How in the world would Republicans move us forward?

Every discussion about the November election seems to focus on how people feel about Mitt Romney or President Obama. I view the election from a completely different angle. Having served in government, I think it’s really about which political party is best capable of preventing the U.S. from becoming a second-rate country.

In order to make a choice as to who would be the most effective president, it’s important to look at what has happened in Washington in the past few years. Our federal government is hopelessly gridlocked. Few major bills have passed since 2010, and the prospects for any real progress next year are even worse.

In his first campaign, President Obama pledged that he would work with the Republican Party to get things done. It was a very naïve promise because the Republicans never intended to work with him. The day he took office, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pledged that he would work to make Obama a one-term president, and he kept that promise.

Every time a major piece of legislation was up for debate, McConnell used all of the parliamentary devices in the books to stop its passage. Senate Republicans threatened to filibuster 36 proposed laws and were able to prevent them from passing. While the Democrats managed to pass a few meaningful bills during the first two years of Obama’s tenure, nothing has happened in the two years since the Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives.

If you take a good look at the House, it’s easy to see why it is crippled beyond belief. At least 60 of the 435 members have pledged in one way or another to shut down the government if they can’t get their way. Speaker John Boehner is known to be open to any reasonable compromise that will make government work, but he is unable to get the rebels to give in on anything the Tea Party opposes, and he is paralyzed.