Causes Of Gridlocks

Gridlock has been around for centuries in Congress, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. Gridlock refers to the inaction of the government and failure to make a decision or legislative law that satisfy the needs of the people. Gridlock occurs when two parties cannot agree on a single matter, and they cannot come to a good agreement on how or when the law is going to be passed thus leaving a pressing issue in the nation unhandled and doing nothing about it. An example of gridlock would be one of the nation’s pressing problems – social security. It is currently headed towards never being solved. Congress has done absolutely nothing, and if this fiscal disaster does not get fixed, it could seriously hurt America for the worst. Gridlock

One of the reasons for congressional gridlock is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is manipulating the boundaries to favor one’s party or class. Gerrymandering creates elected officials who have ideological extremes who use utmost legislative strategies that cause gridlock. Essentially, only citizens can stop gerrymandering and truly restore democratic elections, which is crucial for our democratic elections, including Congress. One solution to ending gridlock is to reduce gerrymandering. Reducing gerrymandering can be done by having commissions re-district after the decennial Census. Another cause of gridlock is the way our government is set up. Our government is unusually structured in a complicated way that combines all of these different concepts that prevent one branch of government from having too much say in certain policy matters and other important governmental decisions, such as law-making. This makes it nearly impossible to come to a legislation agreement in a decent amount of time. (Shep, 3) Gridlock is also caused by representative dynamics. Representative dynamics refers to times when each organization is advanced by someone else just to be in their favor. While other representatives are open to sitting down and working out problems, their constituents are discouraging them. This can be fixed by getting to the root cause of representatives leading in service of only their own interests rather than to follow their

After the Newton, CT incident, people all around the country were – and still are – hopeful something will get accomplished regarding gun violence. They preach that the Congress needs to work on the laws to make it so that there are more background checks to make it even harder for criminals and mentally ill to acquire guns and assault weapons. “Gun injuries cause twice as many deaths as cancer, and they account for 6,570 deaths of children and young people.” (Dinan, 4) This is a staggering statistic. Knowing this, Congress should be on gun laws more than ever during this time to fix it, but Congress has yet to have done something about it. Even though there were four amendments proposed about gun laws, only one was actually approved because the Senate refuses to acknowledge the gun trouble and has become so terribly dysfunctional that every vote now requires a 60-vote threshold. Since this has happened and there was a failure to reach a super-majority threshold, this underlying bill was withdrawn from further consideration. Since Senate rules, a minority was able to block it from moving forward. As a result, the Senate cannot move forward, and the bill has, in all actuality, been basically eliminated from the Senate