Our Leaders

Politics has invaded my mind and it seems to be all that I can think about these days. To be honest though, I can not wait until election day when all of this will finally be over. However, I have lately been thinking about our lovely 3 branch government and I think that too much emphasis is put on the presidency and not enough on the house and the senate. My rationalization of this is that while the president does have a fair amount of power, i.e. meeting with foreign heads of state, negotiating and signing treaties (with the permission of congress), the appointment of supreme court justices and commander-in-chief of the armed forces to name a few of the major ones, he is not the one who drafts legislation. With legislation being fairly powerful, it is my position that who our 535 members of congress should be infinitely more important than who our president is. Legislators decide how what when where and why our tax dollars are being spent, what laws get enacted, appropriations bills, voting on whether or not to impeach the president, whether to go to war or not, and what treaties to sign with what nations. Granted the president can override the majority of these with a veto, but if there is a "veto proof" margin, any bill that would be vetoed by the president could still get passed. I really think that it is quite ironic that the presidency is given so much attention when in actuality it seems that congress has quite a bit more power.

Speaking of congress, I find it really ironic that the GOP (grand old party? wtf?) feels the need to call this congress the "do-nothing" congress. If you look at the numbers, there are 49 Democrat Senators, 49 Republican Senators and 2 Independents, when you flip to the house, there are 235 Democrats and 199 Republicans with 1 vacant seat. My opinion that this if this really is a "do-nothing' congress both parties are to blame not just the democrats. I'm really tired of the partisanship that has ingrained itself into our government. Too many people are just looking out for their own interest and not looking out for the "greater good, as cliche as it may sound. The Great Seal of the United States of America has a Latin phrase on it, E Pluribus Unum, which, as you may know, means Out of Many, One. This should be more true today than ever before in the history of this country. We are so polarized by so many issues and it is largely due to the partisanship on capitol hill. We need to become unified once again because, as the cliche slogan once again states, divided we fail.

I'm not going to try to tell people how to vote or who to vote for but I will say that we need to be informed better and have a clearer picture of what the candidates stand for. Our government needs greater transparency meaning that we need to know what our leaders are up too, not guessing and having to find out what they were up to by means of federal investigations and subpoenas. The era of secrecy that was the Bush legacy should be a lesson to us all that there is a need for government transparency. Keeping every document, every meeting and every conversation classified and citing "national security" as a means to keep this information under wraps is a farce and should not be tolerated. Remember, the government works for us, not the other way around. We elect these people to be our representatives in Washington and also to the world, and if they are not doing their job right or not doing it ethically, they should not be doing it at all and we should know.