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Our founding fathers couldn't have foreseen the gridlock that has occurred in our Government ...
In my view, "Citizens United" is the major cause of this mess becoming almost unsolvable.
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Alas, the gridlock was terrible even before Citizens United came along.
It goes back to the European idea of rigidly enforced party-line voting.
Under President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O'Neil, legislation was bargained over, as it had been since the Continental Congress. Usually compromises meant each side getting some of what it wanted, or the other side getting less of what it wanted, but both sides could live with it.
A little understood new rule in the House changed things profoundly. From Wikipedia:
The Hastert Rule, also known as the "majority of the majority" rule, is an informal governing principle used by Republican Speakers of the House of Representatives since the mid-1990s to ... limit the power of the minority party to bring bills up for a vote on the floor of the House.
Under the doctrine, the Speaker will not allow a floor vote on a bill unless a majority of the majority party supports the bill.
Under House rules, the Speaker [has always] schedules floor votes on pending legislation. The Hastert Rule says that the Speaker will not schedule a floor vote on any bill that does not have majority support within his or her party — even if the majority of the members of the House would vote to pass it. [Democratic Speakers do not enforce this rule.]
It takes 218 votes to pass a bill in the House. When the Democrats are the minority and the Republicans are the majority, the Hastert Rule would not allow 170 Democrats and 50 [defecting] Republicans together to pass a bill, because 50 Republicans votes is far short of a majority of the majority party. The Speaker would not allow a vote to take place.
As it worked out, this new rule (actually begun by Speaker Newt Gingrich before Hastert) destroyed the "liberal Republican" wing of the party. Senators and Representatives who before had frequently "crossed the aisle" to join with Democrats on various issues, from Civil Rights enforcement to transportation budgets, could not do so, without risk of being expelled from their party caucus and losing their committee seniority.
But being forced to support the party line votes meant that the liberal Republicans were almost always bound to vote the same way as those from the ex-Confederacy. And these unReconstructed Southerners were becoming the majority of the majority. As a result, Sen. Jeffords VT and Arlen Spector PA switched parties, and Olympia Snowe (ME) and others retired rather than face strong challenges (both in primaries, for not being "pure enuff" and the general elections for being too right wing). (Meanwhile individual Democrats became less able to get anything done, because they could not team up with like-minded Republicans.)
Many old-fashioned Republicans are still wondering what happened to their father's party.
Today we look back on George Herbert Walker Bush as a normal, mainstream president. But the current crop of Republicans are calling each other extremists and Fascists ( ! ), so Democrats don't have to do that dirty work.
Specifically as for Amtrak, the strongest supporters are those in the regions best served by it, namely the Northeast Seacoast states and the Chicago Hub Midwest. The haters are largely in a band of states stretching from Sen McCain's AZ to Cong Mica's FL, and, alas, they form the majority of the majority. Meanwhile conservative Democrats from the old Solid South are almost extinct.
Now the few surviving Republicans from "purple" states, like Sen Mark Kirk of IL or Sen Kelly Ayotte of NH, in election years must seek special permission from their party leader to vote for something that is so clearly important to their constituents in every year.
(We are blessed that Rep Bill Shuster, the head of the House committee handling Amtrak, is from PA, where Amtrak has considerable support from its many, many riders. It could be much worse.)
Of course, the arcane Hastert Rule is part of an ideological shift. Republicans used to be the party of business and moderation, not opposed to government or spending as such, but conservatively frugal and watchful, and often favoring investment in infrastructure, like the Interstate Highways. But the emergent, cult-like ideology holds that almost all government is bad, and, except for war toys, it might be wasted on "the takers",
if you know who I mean.
In the space left by refusing to govern by compromise, we have a hardline zealotry of unyielding opposition to anything done by government. At the local levels, the ideologues are trying to destroy public schools. At the national level they oppose medical care for the wide public and any other help for the non-rich.
To these haters, Amtrak is a star example they love to cite as evidence that government can't do anything right. They
want an Amtrak that loses money and can't seem to make real progress. They want to mock and demean it, as in, "Soviet-style railroad" and "almost $1 Billion in losses on food service". (That number achieved by adding up 10 years, because the yearly number is too small to be calculated in D.C.). These haters need a failing Amtrak, and will fight any serious effort to invest to improve it.
Now with the help of sophisticated computer software, the haters have taken gerrymandering to a level not seen before. States that voted for Obama twice (Penn, Ohio, Mich, Wis, Va, Fla, and others that voted for him once N.C. and Ind.), were gerrymandered after the mid-term election of 2010 almost repealed the incumbent administration. Now they have district lines so carefully drawn that their delegations are overwhelmingly -- like 2:1 or more -- made up of members of the losing side.
Democracy is being killed off before our eyes. It's painful to see. Selfishly, I'm glad that my life own expectancy is very little more than that of democracy in America.