The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.
When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.
The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.
In the long history of western civilization … the periods of abortion rights, equality, taxing of the rich, dealing with racism and sexism were all just modern changes that happened really quickly and suddenly (relatively speaking).
There were thousands of years of history before where the world was set up as the wealthy and powerful on top and the slaves and poor at the bottom serving their masters.
That is what conservatism is … wanting to return to the model of a wealthy class owning everything and to be served by the poor they control and own below them.
To them, our modern beliefs and fight for equality and fairness are just mere blips in the history of civilization that has only ever known the powerful standing over the weak.