Who has the Power

Who welds the power in the United States? This is a very good question. Our nation was developed under the pretenses that the people have the power. I don’t know how true this statement is. We do have some power of the vote. This vote could dislodge our representatives in congress or senators. But how much do they listen to us? If law makers want to “Sneak” a law into existence they attach the bill to another one. If the bill that it is attached to is vetoed then at least they tried. But If it is passed then they are able to get their own way, even if it is not overly apparent to the United States Public. I think that this is underhanded and these attachments should not be made.

An example of this is the health care reform bill. There were many other bills attached to this document. Some of which could be very costly to the American people. One was that they were going to authorize inspections of houses to see how energy efficient you were being. You would then be required to upgrade certain features of your house. I think that this is a ridiculous idea. I am all for going green, but to have the government make you is ridiculous. I also wonder how many of our representatives actually read all the bill. This bill is huge. What is the impact and do they really know.

I think that we have the original power to place people in office that will do what they say they will during their perspective campaigns. The problem is that when they walk through the doors they tend to forget what they talked about during their last year or two of campaigning and everything is back to status normal.

I think the real power is in the lobbyists. These people have millions of dollars at their disposal and bribe all legislatures to pass items in their best interests, not necessarily the publics. These bribes are not necessarily money, but relocation of factories and bringing more businesses to states that vote in their favor.

Lets look back at the election in 2000. If the people truly had the power to elect those who they wanted to be elected into office, Al Gore would have been the president and not George Busch. I still do not understand the concept of the elector college and those votes counting toward what the people what when it does not reflect what the popular vote actually was.

If the people were really in charge I think that you would truly see change. The first item that really bugs me is the way the federal government keeps spending money that it doesn’t have. We are close to surpassing our Gross National Product for debt. If I ran my house like this I would be bankrupt. We need to get our spending under control and pay off all of our debt. If we can do this then we can really look at providing health care for every legal resident in our country. The interest that we are accruing for our debt would be able to pay for a lot of these programs. Another area that we could cut back is the military. Please don’t get me wrong, I am for a strong military force but why are we spending more half of world spending on the military in our country.

I guess I have rambled on enough. I will conclude that the power of our governmental system is spread out into phases. The first phase we have control over and the rest the government has control over.