Educated-but-uninformed Letters to Congress, Part I

I don't follow politics as closely as I used to, and there's a reason for it -- it's excruciatingly exhausting and endlessly frustrating. Thanks to the 24-second news cycle, an explosion of cable news channels that don't actually report news (and CNN's decision to follow suit), the rise of social media that no one quite knows how to utilize, and so on, and so forth, our legislative process has essentially degenerated into a schoolyard game of tag-dodgeball-foursquare, in which there are no one-handers, gobstoppers or fishies, and tagbacks are only allowed on Thursdays unless the ball hits you in the face while chewing on Red Hots, in which case you can give cooties to up to five members of the opposing team. (Yes, Teacher is present to preserve the general integrity of the underlying system, but inasmuch as s/he doesn't understand the rules, she is unable to police the game as it unfolds.)

As an adult who has reached the Age of No Credibility within the past year, it is no longer an effective use of my time to track every drop of sulfur that spews forth from the bottomless fountain of vagaries, platitudes, scandals, and hypocrisies that fill the 3000-bazillahertz of "news" spectrum everyday. Rather, I just try to stay informed on the issues that are going to matter in the long-run -- e.g. energy policy, caring for the environment, fixing Social Security/Medicare, unemployment/job growth (and yes, foreign policy, but it often makes my head hurt if it doesn't put me to sleep) -- and periodically check in on the status of how these issues are being addressed. Or not, as the case has increasingly -- maddeningly -- tended to be of late.

Do I know what it's like to actually work in Washington? Do I know what kind of micro-scale wheeling and dealing, arm-twisting, and general slithering actually needs to happen in order to pass legislation? Do I have any understanding of congressional hierarchy and the arcane procedural rules that govern both bodies? Absolutely not. But I'd like to think that I'm a fairly well-educated, intelligent person, who, not knowing any better about the nuts and bolts of what goes on inside the beltway, could make some helpful suggestions. (I realize that Obama probably felt the same way before we elected him to be eternally suffocated by pollsters and political consultants.)

And so, without further ado, here is the first installment.

Dear Members of Congress:

Please stop screwing around with Roger Clemens. Most baseball fans have long presumed his guilt with regard to the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and could care less whether his self-delusional lies constituted a felony deserving of 18 months imprisonment and a fine that amounts to 0.000011% of our nation's GDP. There are more pressing issues for you to address. Speaking of which (and of our GDP):

It's the economy, stupid.

People are not fundamentally unhappy because we're becoming a socialist state, or paying historically-low taxes, or continuing to take a self-contradictory attitude toward immigrants, or adding marginal amounts to record paper-money deficits that have been with us since the the early aughts. They're unhappy because they don't have a job, because their 401(k)'s (if they were lucky enough to have one) have been cut in half, and because it seems like everyone else is getting bailed out while they're being told to be frugal. Ask yourself: how many people in Middle America do you think would rather block the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero (conveniently disregarding the fact that there are already two within four blocks) than feel secure about their employment situation and financial well-being?

To Republicans, in particular: stop fillibustering everything. Not only is this a ludicrous waste of your own time, but wasn't it you guys who kept clamoring for a simple up-or-down vote on the Bush tax cuts (which, by the way, added $1 trillion to our national debt) and hinted at the "nuclear option" of eliminating the fillibuster itself? Look, it's pretty simple: if you were against the fillibuster then, certainly you must still be against it now (because you established in 2004 that changing your mind on an issue is unacceptable), so naturally you're voting for cloture 100% of the time, right? More generally, if you're so concerned with how egregiously damaging the Democrats' propositions will be to our nation's future, surely you have an intellectually-honest counter-proposal for each measure that you block for our collective safety?

To Democrats, in particular: if you're the party of change, let's see it. Since you've had control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you've:

• Spent several months passing a healthcare-reform bill (which, by the way, was probably priority #4 on many of your constituents' lists) that, in your efforts to compromise with an uncompromising opposition and to ensure that the flow of re-election campaign dollars remained intact, became so watered down that it essentially became a government-mandated handout to the insurance industry (but hey, at least it doesn't kick in until 2014).
  
• Passed a similarly diluted financial "reform" bill, in which many of the regulations that were repealed during the anything-goes 1980s and 90s remain repealed, and under which financial institutions are still free to become too big to fail (and to be bailed out at taxpayer expense), and for-profit stock exchanges and high-frequency trading systems can team up to knock 1,000 points off the Dow in five minutes. Meanwhile, banks are continuing to borrow money from the Fed at near 0% while not loaning it out to consumers and small businesses (which, you know, might, I dunno, stimulate the economy and create jobs?) because it's more profitable for them to invest those funds in treasuries and/or route them to their proprietary trading desks. How was none of this addressed?
  
• Displayed a remarkable tendency to cower in the face of misinformation. If you have a good idea that you truly believe in, you should defend it. If someone puts out a press release saying that bill that cuts taxes for the middle class will raise taxes on 99% of Americans, you should put out a press release correcting that misinformation and calling out / into question its sources and motives. Just because someone is proclaiming the earth is flat louder than you are proclaiming it is round doesn't mean you should back down.

To everyone: You're adults. You're public servants. You're our representatives on the world stage. Act like it.

Sincerely,
The Captain

(Fair readers, please accept my apologies for running out of steam... I had like maybe five or six more points of discussion on my mind, but I'd actually like to have a life this evening.)