by Max Humana, October 2013

The time is long past to bring sense to how we run our great nation.

It is time to “sequester” Congress.

Boiled down to Joe Sixpack basics, our Constitution gives the Congress the job of making the nation’s laws and managing its money. They pass the laws that drive most of how much tax we pay, and they provide money to fund many of the services we get. The laws Congress passes enable the government to collect taxes like the individual income tax we pay each year, Social Security tax, estate taxes and others. In return, Congress passes laws that use these tax dollars to do or buy things, like paying people Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, provide for the national defense, provide for our veterans, make sure our food is safe, keep the air and water clean and our national parks open and running.

Basically, Congress ‘holds the purse strings’ of our national family. Speaking metaphorically, and for the sake of this discussion we can omit the President, if you imagine America as a ‘nuclear’ family with one mother, one father and two kids, the parents would be the two branches of Congress (Senate and House of Representatives), and the two kids (John and Jane, say) as everyone else in America.

On extremely rare occasions Mom and Dad are good with their money. Mostly they aren’t though, and have a growing credit card balance which they know how to fix but won’t, and which is starting to scare the pants off John and Jane. Sometimes Dad goes out and does bad things like buy a $1,000 set of golf clubs instead of paying the electric bill. You can pick your personal pejorative equivalent for what Mom would irresponsibly do.

Recently, Mom and Dad have been doing some really, really bad things with the family’s money.

What Mom and Dad did with the Budget Control Act and the sequester, and to a wretchedly myopic degree with the recent government shutdown, was essentially to say to each other the following:

Mom – “You are irresponsible with our money, and unless you do things my way, I am going to stop feeding Jane supper” (a la the sequestering and shutdown of social programs).

Dad – “You are irresponsible with our money, and unless you do things my way, I am going to let that neighborhood bully beat John up” (sequestering and shutting down the Department of Defense).

Perceptive readers will have noticed that neither Mom nor Dad were themselves personally impacted in any way by their mutual failures. They inflicted the pain of their ineptitude and stubbornness on the people for whom they are responsible. Would any responsible parent feel this behavior to be appropriate? Or would this be neglect and even abuse? You know the answer.

So I ask the question, when Congress dreamed up the Budget Control Act and Sequester, or decided to shut down most of the government, where were the provisions that Congress would personally feel the impact? Where was the provision of pay cuts for Congress? Who is truly not doing their job here?

The Congress is currently incapable of making honest and impactful change and reaching reasonable and practical solutions to the problems that face us. They are collectively perfectly content to let the national house burn down while they glare at each other from their hardened and inflexible positions because they are not personally liable for their inability to work together and do their jobs. In the private and public sectors, workers who do not do their jobs lose those jobs. This needs to also be the case with those who get paid by the American people to run our country.

I am certain that had the entire Budget Control Act been replaced by a single small piece of legislation that required members of Congress to lose pay when they cannot resolve differences and do their jobs, they would magically find a solution. Accountability must be part of the process.

We need a government that indeed provides for the “…general Welfare of the United States”.

It’s time to sequester Congress.