gridlock pt. 2

Today we learned that Newt Gingrich was the "father" of gridlock because he demonized the democratic side of congress. He made the democrats seem like the bad guys to the American people by talking to an empty congress chamber, making it seem like they couldn't disagree with what he said about them. I think that was an interesting political maneuver, but the way that he went about it was not right. Demonizing the other side might work to win an election, but what happens when he/she needs to work with the other group that he/she humiliated? There are always two sides to a coin. Political tribalism has positive and negative effects. Because Gingrich set the standard for humiliating the other side, this leads to a gridlock because neither side wants to cooperate with the other side. Gingrich even gave republicans a memo in congress to refer to the democrats in certain choice word. Because congress is very bipartition, is very hard for either side to pass legislations that they want to pass. Because of congresses inability to pass important legislation, they are not able to fix infrastructure problems. Such can be seen in the Brent Spence bridge, where presidents (Obama and Trump) vowed to fix the bridge, but were not able to follow up on the problem. While congresses idea of using the gas tax to fund money for the bridge seems like it might work, it negatively affects the poor income families heavily. This is all combined with Trump's threat of not following up on funding for infrastructure because of the private investigations into Trump's alleged collusion with Russia. There is a lot of problems that inhibit infrastructure laws from being passed, but everyone one, all three branches agree that not addressing the crumbling infrastructure is a problem that needs to be fixed.