Can the U.S. Congress pull things together before a superpower becomes a super deadbeat? For Poland’s Polityka, columnist Cezary Kowanda writes that when America’s founders thought up ‘checks and balances,’ they had no idea that Congress would one day be inhabited by people averse to compromise even in the face of disaster.
For Polityka, Cezary Kowanda starts out this way:
For now, Americans have no budget, and soon they may not have the money to pay off their debts. The global superpower turns out to be a state incapable of managing itself. That’s not the America her creators had in mind.
The Founding Fathers didn’t want their new, democratic country turned into a dictatorship, so they created a complex system of “checks and balances” within various institutions. Their goal was not to paralyze the country, but the Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate that their descendants would one day prove to be incapable of compromise. The polarization of the American political scene has led to a situation, such that its participants cannot be induced to concede even in the face of drastic consequences. The financial crisis we are now seeing in the U.S. is actually a political crisis, and employees of federal institutions have become hostages to the battle between a Republican Party faction and President Obama.
At stake in this struggle is reform of the health care system, considered by Obama as the most important achievement of his presidency, and by conservatives as an attack on citizen freedom. Obama has support of the Senate, and of course a year ago, he won the presidential election, which Republicans to a large extent made into a referendum on health care reform. Yet opponents of the president don’t want to come to terms with their failure. They still control the House of Representatives, and in the American system of “checks and balances,” both houses are equally important, and both need to support a bill before it becomes law.
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