Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, even Donald Trump. Look at all these old decrepit people who supposedly run our country. Shouldn’t we institute some age limits? And we can grandfather anyone who was already in government before the law passed. But come on! This is ridiculous. I mean, even if Mitch McConnell is technically alive, he’s as pathetic as Feinstein when her “handlers” had to push the voting button for her on the floor of the Senate. Everyone has seen the video clips of when he “froze up” during an impromptu interview inside the Capitol. He looked like an animatronic figure in Disneyland glitching on its program. It was absurd.
Now I know it’s hard to get good people to run for Congress. Competent people would rather work for a living but something has to be done to raise the level of these people. Even a lot of the young ones are morons. I mean, I know I’m just venting here. To fix all of this will take the concerted effort of a lot of smart people who prefer to work in the private sector because it pays better and is much more interesting but if our republic is going to survive as something more than just the plaything of oligarchs and demagogues something will have to be done to bring competence and accountability to Washington.
I think the first thing that we’ll have to demand is that anyone who serves in Congress will have to forego trading in the stocks of companies whose business is affected by government policy. That’s a minimum. Pelosi has already made a mockery out of legal insider trading to such a degree that the law forbidding it should have her name attached to it.
But I will confess I have no idea how we’re going to fix all this. The lobbyists run Washington and trying to remove their influence would probably get a bunch of people killed trying to do it. But it has to be done if things are ever going to improve. The last time large scale reform was tried was during FDR’s administration. Now a lot of what he did was awful. He was practically a communist himself. But he was trying to help poor people during a terrible business collapse. So, we don’t need a communist. We need someone with a mandate and a supermajority in Congress to start fixing a lot of dysfunctional policies.
Unfortunately, there is just as much chance that the next populist president will be more in the shape of a Mamdani as a Trump. So, things may get a lot worse instead of better. But even though I’m starting to get ancient, somehow, I have the feeling that within my lifetime things may come to a head. We’ve been vacillating back and forth between Left and Right. For better or worse I think something happens and the country will break one way or the other. Fingers crossed it breaks our way.