Recent discourse in Washington has proved to be fruitless as policy debates have given way to partisan bickering. The recent impeachment proceedings have only produced more distrust and a further attempt to tarnish the government’s institutions.

Cutthroat political maneuvers have unfortunately become the norm. The impeachment of President Trump in the House of Representatives last month was notable in that not a single member of the minority party voted to impeach the President. While Congress embroils itself in the drama of impeachment, important legislation is continuing to fall by the wayside as any long term foresight seems to have vanished from this congress.

The duty of Congress was never to destroy political rivals, but rather work with the executive branch to form real solutions to existential problems our representatives are ignoring. Recent history makes this sentiment sound to contemporary ears quite silly. We have come to expect that our big problems can be kicked down the road.

Republicans have been guilty for years of pursuing scandals in search of political gain. Bill Clinton’s impeachment and eventual acquittal in the nineties was largely a media stunt to attack the President’s character rather than focusing on constitutional merits. In the most recent decade, similarly odd obsessions over the Benghazi terrorist attack and Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server struck many people as insincere and merely headhunting.

This period certainly weakened the reputation of the Republican Party being a party actually interested in the issues that matter to Americans – jobs, security, and certain civic liberties. They abandoned their conservative message.

In the wake of the 2018 election, Democratic leaders promised a whole range of popular, bipartisan fixes to pressing issues such as the rising cost of prescription drugs, and regulating Silicon Valley monopolies. The Democratic Party has had the opportunity to legislate on principle, but instead they too have been acting purely on emotion. By pursuing impeachment, they broke their own message of being the decent party.

Many Republican congressmen have lamented correctly that Democrats have merely jumped from one hyped up scandal to another. Today, Democratic politicians sound just as biased and conspiratorial when discussing impeachment as Republicans did in the not so distant past. Democrats in practice have now shown that they are really not any different than their opponents.

The next election should be decided by policy alone. For the Democrats to continue to claim that they are somehow more civil and well educated is laughable.