Dysfunctional Government
On November 20, 2014, President Obama issued an historic executive order intended to provide relief to thousands of families who are struggling with our broken immigration system. Many Republican critics are declaring that the president’s executive order is unconstitutional and that they are going to do everything they can to counter this action when the new Congress convenes next year. For his part, President Obama (backed by many Democratic supporters) says that he was forced to take action when the House Republicans refused to pass last year’s Senate Immigration Reform bill. The Republicans claim that they would have created an immigration reform bill, if only the president had not attempted to illegally change the immigration laws in this way. Both parties are making a lot of noise and doing their best to make it look like they are being prevented from doing anything productive by the other party.
However, it should be clear to any reasonable observer that neither the President nor the Congressional Republicans actually care about solving this problem. If the Republicans cared, they would not have childishly refused to vote on the bipartisan Senate immigration reform bill. If President Obama actually cared about helping the people who are being hurt by our broken immigration system, he would not be trying to ram through reform by executive order, when the Republicans have declared that him doing so means they will not allow any meaningful immigration bill to make it through Congress. And, of course, the Republicans would not be responding in that way if they were able to think and behave like adults.
The American government is fundamentally and shamefully dysfunctional. It seems that there is nobody in any level of the government who is making a good faith effort to actually govern or solve America’s problems. This current debate and anger over the immigration issue is just the latest version of the same argument that plays out over and over again. All the parties accuse each other of intentionally blocking progress and use this as an excuse to avoid making any real change. The only time the attorneys and career politicians in Washington can be counted on to get anything done is when they are making laws that directly benefit themselves and their friends on Wall Street.
We’ve seen this over and over again in recent years, with the debate over Obamacare, the government shut down, and the dozens of tiny crises that happen every day in Washington. The politicians use these issues as a way to insult their opponents and to look good on the evening news. Not one of them is concerned with what is best for America; they are only concerned with manipulating the public opinion so that they can be re-elected and keep making money for their Wall Street friends.
We cannot continue in this way. America is the greatest country on Earth, and what has made us great is the serious and dedicated work of generations of great American leaders who were committed to serving the public interest. Today’s politicians in Washington are a pale shadow of the great Americans who once ran this country. We need a radical change from the status quo that has allowed the charlatans and parasites to flourish at the expense of our country’s well-being. A vote for either a Democratic or a Republican candidate is a vote for the same kind of dysfunctional government and wasted resources that have characterized the last decades of our history. If you want change, if you want a government that will actually work to fix America’s problems, I urge you to cast your write-in vote for me, Art Drew, in the 2016 Presidential Election.