223. "You get the government you deserve."

There's one thing wrong with that wonderful reminder to voters in a democratic country, "you get the government you deserve": it can't be said to those who voted against the majority that produced the government.  Like now, to a Massachusetts liberal suffering under the fiscal thumbs of House Tea Partiers.  "You think I deserve this?"

Tough enough under ordinary circumstances but here the dessert-serving group weren't even a majority, and what they did is not even democratic.  Their majority in the House is a result of Republican gerrymandering (the popular vote in the 2012 election of House members went to the Democrats by 1.2%) and their typical action, stopping funding by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, is a result of a procedural quirk, a leftover from a pro forma budget gesture of 1917.

The polls show that as a nation we're very unhappy with them, with approval of Congress down to 12%, disapproval up to 85%, and more than 70% of those strongly opposed to the job congressional lawmakers are doing (Washington Post/ABC).  So they're rascals, right?  From what you hear in street interviews they're that and more:  "religious nuts," "one-issue extremists," and the old one, "dirty politicians."

Depressing, isn't it, to have such people gaming the system, playing the quirks.  Differences in a democracy are supposed to be worked out, fought out, fair and square on the floor of the legislature.  Lose there and a representative is supposed to go along gracefully until his next chance to fight.  In the designated arena.  That's democracy.  Not slinking around with a wrench looking for a place to jam the machinery — machinery you have yourself already set, or allowed to be set, in motion, for God's sake.  

I can't stand it.  I'm a democrat (and Democrat) about to die of depression.

No, I won't die, nor will the masses of depressed people all around me.  We know that we, unlike the Egyptians, have a fixed, absolutely irremovable, election coming up.  And we have, in our aural memory, another good old American expression to cheer ourselves up with: "Throw the rascals out!"  Straight from the citizens who threw out Boss Tweed and the Teapot Dome gang and the Whisky Ring.  The majority the polls tell us of will assert itself.

How comforting, the thought of those rascals being thrown out, head over heels behind Boss Tweed.  The majority triumphant. 

How comforting, and now, apparently, how vain.  The majority has already shown how it's going to act, and that, in 2014, will be to keep the rascals in.  Ninety percent of them.  That's the percentage of incumbents they returned to office in 2012, when the laments over the terrible 112th Congress were as loud as the laments over ours, the 113th.

"Yes, but voters then didn't know what we know about these machinery-jammers, these district-slicers."

Ah, my friend, you have forgotten.  The jamming and slicing, and making a party of it, were already on display.  John Boehner had his (or the Tea Party's) thumb on the fiscal artery as surely, with his intentions as surely known, in April 2011, as he has now.  There was a partial shutdown of the government, remember?  With a bigger one narrowly averted in August.  What more was there to learn about these rascals?

The general electorate certainly appeared to have learned what it needed.  Hell, going into the 2012 elections you'd have thought that to be an incumbent legislator was to be one step from the tar pot and the feather pile.  Congress's favorable rating was only a little higher (15%) in the Gallup poll than it is now.  Teapot Domers, here they come.  And how many Congressmen got thrown out?  One in ten.  A rapscallion here, a scallywag there.

So, comfort-seekers, get used to it.  Americans, no matter what they tell the nice polling lady, no longer throw rascals out.