Columbus Dispatch...
People are scared; why won’t their lawmakers listen?
By Joe Hallett  
October 25, 2011 

Hello! 

Hello ... hello ... hello! 

HELLOOO! Why won’t you hear us? 

We’re agonizing out here. What will it take to make you change things? 

Look at the polls, for heaven’s sake. For 93 straight months — nearly eight years — we have said that the country is on the wrong track. Almost 75 percent of Americans said that again late last month in a New York Times-CBS News poll. 

A recent CNN-Opinion Research poll showed that 72 percent of us are angry about the way things are going in the country. Even more disconcerting from that poll: 71 percent of us are actually scared about the way things are going. 

Scared that we will lose our jobs — if we haven’t already. Scared that we will lose our homes — if we haven’t already. Scared that a single injury or illness could ruin us financially. Scared that our kids won’t be able to go to college or even play high-school sports because all you ever want to do is cut, cut, cut. 

While we’re out here fearing what tomorrow might bring, you’re in the corridors of Congress and the Statehouse playing your inane partisan games. Just win the day, baby! Out-shrill the other side. Make your political opponents look stupid. Talk about how you want to help small businesses and working families and then continue doing what you always do: serve those who fill your campaign war chests. 

We will go to the polls in November 2012 determined to take back our country from you representatives who have failed to represent us. We took back our country from you in 2006 and 2008 and 2010, but somehow it never got delivered. 

“No matter who was put in charge, things didn’t get better,” Mickey Edwards, a former 16-year Republican congressman from Oklahoma, wrote in the July/August issue of the Atlantic magazine. 

“They won’t this time either; spending levels may go down, taxes may go up, budgets will change, but American government will go on the way it has, not as a collective enterprise but as a battle between warring tribes. 

“If we are truly a democracy — if voters get to size up candidates for a public office and choose the one they want — why don’t elections seem to change anything? Because we elect our leaders, and they then govern in a system that makes cooperation almost impossible and incivility nearly inevitable, a system in which the campaign season never ends and the struggle for party advantage trumps all other considerations.

“When Democrat Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House, the leader of the lawmaking branch of government, she said her priority was to . . . elect more Democrats. After Republican victories in 2010, the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said his goal was to . . . prevent the Democratic president’s re-election. With the country at war and the economy in recession, our government leaders’ first thoughts have been party advantage.” 

Edwards, who taught at Harvard and Princeton after leaving Congress in 1993, advocates a sensible, six-step plan to fix Congress. One step is to turn over the process of redrawing congressional districts to independent, nonpartisan commissions. Stopping the party in power from gerrymandering districts that ensure election of candidates from the extreme fringes of both parties is a step that overnight would create a more collaborative and collegial Congress. 

And it is a step that could be taken right now in Ohio, where the threat of a referendum could put on hold 16 new GOP-drawn congressional districts that mock the state’s political evenness. The opportunity is ripe for both parties to come together and devise a fair system of redistricting. 

It won’t happen. “People on our side aren’t keen about sitting down with the (Democrats) and drawing a map,” state Rep. Louis Blessing, R-Cincinnati, the No. 2 House leader, said Thursday. 

Hey, Lou, why won’t you hear us? We want you to change things. 

We’re scared out here. 

Hello? 

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