Response to president’s address came from poster children for term limits

The Democratic response by the Speaker of the House and the Senate minority leader to the President’s Oval Office speech on the border crisis was delivered by the poster children for term limits. 

One has represented her political party on Capitol Hill since 1987, 31 years; the other since 1981, 37 years. The response advocated a defense of business as usual in congress with a “bipartisan” continuing resolution, no substantive recommendations to end the crisis and a plethora of personal attacks. 

The only answer offered by these poster children was to “reopen” government “…while allowing debate over the border security to continue.” A debate ignored by the party nobility because it would interfere with their Christmas vacations at expensive resorts and weekends with the lobbyists. A debate ignored while congress took their traditional August recess to campaign and lobby for financial contributions to their employer, the party. A debate ignored by the professional politicians for decades, with a tragedy resulting in human trafficking of women and children, narcotic infestations, economic decay and domestic fatalities.{mosads}

Blinded by decades of conditioning from Washington D.C. and fanatical devotion to their political parties, solutions to issues are not part of their vernacular. This is all they know, vote for another “continuing resolution.” The proverbial political speak, “bipartisan” inaction of kicking the can down the road; “bipartisan,” a fabrication of the political parties absolving responsibility or accountability for a “bipartisan” action jointly supported by both political parties.

Over the last 40 years, the “bipartisan” members of Congress, with their continuing resolutions, persist in their negligence in addressing their first duty delineated in the Constitution by failing 90 percent of the time to produce a budget by the established deadline. If your local fire showed up late to the blaze on 90 percent of calls, if your doctors rescheduled 90 percent of their operations, if your car failed to start on the first turn of the key 90 percent of the time, wouldn’t you hold someone accountable? Eventually? So why do we not only accept but support this congressional dereliction of duty?

George Washington warned us about political parties in his farewell address: “They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party … to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction…”

When did the fanatical devotion to the party fulfill the terrifying “1984” Orwellian prophecy “…they adored the party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State… Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Madison put it simply in the Federalist Papers as “…the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties.”

The result is even seen in the separation of powers, between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, a fundamental principle of the United States Constitution, which has been usurped by the orchestrated struggle for party supremacy and party conformity across the three branches of government.{mossecondads}

Each of these statements in and of themselves is disturbing but taken together they outline a calculated control of the many by a few in the political party to impose their will on the masses and make the masses support the few. When did the transition occur that the demand for party allegiance required deserting their congressional oath of office under the constitution?

Is this not what George Washington predicted over two hundred years ago about the effects on the government by the interest of political parties over the interests of the people?

The “Democratic Response” was an unintentional censure of the professional politicians that have commandeered the government for the good of their political parties to the detriment of their constituents. These two professional politicians looked like the poster children for the reprehensible mutation of a government of the party, by the party and for the party.

Control of the government needs to be returned to all the people, not just a few anointed party aristocrats.

It is time for us to rid our government, yours and mine, of the professional politician by means of term limits and return to a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

John M. DeMaggio is a retired Special Agent in Charge for the U.S. Postal Service Inspector General. He is also a retired Captain in the U.S. Navy, where he served in Naval Intelligence. The above is the opinion of the author and is not meant to reflect the opinion of the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Government.