How to enforce that congress does its job.

Congress has it all backward. They made sure they get paid when the rest of the government shuts down. They should only fund themselves until June and then go without pay until they get the budget completed. To be fair, the office of the President should follow suit a month later if he has failed to sign the budget presented or a submitted a revised one in compromise. So both are on the hook until upcoming fiscal year's budget is signed into law.

Gridlock!

look at all of the political rhetoric on here and wonder what are we thinking. Here are two simple things we should all see. Whatever our stance on spending is, the debt ceiling has to be raised to pay for what we have one way or another already spent or committed to spend. Raising the debt ceiling isn't about new spending, it is about paying for what we have already spent.

The answers to this is simple. We need to make budgets and approve them far in advance. We shouldn't be making budgets in September (October) . We should have the budget finished and the rule-making done before the fiscal year begins. We certainly shouldn't make a budget then wonder how the debt we created in the budget got there. Pay the debts we made.

How to decrease spending? That one is easy too. YES EASY! If we ask the executive departments to reduce their demands by 15% and let them actually make the cuts, they can and will live off of them. The problem is congress wants to decide where the cuts are made. They want to spend on programs that are advantageous to their districts even when the department (especially defense) has the project at a lower priority or even doesn't want it at all.

The bottom line is both sides of the aisle voted for the budget. Both sides of the aisle made it into what it is. That brings us to the second thing: Congress. They have a 5% approval rate. Why don't we throw them out? The bottom line is that a couple of things happen that keep us from it. The first is that we believe that the ones that we would replace them with wouldn't be any better than the ones we threw out. The other is that there is far more power in incumbency that anyone wants to admit. To the political parties it isn't about America, it is about the balance of the aisle. You would keep anyone as long as they were usually dependable to the cause of the largest donors and partisan media.

The whole problem is simply that NO ONE is accountable. As long as we have a permanent congress who doesn't have to come back to their district and live as one of us, it is NEVER going to improve. I have lots more where this came from. This is too important to ignore. The problem is congress from both sides of the aisle have failed and now they are all blaming someone else.