Spring Into Action

It's been a long winter. The frequent and brutal snows of the past four months have been significant, but the temperature indoors has been below chilly for most of those days. Especially if you happened to be a legislator. The sequester is just one example of how things tend to slow or stop in the middle of a freeze. The inaction of our lawmakers caused billions in random cuts to appear overnight, and even though a simple meeting to agree to disagree and make good faith promises to work on things in the upcoming year, there will still be no tours of the White House. Oh sure, you can wander around outside, but at your peril. The sequester hasn't limited the zeal of the security force in place outside.
And speaking of security zeal, how about those gun control debates? That has certainly added to the sound and fury of the long winter's night. But like Shakespeare suggested, all of that noise signified effectively nothing, except in Colorado, where the lack of snow has apparently given lawmakers there some traction to pass some rather impressive gun control bills. Just up the road from that state's capitol, however, the Weld County Sheriff has no intention of dealing with these “feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are unenforceable.” Well, that's more like it! That's the kind of no-nonsense, head-in-the-sand response that fails to get things done. That's the kind of response that we have come to expect from our elected officials.
At least that's what the past few months have been about. Maybe now that Spring has sprung we can look forward to our legislators and other elected-types emerging from their holes and seeing their shadows. Maybe that will be enough to remind them of their own mortality and the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few or the one. But first, how about a couple of weeks off?