[BWStearns]

Every time I hear someone defend the recent state of affairs by bringing up the gridlock being a feature and not a bug, I feel like someone who owns a delivery truck that won't go more than 10 mph. I go to the dealer and ask what the fuck, and the dealer says that there's a speed governor on the truck that won't let it surpass 80mph and the governor is just working better than usual.

[justin_vanw]

That is a clever analogy.

I think we are fine though, we are safer than ever before. We don't need to extend government snooping power, because there is no need to do so. If someone disagrees, that is fine, but that is why we have a speed governor.

People have always complained about decisions being made too slowly, but they have never been made faster, if anything they are made more quickly now than ever before. Congress used to only meet a few times a year for a few weeks!

[BWStearns]

When they only met a few times for a few weeks they were passing laws that were readable in whole by individuals during those sessions. The scope of their responsibilities has increased and I expect them to apply a correspondingly high degree of effort.

I want the legislature to be passing laws rolling back the security state, I want them to cancel or rework programs that don't work across the board. They can't do those things if they spend all their time in some arcane ritual circle jerk whose only and ultimate goal is just to make some of the other participants ultimately look more ridiculous than other participants.

We've normalized and accepted parliamentarian bullshit at the expense of governing (on both sides, but the republicans are the undisputed masters of the dark arts) for a couple decades now. Legislative lethargy (sorry, had to) is supposed to derive from lengthy debate and substantive disagreement, not from participants purposely tanking the process to score points in the cheap seats. Part of the reason that they got shit done in a couple of weeks in ye-olden-congress is that it was closer to a turn based game, news traveled slower and so the results of the whole session were what constituted news, not every little BS stunt.

The frustrated and vindictive part of me hopes that not a single senator or congressman pays a price for their cynical abandonment of their duty to govern. That way, next term we see months long shutdowns of the whole federal government and a collapse of federal services until [Bernie|Hillary] signs a budget that reallocates all non-entitlement social spending to some insane shit that polled well among likely voters suffering from bathtub-gin induced brain damage. The revolting (both senses) congressmen won't actually care about getting the spending reallocated, but them "standing up to" [Bernie|Hillary] will play well with their group so so be it.

Edit: to clarify the frustrated and vindictive part would be rooting for it in the sense that the worst part about democracy is that people get the government they deserve, and at the moment it doesn't seem like the process thinks we deserve much.

[justin_vanw]

Again, you seem to think we are getting 'worse' government, but we have the best government we have ever had. Just because you can see it close up (in a historical sense), you are aware of it's warts. But I assure you, the governments of the past had all the problems we have today, and many, many, many more. If you were to get in a time machine and go back even 50 years, you would be shocked at how corrupt the government was then compared to now.

Stop with your short sighted, historically ignorant whining already.