Bipartisanship as Bane

For the past forty years, bipartisanship in Washington D.C. has not ruled in the best interests of the nation. When politicians from both sides of the aisle collude to pass legislation, they trade votes, support pork barrel projects to districts all over the nation, and refuse to stop the spending.

Two budget commissions in the past year could not agree on adequate spending cuts. Voting along party lines, no legislator, aside from Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, was willing to offer substantial revenue increases with matching spending cuts. No one wants to touch the sacred-cow entitlements which are milking today's taxpayer and future generations for all they have. The bipartisanship of little results on cutting spending, coupled with the bipartisan support for spending increases on local projects and constituency pandering, has done nothing but drive this nation toward a closer calamity with fiscal insolvency and default.

Starting with Progressive President Lyndon Johnson's grand and glorious hopes to enact a Great Society, the liberal mindset of command and control economies, welfarism, and subsidies has taken root in our national consciousness. Assuming that throwing more revenue at a problem would make it better, the voters in this country instead witnessed a rise in crime, illegitimacy, and state-sponsored failure on a massive scale. Race riots throughout the country, and the forced segregation of government monopoly schools, have dismissed the hype that more money, more rules, more government would give the citizen more for his forced contributions to the state.

From the War on Terror to Federal Entitlement programs like MediCare and Social Security -- which have ballooned beyond sustainability -- Democratic and Republican cooperation has furthered along the growth of government while starving our private sector and impoverishing states and taxpayers. The grand ensemble which united in pariotic fervor to support of the Department of Homeland Security, merely exposed the lengths to which politicians will commandeer more money from a rapidly depleted treasury. Expanded MediCare coverage in 2003, which followed the most massive of federal incursions into public education with No Child Life Behind, has harmed a generation of elderly and school age citizens who will labor under expanded spending with waste and fraud that frustrates wealth management and the proper education of our youth.

 Strictly speaking, this nation is broke, burdened under multi-trillion dollar deficits, yet legislators insist that more laws, monies, and regulations will improve matters. After forty years, the voters in this country have had enough. We need less government if we want to ensure more business, more investment, more power to our states and local leaders to make the proper decisions to rescue our cities and counties from fiscal insolvency. Bipartisanship at the federal level is tearing the national ship of state apart. If dutiful interests like the Tea Party Movement have effectively forced their colleagues in the House and the Senate to rethink appropriates and discuss government spending, then they have done the job which they were elected to do. Every voter, liberal  or conservative, should be grateful that a diligent minority has demanded that the established status quo on both sides of the aisle has been forced to take account of debts and deficits and demand their diminution.