Let’s pretend for a minute that you own a business, and you have … oh, say about 535 salaried employees earning an average of $175,000 per annum (low ball average, but I am trying to keep it conservative).  Now, let’s say that you have just found out that all 535 of those salaried employees have spent the past two weeks working on a project that they knew would never work, knew there was no demand for, and knew would be scrapped at the end of the project.  What would you do about those employees?  This, ladies and gentlemen, is no hypothetical.  You DO own a business, it is called the United States Congress, and you DO have 535 salaried employees called Representatives and Senators.  And they DID just spend the past two weeks wasting time on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act which was signed into law in 2010 after passing in both the House and the Senate. Your employees admittedly knew their bill to repeal ACA stood absolutely NO chance … ZERO, NADA, NUNC, ZILCH chance of being signed into law and they knew with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that President Obama WOULD veto it once it hit his desk.  It was all a game.  A joke.  A joke that cost, just in terms of the salaries of your congressmen and women a minimum of $3,600,000 .  Yes, that is THREE POINT SIX MILLION DOLLARS for two weeks of time wasted to play a game, to make a “point” that had no point.  Additionally, one must consider all the lower staff members who also worked on this useless piece of legislation, even being required to work over the Thanksgiving holiday to craft … a useless piece of legislation.  I cannot even begin to calculate the cost of these men and women’s salaries and associated overhead costs. They might just as well have been building paper airplanes or playing tic-tac-toe … on YOUR dime.

Unfortunately, your employees have contracts and so you cannot simply tell them to “pack their shit and go”.  So, what can you do?  You can vote them out of office when their terms expire.  The republicans in Congress have made no attempt at good governance over the past 3-7 years, their only focus having been on making it as difficult as possible for the Obama administration to pass any meaningful legislation, throwing up every imaginable roadblock at every turn and then pointing fingers saying “See … he hasn’t done anything!”.  There has been little, if any, attempt at bi-partisanship or compromise in order to see that the business of the nation provide well for “We The People” as commanded by none other than the Constitution of the United States, nor is there likely to be in the next 13 months.  It doesn’t matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal, moderate or conservative, male or female, black or white, rich or poor person, you should be incensed by the behavior of your elected officials.

The largely republican-controlled Congress say that this bill is proof that ACA will in fact be repealed in 2017 when a new president takes office.  Two points here:

• That would assume that a republican candidate wins the presidential race next year, which looks like a slim possibility unless the GOP can rebound from the recent “carnivore carnival” and actually nominate a viable candidate, and
• The repeal of ACA is NOT in the best interest of the millions of Americans who would lose their healthcare benefits.

No matter which party you support, no matter your ideology, you cannot possibly believe that the money wasted on this useless bill was anything other than game-playing with YOUR money on Capitol Hill.  And yet, though they found time to play these games, Congress has yet to find time or money to re-fund the Zadroga bill that would provide healthcare to 9/11 rescue workers!  It is time for Americans to make a point to Congress that, no matter your ideology, we will no longer support those highly paid men and women who have chosen to take our money to play childish games with our lives.