Columns

I've noticed a recurring question as I talk to people about Congress. What can be done, they wonder, to get Congress back on track? Is our national legislature capable of serious policy making?

At a time when polls say jobs and the economy are Americans’ chief concern, Congress has not passed a single piece of economic legislation. Instead, it’s focused on investigations. It’s an institution with very little to show for its efforts.

I still call my dad most every morning. While I’m driving to work, he’s slowly but surely making his way to breakfast in the retirement facility where my parents now live.

I sometimes have difficulty communicating on the phone with Dad since his hearing is not what it used to be. (Dad just turned 89.) So, I was encouraged when Dad told me he was getting new hearing aids. I thought that would make our conversations easier.

“I just got my new hearing aids,” he proudly announced one morning not long ago.

Tea-party activists led by Jessamine County’s David Adams recently filed lawsuits in Franklin Circuit Court challenging Gov. Steve Beshear’s arrogant use of executive power to force Kentuckians to participate in Obamacare.

Beshear claims he has the right to create a government-run health exchange and expand Kentucky’s Medicaid rolls – Obamacare’s state mandates – without agreement by lawmakers.

I grew up in Tornado Alley. Tornadoes were more of an event I enjoyed than a threat I feared, so invincible did I think I was as a child and teenager. As we gathered in the Shively’s storm shelter with other neighbors, I rather enjoyed the social gathering and naively hoped the twister somehow would be bad enough to cancel school but not destructive enough to hurt anyone.

Questions of why, an inevitable response to suffering, weren’t in my purview, at least not then.