As the GOP brags about their unwillingness to do their job regarding an open Supreme Court seat, I’m just astounded at how broken government is at the moment. Perhaps it has been this way for a while, that may be.  But it is illustrated so clearly and completely in this most recent power grabbing maneuver.

We elect a government to work for us, the american people. We break that government into two elected branches and have a third to make sure there is a balance of power. A balance protects the minority every bit as much as it does the work of the majority, and keeps as even a keel as possible since real governance takes important stability with a level of flexibility achieved via compromise.

Our elected officials serve differing intervals of time and no one entity of government is completely filled at one time. This adds some continuity to the stability and minimizes shifts that are knee-jerk reactions as much as possible.

We elect a president for a four year term, and in that is the expectation that the president does four years worth of work. But if we are to believe the current GOP leadership, we must decide that the current president is only permitted to work for three of his four year term. And if he isn’t to do his responsibilities, neither is Congress to do their responsibilities: because some future vote is yet undetermined. This focus on a future vote dismisses and abandons the only important election, which was the one that elected the existing president and congress.

What if we all stopped working because of some future event? How would that go? Ans why do we accept it from our government?

While the brokenness of the current government is indisputable, it is also clear that a huge part of the cause is the american people. For example, in the last general (non-presidential) election, less than half of registered voters turned out to vote. Our role as the public is to participate by voting! If we do that, we help cull bad politicians and promote good ones. Failure to vote leaves politicians to run amok.

In social media and elsewhere, there is always plenty of talk about the brokenness, but where is the talk about the solution? What are we doing as a people, to turn out the vote? What are we doing to identify barriers to voting and support everyone in overcoming them? Until we do more to address those questions, government will remain broken to everyone’s detriment.