Building a Road Map

The President of the United States cannot really make any laws. Executive Orders are pretty limited in scope and use. Therefore, the President must challenge Congress and the people by being the "big picture" guy and leave the details to those who can write laws.

In last night's State of the Union address, the President laid out what I thought were generally fairly bipartisan challenges and asked Congress to get busy writing the laws that would do what he recommended so that he could sign them into law. During a surprising number of those challenges and "big picture" blueprints, both Republicans and Democrats cheered, stood up, and/or clapped. Yet, when it came time for the Republican responses to the President's address, they pretty much toed the same line they have been for the last 18 months: we are not going to do anything to help this President get reelected.

The problem with this philosophy is that they also are not helping the people they are supposed to serve. Independent polls consistently show approval ratings of Congress at single to very small double digits; otherwise known as the worst in history. Independent polls also show that people want a lot of what the President proposed during his address. The only quibble among the people is on how it gets done, not what needs to be done. Yet the Republicans don't seem to care about this; their agenda is simply to block the President, make him look weak and ineffectual, and to get him out of office.

I used to proudly be a member of the Republican party and voted party often. Bush 2 ("W") changed all that. His politics, in my opinion, were so biased, were so based on helping the few and damning the many, and, in some very specific instances, so illegal and unconstitutional, that I changed my political stance to Refuse to State. Bush was warned about the housing bubble and chose to do nothing. He was warned about Wall Street and chose to remove even more regulations instead of policing the situation. He had a clear objective to go after terrorists and then, by all evidence both at the time and now, manufactured a reason to go into Iraq and get us into a war we couldn't really afford and for which we had no clear plan, strategy, or exit.

I didn't join the Democrat party because I didn't see much better from them. They blindly voted with W for war, without doing their due-diligence or questioning it. They ignored or passed many of the bills that helped W loosen regulations and damage the economy long-term. When I felt W had gone so far as to be provably doing things illegal, I even contact each representative and asked them to start Impeachment proceedings. My reasoning was that the Repubs impeached Clinton for lying, but not really breaking the law. Bush actually broke the law, in my estimation, with his unconstitutional practices toward Muslims in America and detainees everywhere, and he lied to get us into a war, Impeachment proceedings should have started immediately, as this, and the end result of thousands of Americans dead and many more Iraqis killed was much worse than Clinton lying about an affair with an intern. Yet they all wrote back with very weak excuses as to why they didn't feel impeachment was the right choice for that time. Hunh?

America needs help right now. Party politics are at an all-time low, infighting, backstabbing, and rhetoric are at an all-time high. The President consistently has asked for bipartisan cooperation in Congress and he consistently hasn't received it. We, the people, need to start demanding it of our representatives and kick them out of office when they don't perform up to those expectations. We need to be emailing, mailing, phoning, telegraming our representatives with our opinions. I strongly believe that the vast, quiet majority of people can come to a compromise that works for them, regardless of party politics, and get things moving. We just have to push, prod, pull, browbeat, and force our representatives to work toward that same goal.

Americans seem to be in a feedback loop where all they watch, hear, or read are items that share and reinforce their existing opinions. They don't seem to be seeking out antithetical opinions or challenging their thought processes. They don't seem to be questioning their leaders, regardless of party affiliation, and insisting on accountability. We all need to step up and start doing this and make our voices heard. The politicians will come into line or get kicked out of office.