Polarization In Congress

“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”—John F. Kennedy. In today’s world, political issues are very divided. You have your right and your left, there is hardly any in between. Senators can’t work with each other, Representatives can’t work together, everyone believes that their way is the right way. Washington warned about dividing the nation into political parties. Thomas Jefferson once said, “North and South will hang together if they have you to hang on.” He united the colonies at the time and he didn 't want there to be a big division. If we look at a map of political parties majorities by

Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Republicans and Democrats are more polarized than ever. Polarization is the division of two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs. Today 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median. In contrast, there was more compromise in years before, we have become more divided and divided. In congress you can see these statistics take place when ever we have a government shutdown. A government shutdown is “the process the Executive Branch must enter into when the Congress creates a "funding gap" by choosing not to or failing to pass legislation funding government operations and agencies, or, after the Congress passes a bill to fund the government and sends it to the President, the President vetoes that bill. If interim or full-year appropriations are not enacted into law, the United States Constitution and the Antideficiency Act require the federal government begins a "shutdown" of the affected activities.”. In other words, its when congress can’t agree to pass a funding bill, and so they can’t officially fund any organization, therefore a shutdown is

Each one wants to portray one political party as the villain and the other as the hero. Common news sources that tend to be very biased are Fox News, CNN, BuzzFeed News, and many more. With many social problems each party wants to solve them one way, and any other way is wrong, however, this is not an ideal way to govern. You step on everyone’s toes, and things wont get done. A very popular topic that divides the nation greatly is abortion, many think its wrong and cruel, while others believe its correct in certain situations. You can see the effects of this with the government trying to defund Planned Parenthood, Congress votes to defund and the president overrides it and nothing gets achieved. Media might want to portray this as “Men being horrible humans and they have no right to choose what a women can do with their bodies” and attack men, but there are also women against Planned Parenthood, and thats how it goes with controversial topics, media try to shape to what benefits them and their views. Or, they will try to portray it a specific way that only shows one side saying horrific things and not the other . This is called Political Socialization which is the process by which people form their ideas about politics and acquire their ideas about the government. A main source is media. A lot of the time you will only here about certain events on a specific website if it fits their political agenda and will