This is a day when many Americans must feel ashamed. The trivially-named Super Committee (right) has produced nothing. Worse than that, both parties seem ready to quickly rewrite the spending sanctions contained in the committee’s mandate, revealing the entire process as a charade. As in so many others places, radically different social beliefs bred in the prosperity of the 20th Century, have made the U.S. a society at war with itself. And it seems fair to say that the seeds of gridlock were sown more than 200 years ago, even as the national sentiment was much more unified than it is today. That’s when the Constitution was crafted in a way that permitted one party to control the lower house and a different one to control the upper house. There was surely trouble in the making. It was part of an easily understood desire to keep anyone from seizing power. But in the end, it is a very serious flaw in the U.S process.
