U.S. Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) admits he's brain dead.
[From article]
With the Senate now less open and more
partisan, unanimous Democrat votes set an all-time high for either
chamber, according to a recent study by Congressional Quarterly, with
the average Senate Democrat voting the party line 94 percent of the time
in 2013.
To maintain this governing
conformity, Reid has denied votes on more than 350 House-passed
measures, many with large bipartisan majorities, and used parliamentary
trickeries to pass controversial measures on narrow party-line votes. In
December, he activated the “nuclear option,” eliminating the Senate’s
two-century-old filibuster tradition (the 60-vote threshold requiring
consultation with the minority) on most presidential nominees.
Smash-mouth politics has served
the governing elites — many of whom, like Reid, have parlayed influence
into family fortunes — but not Americans who feel ill-served by the
institutions they oversee.
[. . .]
More worrisome than the cavernous
competence gap is the politicization of every bureaucracy, even
institutions charged with equal enforcement of laws, such as the Justice
Department and IRS.
Aided and abetted by elected
officials who defend the indefensible, the administration diverts our
attention with false assurances: You can keep your health insurance and
your doctors, there’s not a smidgeon of corruption at the IRS, al-Qaida
is on the run, the border is secure, and a U.S. Ebola outbreak is
extremely unlikely.
[. . .]
In a television interview this week, Udall admitted to being “brain
dead,” which isn’t surprising given how dumbed-down and non-deliberative
the Senate has become. Had Udall and Reid succeeded last month in
passing their constitutional amendment to refashion the First Amendment
(under the guise of campaign finance reform), there’d be even less need
for politicians to defend themselves in the marketplace of ideas.
http://www.aspentimes.com/opinion/13490814-113/udall-ebola-post-senate
Sturm: “What’s Scarier Than Ebola? A Brain-Dead Polity.”
Melanie Sturm
Think Again
October 23, 2014
