How to turn 100 hours into an eternity...new Congress and...

I'm reminded on more than the odd occassion that our founding fathers were relatively brilliant individuals in ingenious ways that they constructed our Representative democracy/Republic of these United States of America.

As a prime example (related to the article I had just written: Liberals - how to tell if Dems are pandering on minimum wage) consider the promises by (likely) soon to be Ms. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, an ambitious plan to accomplish a ton of things in just the first 100 hours of the new Congress.

Ms. Pelosi has promised a lot, but her ability to actually deliver will be severely impacted by the brilliance of the founding fathers. You see, if you don't recall, the founding fathers set up multiple branches of our (the U.S.) government, each having checks on balances on the other branches, and each having important roles in how bills become laws.

Some people may remember back to the cute little cartoon Schoolhouse Rock series and the great little "I'm only a bill" video.  If not, dig up a copy of that series and watch it again.  Learn how government works, but then go deeper (such as this article here at JU and affiliated Stardock sites).  Remind yourself that the role of the U.S. House of Representatives is to start most actions, create bills and work them through the congress where they eventually wind up in the U.S. Senate.

Here's where things start going from top speed down to screeching halts though.  The U.S. House of Reps. was designed to be the speedy part of the congress.  The Senate was designed to put the brakes on things and generally be more patient, deliberate and much slower in it's handling of the nation's business.  Again, by design.

Our founding fathers created these various parts of our government with lots of foresight and intuition into what might come in the future.  They had experienced the tyranny of English rule, but had also worked with representative type government.  They built in these checks and slow downs to help our nation be governed more from consensus and less from any radical side.  There (generally) has to be cooperation among the parties and most definitely from the majority holders in either branch of the Congress.  In the end, a raw bill is generally whittled down, or changed from a lump of coal into something that resembles a precious gemstone.

For the coming congress we are going to see very quickly that the speed with which the House takes up tasks may not be matched at all by the Senate, and in reality may find some things that just never get through the Senate at all.  Anything that does get through both the House and Senate is still up for review and potential veto by the President and could find itself sent back for a potential override that may not be possible to ever achieve.

So, be prepared to take the promises and rhetoric with a big grain of salt.  Promises by the apparent speaker of the House are going to be footnotes in history when we are all said and done.  Whether they're remembered as undelivered promises remains to be seen, but it's certainly possible and still somewhat highly likely given the breakdown of the elected bodies.