How This Came to Pass

House Republicans are so screwed up that they're seriously considering electing a "caretaker" speaker, John Kline from Minnesota, to serve until they can get their act together.

How did this come to pass?

It's not just that Republicans are prone to adolescent temper tantrums. It's their doctrinaire attitude about ideological purity, which fractures them into smaller and smaller subgroups that are always at war with each other.

This boils down to one thing: their inability to compromise.

They like to compare themselves to the Founding Fathers. But they're nothing like the men who built this country.

Those guys sat around in meetings for weeks and months on end, hammering out the Constitution with compromise after compromise to make this country work. This is best illustrated by the the most ridiculous and outrageous compromise of all: the Three-Fifths Compromise. It read:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Representation in the House (and presidential elections) is based on population, and Southerners -- who deemed slaves chattel with no more rights than livestock -- still wanted them to be counted as full human beings when it came to apportioning seats in the House. The compromise gave Southern states more political power to keep men enslaved, but it was the price that had to be paid to keep the country together.

It was doomed to fail, as it ultimately did less than a century later when slavery was abolished. But that's the nature of government. Nothing is forever. Times change. After a time you have to agree to something and move on, with the full knowledge that it will have to be revisited.

It is silly and petulant to pretend that you can make a decision once for the rest of eternity. Science, technology and social realities are in constant flux. A government -- or any organization, be it a company, philanthropic foundation or church -- has to adapt to new conditions.

Insisting that nothing can change and we have to do everything the way our great-great-great-grandfathers did won't just mire you in the past, it will doom you to failure.

A huge part of the problem is that Congress doesn't actually do the work of governing anymore. They work maybe three days a week, then they jet off to their home districts or some boondoggle to shmooze with big donors and PACs.

Unlike the Founders, who were stuck in the capitol for months at a time with nothing to do but the actual job of governing, modern congressmen spend all their time raising campaign cash, even when they're in DC supposedly doing their work.

If Congress actually stayed in DC and talked to each other, instead of spending all their time trying to appeal to megadonors and cranky "base voters," this country would run a hell of lot better.