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Emergency Team Of 8th-Grade Civics Teachers Dispatched To Washington

WASHINGTON—With lawmakers still at an impasse over increasing the debt ceiling, a special team of 40 eighth-grade civics teachers was air-dropped into Washington earlier today in a last-ditch effort to teach congressional leaders how the government’s legislative process works. “We started them off with the basics, like the difference between a senator and a representative, and then moved on to more complex concepts, like what a resolution is,” Bozeman, MT social studies teacher Heidi Rossmiller told reporters as all 535 members of Congress copied down the definition of “checks and balances” from a whiteboard in the House chamber. “It’s been a bit of an uphill battle, since most of them seemed to have no real sense of how or why a bill is passed, and Sen. [Harry] Reid [D-NV] had to come up to me during a break and ask, ‘Ms. Rossmiller, what happens if Congress can’t reach a compromise?’ But hopefully it will all start to sink in soon.” At press time, an unruly House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) had noisily stormed out of a lecture on bipartisan cooperation, claiming it was “too hard.”

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John F. Kerry

I think this stalemate is actually pretty awesome.

If we didnt gum up the obama workx it they would just keep treating our kids futures like a free cash machine on the white house lawn.

the democrats are the ones running around with their heads cut off wondering how they are gonna get reelected without all sorts of extra money to buy votes... the tea party is like , meh, we dont ask much from the government in the first place, this is no biggie.

...now i know the debt ceiling eventually needs to get raised, but in light of the place both sides are comming from, if you were the gop wouldnt u keep this up? they have far less to lose than obama, and gridlock and stalemate are actually to a certain extent what they wanted...anything to stop the runaway spending thats bankrupting our country.

we may need to amputate a leg to save the patient, better than letting him die slowly from blood loss.

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Nasa under Obama

kamikazi89

send in the nuns so they can paddle some ass

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katie west is the best

Captain Cannabis

someday i would love to visit the planet you live on

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fuck the monkeys

Roach

seriously !

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It's an Onion story man.





Oh and it's not 'anything to stop the runaway spending', it's more like "Anything to stop that smooth talkin' nigger..."

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profit

john f kerry wtf dude. first of all lul that you responded. but now i have to respond to your response. seriously. if you want to amputate your own leg to save banks and corporate CEOS then here is a fucking knife. go at it.



ill watch. record. and youtube the result.

i can tell you have faith that change can still come from the system in place. #wakeup old man. #wakeup.

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Roach

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Roach

always was kind of a knife guy.

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The more I thought about j. and this little blip it kind of got me pondering the fact that even if j. isn't 'real' and has just been master trolling all of us these many years, guys who buy into the rhetoric for real are out there and do strike me as folks who would be just as happy setting the ship on fire and going down with it rather than say 'hey you know what, maybe if we all could look at the bigger picture..."

I mean the one thing no one wants to lose is face, never back down, never surrender and the minute an offer of real compromise is brought to the table the other side shoots it down as a sign of weakness and exploits it to their own needs. How can you let the weak flip-flopper lead you, no conviction to his principals, blah blah fuckin' blah.

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eldizle

it's pretty sad.

Mafoo

its not about reelection its about fixing this giant hole that we are all facing. the republicans are thinking exactly how youre thinking, they dont give a fuck if the country runs into the ground as long as they win the next election.

that runaway spending is stemming from your butt buddy, GWBush

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PLUR
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return

farmergiles

Lol j! Get the coffee on . You been trolled!!

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Cultivate a stoic calmness

Roach

Don't blame Congress for not passing laws. It's designed that way.
By Shankar Vedantam

Stroll around Washington, D.C., this summer, and you will see hordes of tourists thronging the national Mall. Parents ask their kids, "What's the role of Congress?" And the teenagers respond, "The purpose of Congress is to pass laws."

Most people who hear that nowadays feel an urge to laugh. Sure, that's the purpose of Congress, but that isn't what Congress actually does. Congress in theory is decisive, but Congress in practice is dysfunctional. If Congress were a student and its handling of the debt-ceiling crisis were an exam, it would get an F, if not expulsion or a referral to the juvenile justice system.

