By Wayne G. Reilly

The last few weeks have produced some remarkable political theater in Washington. The speaker of the House has been serially humiliated, the vice president apparently has ridden to the rescue of a hopelessly deadlocked Congress and the hurricane victims of the Northeast were told that the Congress would get around to helping them before too long, maybe.

If one enjoys dramatic farce, the Congress has provided a cornucopia of that commodity, but it has not provided much in the way of solutions for our country’s problems. There seems to be some agreement that the most critical of those problems are reducing the federal debt and restoring the country’s economic vigor. Clearly these two problems are interrelated, but the Congress is most directly capable of dealing with the national debt.

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Reilly is professor emeritus of political science at Hollins University.