Many of us are throwing up our hands, knowing much of our Congress doesn’t care about our frustration, about our pain, about our embarrassment.
Even as the United Nations meets in New York, the people’s representatives in Washington are almost as deeply divided as the warring factions in Syria.
In Washington, one tea party senator stays up all night pursuing a parliamentary strategy that almost no one thinks can achieve his real goal – ending Obamacare. Republicans deplore his tactics – which he must think gather praise for him based on this futility: he cares enough to look silly, even when he can’t win. Texas Senator Ted Cruz wants to defeat the health care measure, asserting – against the evidence – that Americans are with him. Polls show more than a majority do oppose the plan, but 16 percent of the opponents feel the law simply doesn’t go far enough.
The senator’s GOP colleagues point out that nothing now can stop the program. But Senator Cruz soldiers on, speaking all night in a mini-filibuster, to illustrate his determination to prove that government is listening. He risks making the opposite point.
Meanwhile, UN delegates arrive on the heels of yet another mass killing in the U.S., this one only blocks from the Capitol. This time, the shooting has raised little if any of the demand for action that followed the killing of five- and six-year-olds in Connecticut.
Congress was unwilling to require background checks for gun buyers – a subject on which the American people did, in fact, say yes. Since last week's shooting, which came almost within earshot of the Capitol, the American people have been essentially silent.gun
We know a lost cause when we see one.