Bunning Man

What is the difference between an arsonist and Sen. Jim Bunning?

Most arsonists never pitched in major league baseball.

The last 3 years have been a primer on how broken the system is in Washington. The Dems took over Congress in 2006 promising an end to Iraq and accountability and promptly after winning, proclaimed that that impeachment was off the table. We soon watched as many more things, including taking any steps to end the Iraq War were off the table.

Thankfully, Pres. Obama was elected to end the Iraq War and has taken action to do so.

Still, as the Stimulus battle and the ugly process for HCR has reinforced, our government simply sucks when it comes to getting anything meaningful done in a timely way.

The fact that one sociopathic Senator can kill Medicare expansion as a public option or stall hundreds of presidential appointees and judges from working for our nation or  suspend salaries and unemployment compensation for millions of people, just screams out that our system of government has become terminally corrupt.

In a democracy, how is it that one person’s non-vote has more power than 99 people’s vote? How is that representative democracy?

It needs surgery.

The Founders’ structure for our democracy was based on reasonable assumptions. They assumed that people would naturally proceed in good will, whether they agree or disagree on issues. The Founders assumed that the system they were setting up would be a constructive dynamic, that each branch would work actively to move the nation forward but through checks and balances, prevent any one from becoming too powerful or going overboard.

Let’s be honest, it’s just not working anymore. The Presidency has become supremely powerful over Congress, against The Founders’ design. The Senate has become a tar pit. All the rules put in place to protect civility and responsibility have been corrupted into becoming weapons of mass disruption.

The filibuster was put in place as an emergency cord, to be pulled when legislation might head the nation into disaster. The GOP has destroyed this intent, they are on the train pulling the emergency cord whenever the train just tries to leave the station…making it nearly impossible to get anywhere.

Our government is corrupt and broken. A majority of Americans have come to or are coming to this conclusion.

What we really need is a new Constitutional Convention to reform our democracy into one that can function properly in the 21st Century. However, doing so in the 21st Century when corporations control politicians and legislation would likely be disastrous.

It’s a conundrum. The system is corrupt but the status quo wants nothing to change and controls all the levers that would need to be used to create profound change.

Add to that, any move to do something as radical as reconstitute the The Senate would be attacked by the Status Quo as if it was terrorism.

It still doesn’t change the fact that having two Senators from each state has become a failure of democracy. It is easy for corporations to buy Senators in low population states and doing so gives them a cheap and easy route to blocking ANY legislation they don’t like.

Additionally, how democratic is it for a small portion of the population of the U.S. to have as much representation as the vast majority?

If I had a magic genie who could grant my wish, I would like to see the makeup of The Senate changed so that it has some of the genuine representative democracy of The House.

My revision of The Senate would be:

a. One Senator minimum from each state with the remaining 50 distributed based on population of a state.

b. Either the removal of the filibuster or restrictions that limit how often it can be used.

c. For The Senate, House and Presidency, public funding of elections, no accepting of any lobbyist gifts, vacations or anything else.

d. A 10 year ban on being able to lobby the government once leaving office.

d. The ability for the people of all states to impeach their Senators and Congresspeople for cause (limitations to prevent corporations or ideologues from using this unfairly).

And overall, The Congress needs a therapist to resolve its feelings of inferiority so it can take power back from the Executive Branch and truly act like a responsible and equal branch of government again. This is not aimed at Obama, it is looking ahead to the day when  a Republican will be president again and recognizing that the concentration of power in the presidency, as evidenced by Bush’s destructive and anti-democratic reign, is a danger to our nation.

Meanwhile, Bunning has again today blocked passage of this bill and many Americans, who can’t get a job that doesn’t exist in our economy right now, won’t receive unemployment checks. Neither will tens of thousands of federal employees and all the people across the nation working on infrastructure projects this bill continues funding on, receive paychecks this week. Some of these people, now not able to pay for groceries or rent…all because of this one insane political arsonist.

This corruption of democracy needs to be extinguished.

Only you can prevent Jim Bunning.