on at election time. Get elected and forget about them and dig them up to run on next election. That is probably why Congress is in such a tizzy over Trump. He treats his political platform as a “Bucket List” of things to accomplish.

The odd thing about President Trump is that he is a Democrat. The Republicans know he is not one of them and the Democrats kind of recognize that he represents the party they once pretended to be. He is a true businessman and his first question on most things is “How much will it cost.” Most people in government don’t care about costs, “It’s not their money.”

Right now, there is a tremendous amount of political fervor in the country. Alex de Tocqueville toured this country in the 1850’s (170 years ago) and notice some shortcomings in the US. Here are a few quotes from “Democracy in America.”

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

In other words, a democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

The real problem that Congress fails to address is the National Debt. It is too big to ever pay off. The common man will never understand the implications of that. As a child, you understood the concept, when you came home from school, and the refrigerator was empty and you were hungry.

Congress can perpetuate their reelection by doing nothing, they did the impossible when they printed us out of the latest “Great Depression.” This allows both political parties to blame each other for the current mess and the voter is none the wiser.

Congress is seriously entertaining the Ocasio-Cortez ideas on cow farts and radical socialism which boggles my mind. The thing that bothers me, is that most in Congress must think that “Bovine Flatulence” is some sort of carbonated health drink. The new Left’s credo, “Save a tree and kill a cow.” Of course I have always maintained that there is way too much lead in the drinking water in Washington DC.