A recent Gallup poll revealed that American approval of Congress had dropped to 15 percent. This is much higher that the nine percent approval registered after Republicans shut down the government in 2013, but it fades against the 31 percent that followed passage of the CARES Act last year.
Kansans’ approval ranking for the state legislature would be roughly the same, if that high. Most people are happier when things get done in Washington and when Topeka does something other than talk about abortion. In Washington the Machiavellian maneuvering will continue, with Congress doing little but dithering over the national debt and flirting with government shutdowns in the 11th hour. In Topeka, a Republican legislature waits again for marching orders from Charles Koch in Wichita, and the Washington-based cause lobbies, C-PAC and ALEC.
The public remains at loose ends, outside the fence as the big game unfolds on the other side. How does this happen?
Every authority, state and federal, confirms that Joe Biden has been elected president clearly and cleanly and yet millions of deluded non-believers insist otherwise. Our new senator, Rep. Roger Marshall, is among more than dozen Republican senators who believe – or say they believe – the lie that Biden’s election was fraudulent. Their ploy last week helped Trump to incite hooligan mobs to storm and occupy the Capitol, suspending formal proceedings to count electoral votes. (Our senior senator, Jerry Moran, had said Biden was elected legitimately and that we must move on.)
As the legislature convenes in Kansas, the new senate president, Ty Masterson, remains avid and mercenary; Ron Ryckman begins an unprecedented third term as House Speaker, once a Brownback acolyte, now a graduate mercenary. Both declare, for example, that additional health insurance for the poor is out of the question, although recent surveys find that 70 percent of Kansans favor Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
Washington is subject to brawling over a presidential election decided by nearly seven million votes, counted and re-counted, litigated and litigated again. In Kansas a clear majority of citizens favor expanding government health insurance for the state’s most needy; the ruling legislators say, forget it.
All this, during a pandemic.
People are distressed at contradictions in a pattern of smothering public pieties and ruthless political conduct. Many believe the system has wronged them.
In reality, there’s no such thing as “the system”. The breastplate of government is the federal state. Around and within this state spins a confederacy of many systems, each circling, maneuvering, attempting to sway the state and bend it to its purpose or wall themselves off from its interference.
Each of these systems has its own internal dynamics, its own ethos and greed, and together in their action they buttress the state: the energy and reach of countless government agencies, from health and welfare through education and public transportation; legions of lobbyists, arguing and wheedling for new funding or no funding, taxes or no taxes, for more of this or less of that through nearly every corner of government; crowds of special interests preaching the causes of clean air and water, of expanding commerce (tax free), of aid to cities and counties, of rural infrastructure improvements and urban housing projects – and more.
All the while, the state proceeds. Ranks of the legislative, executive and judicial branches give life to the state and move it in one direction or another. The state itself is not rooted in this vast, spinning circle of many systems, but in faith. Faith and confidence are the bedrock of all states, free or tyrannical. Without faith, a state cannot survive.
If the past is a forecast, not much progress will happen in Washington or Topeka. The Congress is likely to stall, again, blocked by hard-nosed and iron-willed leaders on sides of even numbers. Here there are few if any plans to meet in the middle, a place now seen as the weaklings’ desert.
In Topeka, Speaker Ryckman and Senate President Masterson are devotees of the Mitch McConnell school, obstructing or throttling anything –an idea, a compromise – offered by the opposition. Their Republican majorities are so large, 87-38 in the House and 31-9 in the Senate, that they can override Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, on the slightest whim.
Here is the incubation of another dismal poll on our faith. The system is many systems, each spinning separately to its own profit regardless of the others; compromise would derail the process. This is to the great advantage of legislators empowered by this cycle of futility. Voters, especially in Kansas, like their own representatives even if they have no faith in Topeka or Washington.
