the national blender

One prominent feature of people's outside perceptions of Washington DC is that the federal government is just one big catfight. Pushing and pulling and pulling hair and scratching eyes ...

This is true. But it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Washington is the national blender. This city is the collision point of all kinds of people and all kinds of priorities and all kinds of ideas. Then we hit puree and see what comes out. Sometimes it's pretty disgusting and you want to dump the whole thing and start over. (I wish to heaven that were utilized as an option sometimes, instead of "reforming" a program that no one likes. Just start over, already.) But sometimes it actually works and we get something decent.

The procedural process to pass legislation is lengthy and difficult on purpose. The Senate in particular has mechanisms in place - like the filibuster - to prevent a simple majority from slamming through whatever they want with little to no input from the opposition. Can you imagine what would happen if everything passed? What a mess!

Even the Founding Fathers mixed it up pretty good. A number of delegates to the Constitutional Convention never signed the Constitution because they didn't agree with it, and ratification by the states was not unanimous by any means. The Vice President and the Secretary of the Treasury had a duel over political trash-talk, for crying out loud, and the Secretary died. (Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.) John Adams and Thomas Jefferson couldn't stand each other when they were both involved with the federal government.

There's a lot of give and take in government because there are so many competing ideas. Even if there's one idea that everyone actually agreed on, there are still a billion different ways of implementing that one idea. There's no one way to do anything. We just hope that what we do end up with tastes all right.