by EJ Young

Created on: July 31, 2011   Last Updated: August 14, 2011

Compromise sounds like a dirty word for some new members of Congress. Tea Party politicians belonging to the Republican party seem to take pride in flat out refusing to consider compromise on the debt limit increase.

The debt limit fiasco serves as a good example of lack of compromise from both parties but the Republican are more responsible for hampering effective legislation.

Washington politicians appear to be validating former Jimmy Carter’s statement on NBC Nightly News in the fall of 2010. He cited political unwillingness to compromise as a reason for “making the country more polarized than during the Civil War”.

He followed by saying President Obama “suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen – even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the war between the states”.

The model of dysfunction, politicians look more like indignant childish bullies than leaders chosen to represent the good of the people. Since the last election and the shift of power to a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the Republicans seem rigid and less likely to compromise on vital legislation such as increasing the debt limit.

Most likely both parties are to blame for the political dysfunction in Washington but the debt limit issue underscores the inability of Republicans to work together and compromise.

The most glaring example of this rigid attitude surfaces in the plan known as the Grand Bargain. Negotiating for several days, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner designed a plan to aggressively attack the nation’s debt. This Grand Bargain offered up huge cuts of approximately $3 trillion during the next decade along with the addition of over $800 billion in revenue. 

In the spirit of compromise, the President angered core Democrats overlooking protests from his own party by agreeing to deep cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Medicare in order to pass vital legislation to increase the debt limit. In exchange for the President giving up money for human services and senior citizen programs, the Speaker agreed to reinstating pre-George W. Bush tax codes for the wealthy.  

Bringing in an expected minimum of $800 billion in revenue, the country’s millionaires and billionaires would no longer receive the tax cuts granted by the former President. Speaker Boehner pulled away from any handshake, giving in to pressure from a group

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