By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It’s always tempting to write a year-end wrap-up as we near the last days on the calendar. We used to see them everywhere, the-ten-best this and that, the-ten-worst. I used to put them out each year on Political Waves as “the lists,” short articles that have the appeal of a bumper sticker, offering a brief but concise explanation of cultural and political complexity. I appreciate these, collector of sociopolitical puzzle pieces that I am, but this year I’ve seen fewer of them. Perhaps everyone’s too worried about the impending plummet off the fiscal cliff to concentrate on such a review, or perhaps they — like me — find this year too perplexing and complex to break down into a tidy smattering of sound bites.
Oh, there are several ‘firsts’ to be noted, not that they’re anything to which we might point with pride. The 112th Congress, for instance, has surpassed the previous record held by the (1947-48) 80th Congress — one then-President Harry Truman dubbed the Do-Nothing Congress — in giving the nation a two-year hiatus from substantive, and necessary, lawmaking. That prior congress, by the way, passed almost THREE TIMES the number of bills produced by this legislative body, if that’s what we wish to call them, given their record of obstruction. We’ve endured more than 100 Republican filibusters this year alone.
I plan to write a letter to the editor at our tiny county paper “thanking” our Bagger House representative for ignoring the needs of the people and refusing to engage them in conversation locally, while laughing all the way to the bank with her whopping $174,000 salary for doing next to nothing. (I doubt it will be published, since that would be considered the local equivalent of spitting into the wind.) Her recent re-election is the product of the rural religious vote and a newly-gerrymandered district, although I’m seriously confused as to why she and her Bagger comrades are considered such a prize to the natives.