Regardless of your patriotic sensibilities, the truth about government is an absurdity without rationale or reason.
Beyond age, citizenship and residency, there are no qualifications required to be president, a member of Congress, or Justice on the Supreme Court. You don't even have to be a lawyer to be on the Supreme Court.
A political candidate can promise anyone, anything and there are no consequences, no accountability for them when they’re broken, whatever the new shiny thing that sounded so good in the campaign commercial.
When elected, there is no 'going to work'. There are no work hours. There is no job description. And you can't be fired.
If you're on a Committee but don't want to attend meetings, no problem. Don't want to vote on a bill, no problem. Don't want to attend a Congressional hearing, no problem. You can do whatever you want. No “Boss” will demand “see me in my office immediately!” Complaining constituent bosses” are…handled.
Each member of Congress gets an office and a $2 million annual office budget with which they can do anything they want. They also receive a $174,000/yr salary for doing whatever they want. That’s more than three times the average American household income. Recently, they each received a $34K raise. Of course, it wasn’t called a raise; that would require a vote. Voting for raises gets bad publicity and leaves a record. This one was called “reimbursements for meals and hotels” and such, but they don't have to produce any receipts to get reimbursed. Sweet! Do you think the IRS would let you skate doing that?
See you in prison,
But elected officials can.
And...
They can take money from lobbyists, introduce bills lobbyists write, and provide rubber stamps for such Industry-specific legislation and regulation. In exchange, they receive re-election campaign funds and their donations to their favorite 'charities.' .
Do you know why being a dentist, doctor, engineer, architect, pro athlete, musician, etc., cannot be done by just anyone? Because each of those occupations requires very specific skills.
Do you know why being a politician can be done by anyone? Because there are zero skills required.
Explain to me what level of insanity, what amount of aggressive ignorance is required to honor an institution in which anyone can be hired, cannot be fired, and is paid six figures for doing whatever they want; even a baby step like Term Limits is a punch line.
There is no justification for this. It's an arcane institution that should have been relegated to the scrap heap of history centuries ago.
BW
Thanks for reading this far.
Warning: “The Two and Only” are next….!
Freeze pay, cut staffing allotment, reduce session to two months every two years, move department to the states, freeze spending and hiring.
I can do this all day…
And it's not just congress, civil service exams are a joke and thanks to the spoils system they get a job based on political contributions rather than talent. This was started early on as each Faction in Washington demanded their people get put into positions, only to be replaced the next time a faction came to power. Then later civil service exams were shot down due to the belief that it would exclude black people from getting any of the jobs. As a result you don't have to have any particular skill to become a politician and tons of the most important positions in civil service are put in place without any particular qualifications other than ability to fund-raise or because of pandering to specific minorities.