How to Tell When the Government Is Broken

Democrats can’t get their bills passed. George Will nailed it this morning on ABC:

TERRY MORAN, HOST: There’s a sense that something is broken in Washington summed up this week by Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) who announced his retirement. I think it’s fair to say he’s leaving in disgust. Here’s what he had to say.
SENATOR EVAN BAYH, (D-IND.): I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is much too much partisanship, and not enough progress. Too much narrow ideology, and not enough practical problem solving. Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.
MORAN: Is he right, George?
GEORGE WILL: Well, it’s hard to take a lecture on bipartisanship from a man who voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, the confirmation of Justice Alito, the confirmation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Far from being a rebel against his Party’s lockstep movement, Mr. Bayh voted for the Detroit bailout, for the stimulus, for the public option in the healthcare bill. I don’t know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda. No one when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security said, “Oh, that’s terrible – the government’s broken.”

Actually, there is one legitimate sense in which one could say that our government is broken. We are approaching a fiscal disaster because of out of control entitlements. Everyone in Washington knows it, but the government is unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Even here, though, the problem isn’t a process issue. The problem is that most Americans aren’t ready to face up to what needs to be done, and, when it comes to entitlements, prefer fairy tales to reality. So it isn’t Washington that is somehow “broken,” we are experiencing one of the perils of living in a democracy.
Via InstaPundit.

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