In the heat of the political debates it seems everyone has forgotten that it is the legislative branch that is broken — not the executive branch. It is impossible for any president from either party to accomplish much when Congressional leaders announce on Election Day that their No. 1 priority is to prevent the president from being re-elected or from doing anything he was elected to do. That is the recipe for the disaster we have seen in our national government.
Why don’t any of the talking heads point this out?
Congressional elections will have a much greater impact on our future than either candidate because neither candidate will be allowed to implement proposed plans as long as Congress refuses to compromise on important issues. The House may maintain its majority but unless one party obtains 61 seats in the Senate nothing will happen to break the almost decade-old inability to actually move our country ahead in any direction.
If Congress had been doing its job over the last eight years, we would be in a very different place. Instead we have elected too many gerrymander-protected ideologues who don’t understand they were elected to govern — not to prevent governing. Governing by definition requires compromise — yet few of our senators and representatives understand that simple fact.
Washington won’t get fixed until we choose leaders who want to govern.
While everybody talks about 70 percent of the electorate being unhappy with the direction of the country, nobody mentions that it is the ineffectiveness of Congress that is at fault. Under our Constitution, presidents are very limited in what they can accomplish when Congress isn’t capable of doing anything at all.
Neither Clinton or Trump will be able to fix the mess in D.C. unless and until Congress starts doing the job they were elected to do.
I’m not holding my breath.
Jim Scott
Snohomish
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