DOES CONGRESS REALLY HAVE SOMETHING BETTER TO DO?

by wwtb?, Pacifist Viking

Whenever politicians try to get involved in sports (say, holding hearings on steroids in pro baseball, or investigating allegations of cheating in pro football), the natural reaction among many sports fans is, "Doesn't the U.S. government have better things to do?" The obvious answer is yes, the U.S. government really does have more pressing issues to deal with. Especially when the time and effort comes from tax dollars, we might legitimately expect our elected officials to focus on some of the major issues facing the world and our country.

On the other hand there are a few senators that are planning on basically taking 2008 off to travel around the country chatting with people and giving speeches. We do have a system of government that puts big issues on hold periodically so that the people running the government can focus on the more pressing issue of getting re-elected or elected to higher offices.

And then we might ask, are our elected officials simply doing what their constituents want? The government deals with a lot of issues most every day. Sometimes the government dealing with these issues is even televised. But if a lot of Americans are going to devote more of our time and attention to games than to issues like war or poverty, can we really feel affronted when our leaders do the same thing? We get the government we deserve.

This is not to say we shouldn't expect more from government representatives. After all, we focus on sports during our free time (you're not reading this blog during work, are you?), and congress is working with American tax dollars to deal with serious issues. We can expect them not to waste time on the parts of our lives that, if we really thought about it, can be trivial.

But it's easy to criticize congress for focusing on things that don't matter. It's a little more difficult for us to criticize ourselves.