Don’t worry. This is not a civics lesson about the powers of Congress. There is no point to that because our government is too far gone to resemble the Washington we learned about in school. As far as our Congress is concerned, the only measuring stick that matters is how many times and how hard lawmakers have dropped the ball.

If you are a politician you should know that popular sovereignty means the people tell you what to do. You can stop telling us what the people want. It’s all too often a lie anyway, like the assurances from Democrats that the Affordable Care Act was something the American people had to have:

Second, the American public wants it. 

I live in Illinois. Illinois is a conservative’s nightmare. If you are trapped in the Land of Lincoln you can give up on anything worthwhile happening in the political arena. Better to hope for a miracle to minimize the damage from Springfield lawmakers’ decisions or, in the case of public pension reform, the refusal to make a decision.