Description: A blog on faith, economics and politics
American democracy is broken. It’s very future is in doubt. I want to discuss two of the major issues that need to be addressed—1) the inability of the national government to produce action at the national level on critical, in some cases existential, issues and 2) the increasing threat, that in contraindication to Lincoln’s memorable phrase that “government of the people, by the people and for the people” shall not perish from the earth, there is evidence that it is perishing before our eyes.
The Failure to Deliver. Gridlock is a feature, not a bug, of American democracy. The framers of the US Constitution purposely designed the American Government to limit the ability of a majority to run roughshod over the rights of the minority. Thus, they designed a federal government that gives a great deal of power to the states (The Tenth Amendment reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or t
As Sarah Binder wrote in 2000, “Gridlock is not a modern legislative invention. Although the term is said to have entered the American political lexicon after the 1980 elections, Alexander Hamilton was complaining more than two centuries ago about the deadlock rooted in the design of the Continental Congress. In many ways, gridlock is endemic to our national politics, the natural consequence of separated institutions sharing and competing for power.”