If you have been a loyal reader of The Sexy Politico, you may have been able to conclude that I have more liberal leanings than my parents. Not unusual, but never the less, when I was visiting my family over the holidays I heard my dad say, “Why not let him build the wall?” and “5.6 billion dollars is just a drop in the bucket for the federal budget.”
I am not going to argue that Republicans are arguing that 5.6 billion dollars is nothing when their party is constantly arguing for deficit reduction and willing to cut vital programs to that end. But the line, “Why not just let him build the wall, stuck out to me.
Politics, if done right, is a back and forth between groups of people with different agendas who have a common goal, the good of the people he or she serves. How that particular person sees “the good” can vary wildly, but that should be why a person is in government, to help and not harm. This back and forth should create compromise, ie you want 50 trillion dollars for the military, I want 50 trillion for education lets split the difference and everyone gets 25 trillion dollars. Now this is a very simplistic idea. But what we shouldn’t have are politicians willing to shut down the government for pet projects. This is what the president has done. He is holding the government hostage for a pet political project, and harming the people that he took an oath to “serve and protect.” Children are going hungry and soon enough people are going to be without housing because this president is holding the government hostage.
Then why shouldn’t the other side cave to his demands to help these homeless and hungry government workers? Because doing so creates a precedent. It says to the next president, or the one after that, “I can just shut down the government if I don’t get may way” rather than working with Congress.
It is usually a campaign strategy to say, “I will reach across the isle and work with the people in the other party,” but in the last 20 years that has been much less common to do so. Politics needs to change. The opposite party is not the enemy, and treating them that way only creates more political division. You can disagree with a person’s politics without finding them morally bankrupt. People come from different backgrounds and because of that, they have different points of view. America’s Founding Father’s were fearful of tyranny. Tyranny of the majority or the minority. This is why our government isn’t working right now, our politicians are not acting in the way that our founding father’s intended, by arguing and compromising.
