BY COLE WHITE | Opinion Editor | It’s election year, and an incredibly polarizing one at that. All the extremes are represented, from accused fascists to accused socialists. Unfortunately, none of that really matters.
To understand what I’m saying, let’s jump back to January. That was when, after years of stalemate, king-tyrant-emperor Obama issued his executive order on gun control. An order so outrageously overreaching that it prompted Jennifer Baker, an official National Rifle Association spokesperson, to comment:
“This is it, really? This is what they’ve been hyping for how long now? This is the proposal they’ve spent seven years putting together? They’re not really doing anything.”
If you share her confusion, it’s not surprising. We have an incredibly inflated sense of what power the presidency holds. It turned out that the feared executive order was little more than a desperate reminder of rules that were already in place.
We’ve spent the past months panicking over Donald Trump’s idea to build a massive border wall or Bernie Sanders’ idea to give free everything. What we’ve neglected is the fact that the presidency has the power to accomplish exactly zero of those things.
The old Schoolhouse Rock clip “I’m Just a Bill” is so ubiquitous that most of us can recite it verbatim, which is weird because we tend to forget what it actually says.
When you look back on all the controversial issues, the president isn’t the one that pulled the trigger. George W. Bush didn’t send us to war in Iraq. Barack Obama didn’t pass the Affordable Care Act.
Congress did.
See, a president can say all the things they want, but it’s the representatives and senators that actually vote to make it a law. You know, like a democracy (or to you nit-picky political science majors reading this, a republic). That’s where the real power is held, which makes it all the more distressing that we don’t seem to really care about who these people are.
For how much we value democracy, turnout for midterm elections has rested at a national average of 36.4 percent. While Minnesota has sat at a depressingly impressive 50 percent, let me point out something to you.
I could tell you that Raymond Stantz, the representative from Minnesota’s 9th district, has run unopposed since 1984 and most of you wouldn’t bat an eye. However, if you noticed that Minnesota only has eight congressional districts and Raymond Stantz is Dan Aykroyd’s fictitious character from “Ghostbusters,” welcome back political science majors and/or huge “Ghostbusters” nerds. You’re probably the only ones who caught that. That’s how little we think of these elections. The average person can probably name more Kardashians than congressmen.
In fact, we think so little about them that despite having a roughly 14 percent approval rating, congress manages to boast a staggering 95 percent re-election rate. Try only being 14 percent good at your job and see how long you last. With a 95 percent incumbency rate, congress is essentially a lifetime appointment. It shouldn’t be.
We can worry all day about the things presidential candidates support, but in the end they’re just one person shouting into a bullhorn. In the end it’s just talk. If you honestly care about the direction this country is going, the one person shouting ideas isn’t where it ends. What we need to care about are the 535 people that can make those ideas a reality.