But what if the civics-textbook definition of Congress is wrong? What if Congress is working precisely as designed?

Suppose the purpose of Congress is not to pass laws but to stymie the passage of laws. To be precise, what if the purpose of Congress is to provide us with maximum theater while delivering the least number of new laws? In this alternate universe, we should expect a congressional landscape littered with good initiatives that have gone nowhere. Check. We should expect to see ideologues on both sides deeply disappointed that after all the time and effort they spend campaigning and winning elections, so little of what they want actually happens. Check. We'd expect that the issues on which Congress is decisive are mostly empty and symbolic. Check again.

If the conventional definition of Congress is correct, the only way to explain why Congress accomplishes so little is to assert—as articles, pundits and analyses have done—that the men and women who happen to be in Congress today are particularly incompetent, unpatriotic, and self-serving.

This is the hidden brain at work. Our minds link actions with intentions. When we see dysfunction and inaction, we ascribe them to intentional dysfunction and inaction, rather than to structural factors designed to produce inaction.

The idea that Congress is dysfunctional by design is neither original nor new. Political scientists have made this argument for years, but we have ignored it, perhaps because it interferes with our enjoyment of the theater of Congress. If one were to announce, before the play begins, that precisely nothing will happen by the time the curtain drops, it's hard to get the audience engaged.

Here's why Congress is ineffectual by design.

First, most congressional seats are safe seats. Every decade, the two major parties take turns making those seats even safer through gerrymandering. The Republicans, who won big in 2010, now control the lion's share of state legislatures and governorships. They plan to make safe conservative seats safer and swing seats safely conservative. The net result is that in much of the country, the outcomes of general elections are largely decided in primaries. Whoever wins the Republican primary in a safe Republican district wins the general election. Same goes for safely Democratic seats. The voters who really matter are those who vote in primaries—and the most reliable primary voters are hard-liners.

When it comes time to pass legislation, the hard-line politicians these hard-line voters elect can usually undermine moderates in their own parties, making centrist coalitions unstable. When Americans look at congressional dysfunction with disbelief, they are assuming that members of Congress share their moderate political views. They don't. Members of Congress aren't answerable to all their constituents. They are answerable to hard-liners in their party primaries, and these hardliners see any attempt to compromise as "caving in." Stanford University political scientist David Brady, who runs a fellowship program I've attended, once found that the more members of Congress vote with their parties, the less likely they are to be re-elected.

Second, there's the Senate. Nearly half the Senate represents states whose populations together add up to less than the population of California. One half of Congress, in other words, is designed not as a democracy of the people, but a democracy of the states. If 88 percent of the country wants something to happen but the 42 senators who represent the other 12 percent of the country don't want it to happen, it doesn't happen. This has nothing to do with the integrity or competence of members of Congress. It's how Congress is designed.

Third, neither party stands for the same issues in all 50 states. It is wildly impractical to expect that country club Republicans in Connecticut will see eye-to-eye with evangelical Republicans in Texas on many issues. Republicans from the 50 states might be members of the same party, but apart from a common name and a handful of issues, many don't share much in common. Expecting Republican or Democratic unity on major issues is like expecting cats to march to the same drummer. Internally divided parties can't ram initiatives into law.

Finally, unlike in countries where major parties raise money en masse and distribute campaign funds to candidates nationwide, most members of Congress raise their own funds. As a result, they aren't beholden to their parties in the way legislators in the United Kingdom are, for example. Even if the national Republican or Democratic party had a unified agenda, it's impossible to impose such agendas on individual members. The parties have limited leverage in getting members of Congress to vote one way or another. Weak, fractured parties, whose members arrive in Congress with their own teams, their own campaign contributors, and their own agendas, have trouble passing laws.

Going back to FDR and even before, presidents have railed against "do-nothing congresses." The astonishing thing is how effective the argument has been for presidents, given that Congress is designed to be dysfunctional.

What we criticize as dysfunction or ineptitude is really an institution designed with a profoundly conservative vision—that's conservative with a small C. Congress is designed to stymie change. You can see this as good or bad, but that's not the point. The point is that it's silly to build a supertanker and then criticize the sailors because the ship doesn't maneuver like a speedboat.


politics 101

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