An open letter to Rep. Austin Scott

Dear Rep. Scott,

First of all, I want to apologize for not writing sooner.  I have received several letters from you in the past informing me how you were working hard to uphold my conservative values in Washington, and I really should have written back to you a long time ago. 

I’ve just been busy with work, family, the fall TV season – you know how it is.  But you’ve been on my mind a good bit lately with all the mess that’s going on with our federal government lately and I thought it was time that I gave you some feedback.

Unfortunately I don’t have good news for you.  You see, Austin, I’ve decided that I’m going to have to let you go.  No matter what you do between now and the next election I’ve already decided that I’ll be voting for someone else.

Please don’t take this personally.  You seem like a good guy and I know you and the rest of the House Republicans who have taken the country on this government shutdown/debt default thrill ride mean well and you think you’re doing the right thing. 

I also want to make it clear that I don’t hold the Republicans solely responsible for the waking nightmare that our government has become.  There is plenty of blame to go around, and the Democrats and President Obama share equally in the responsibility for failing to make our divided government function.

It is indeed a group failure, but I can’t hold anyone else responsible the way I can hold you responsible.  You’re my guy.  You’re the one I get a chance to pass judgment on every other year.  You have to to bear my most immediate, direct response to my disappointment over the embarrassment that our federal government has become.

I’m trying to imagine someone in any other line of work getting away with the kind of job performance you guys are delivering to us and not getting fired, and I’m having a hard time doing so. 

Imagine you were part of a team that was tasked with designing a new product, for example, and the team split into two opposing factions with differing opinions on what the design should be.  If at the end of the development process each team presented a different design to management and declared that it was the other side’s fault that the task didn’t get accomplished, what do you think management’s response would be, Austin? 

Maybe you’ve been out of the business world for a while, so let me tell you what would happen – you’d all get fired.  And you’d deserve it.  Your job was to get the task done, not to somehow beat the people you were tasked to work with in a contest of ideas.

Perhaps the most important task of any government is to collect taxes and decide on how that money should be spent, to come up with a workable budget that can pass the legislature and be signed by the chief executive.  It can be a difficult process, especially with a divided government, but governments get it done all the time.

You guys should have gotten it done, and I think you should all be held accountable for failing at this most basic of tasks.  It’s time that you all be let go, and I mean what I say – I will be voting for someone else next year.  I hope there is someone who lives in my district who is just as fed up as I am who and will decide to run against you. 

In fact it would be great if more than one of my fellow citizens ran against you so we’d really have more choices in the next election, and it would be fine with me if those people didn’t belong to either of the two major parties. 

Count me among the 60% of Americans who now agree that we need an option besides the Republicans and Democrats on the ballot on Election Day.  We need more choices, because what we have right now sure isn’t working for us.

Shutdown was inevitable

In retrospect, we should have seen this coming.  We live in a country where the population and its government seem to grow more polarized with each passing day.  We don’t know how to talk to each other without shouting and we aren’t willing to listen to anyone who is not parroting our own beliefs back to us.  Maybe it was inevitable that all of that discord would eventually cause our government to grind to a halt. 

As I write this column, the government is (partially) shut down and the two parties aren’t even meeting to talk about a resolution.  They are just taking turns mouthing off to the media, each side claiming they are the reasonable ones and pointing the finger of blame at the other party.

Who’s really to blame for this mess?  Is it the Democrats or the Republicans?  Or is it a case of our President failing to show effective leadership?  Maybe responsibility should be laid at the feet of voters who keep reelecting the same morons and then complaining about how sorry they all are.  Personally I think the answer is all of the above.

Opinion polls seem to indicate that the Republicans are getting most of the blame for the shutdown, even though those same polls indicate that a majority of us agree with them about Obamacare not being the greatest thing ever. 

I think the reason the GOP is getting hammered over this is that is that they had 3 years to derail Obamacare and they couldn’t get it done either through the normal legislative process or at the ballot box.  Shutting down the government after they failed to get voters to throw Obama out of office or retake a majority in the Senate after campaigning against Obamacare looks like a desperate move by a party that seems to be in an increasing state of disarray.

Of course the Republicans are pleasing their conservative base by taking on the signature legislation of that left-wing Great Satan Obama.  I’ve been following the posts of Rep. Austin Scott, the congressman who represents my voting district, and he racks up numerous “likes” and positive comments any time he posts about his anti-Obamacare votes.

I am sure that Rep. Scott will cake-walk to reelection in his carefully drawn GOP-friendly district, just like most of the Republicans in the House will do no matter how long the government is shut down.  They know how to play to their base. 

But as people much smarter than me have observed, they could be doing major damage to their prospects for retaking a majority in the Senate next year or winning the White House in 2016 with their actions right now.  So the nonsense going on right now may be what we get for the next decade or so unless something happens to change the game in a significant way.

What kind of change would shake things up?  Defaulting on our debt might do it.  There are varying opinions on what a default would mean to the average American, and they range from very serious to horrifying.  Imagine what happened to Greece, for example, but with no one to bail us out.

In such a scenario a whole new reality could set in and no one can predict what would happen.  Based on what we know about human nature, it certainly seems possible that all the hateful speech that is flying back and forth between the left and right could devolve into violence.  Desperate people do desperate things.

I hope that doesn’t happen and I don’t think we’ve gone over the brink just yet.  But I think it would help if we stopped rewarding bad behavior by patting our representatives on the back for “standing up for their principles no matter what” instead of recognizing the reality of our divided government and put a higher premium on being pragmatic and working towards compromise.

Maybe I’ll post that thought on Facebook and see how many “likes” I get.