I've said it before and I'll say it again... The founding fathers screwed up.

In trying so hard to make it impossible for a monarch to rise to power, they created a system so compromised and complicated it has reached gridlock.

The issue is further complicated by Machiavellian scheming surrounding Redistricting, something the entire country has to go through following each census to be sure local and congressional districts are equally populated.  However, an outshoot of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 allowed the creation of districts which could have irregular shapes in order to increase the percentages of minority voters and thereby, increase the number of minorities elected.  You would think this was a good thing, but it turns out to have been a huge mistake.

Some time ago Republican schemers figured out that by concentrating , or "packing", heavily Democratic minority districts, they could seriously undermine the chances of a Democrat being elected in any non-minority district, which tend to be mostly Republican.

Example.  In Gatorville, Democrats are a majority of the registered voters, but out of 19 council seats only three are Democrat.  All of them minorities.  The reason being that during the last Redistricting the Republican dominated statehouse gerrymandered the voting districts so that nearly all blacks are concentrated into three districts.  Had those districts been drawn properly, there would have been several with a majority of blacks, some with a mixed distribution, and some with a majority of whites.  Had that been the case, those districts with a majority of blacks would have quite probably elected a black Democrat as their council representative.  Those that were mixed districts would quite possibly have elected some white Democrats as their city councilperson, and the Republicans would have carried the all white districts.

The result of packing minority Democratic voters into three districts is that almost no Democrat, white or black, has a chance of being elected in a non-minority district.  Multiply this by state and national congressional districts and you begin to get the picture.

And here's another complication.  Most voters don't vote in primary elections and those that do tend to be the most ideologically committed.  The result is, those who are elected in the primaries tend to be those candidates who appeal to the extremes.  People who are committed to "My way or no way."  Multiply that times state and national elections and you begin to get the bigger picture.

And if that's not enough, far and away the profession most represented in the halls of our statehouses and in Congress is the legal profession.  I read where 60% of the Congress and 40% of the Senate are lawyers.  By years of schooling, and probably by aptitude as well, these people have been trained to win at any cost.  In the courtroom right or wrong doesn't matter, it's the debate that counts.  Your job is to win for your client.  These boneheads carry this same intractableness into their congressional debates while pretending to do what's "best" for the people.  Right.

So not only are our elected "representatives" egotistical ideologues, but never-give-an-inch lawyers to boot.

But wait, there's more.  Finally, if all of the above isn't enough for you to agree that the founding fathers screwed up, there's one final blow to the empire.  The great majority of those who make up our elected representatives on both the state and national levels are millionaires, people who not only have no clue what it's like to be an average citizen struggling to smile each day, but who flat couldn't care less.

Here's something to make you smile.