On the House Schedule page that’s attached to its web home, the U.S. House of Representative employs what might normally be considered a … creative description of its summer recess. It’s fitting then that, in a year when the phrase “summer district work period” could actually be applied without a wink, a nudge, and an unfettered trip to the beach, the work being done by House members seemed to be on the painful side of things: The Democrats — dispatched to promote the President’s health care plan — were met with angry resistance from mobs of conspiracy hacks, while the Republicans — dispatched to prove that the citizens of the United States don’t want anything to do with that sort of reform — were working just as hard to drum up protest against the administration’s plans.

According to the New York Times, first term South Carolina representative Jim DeMint is doing his part. “Taking questions from a friendly crowd of 500 people here the other day,” reporter Katharine Q. Seelye writes, “Mr. DeMint did little to correct their misimpressions about health care legislation but rather reinforced their worst fears.” At the suggestion that the administration’s health care proposal would “give the government electronic access to bank accounts,” for example, Seelye reports that DeMint offered a reply that implied the Obama team might look to do just that — or to perpetrate a host of any other conspiracy-nightmare, big-government crimes: “This is about more government control,” Sellye quotes DeMint as saying. “If it was about health care, we could get it done in a couple of weeks.” It begs the question: Is a man who, along with his colleagues, seems unashamed to leave his constituents with such a dramatic example of wrong-headedness fit to govern?

For their part, the Democrats (with the ever-charming exception of Barney Frank) have been no better. As my Unfit colleague Josh Rosenblatt has pointed out, the pathetic effort put forth by the party in defense of the health care plan serves only as an example of its continuing inability to take a political stand (thanks for the legacy, Bill). In fucking-up so royally, they may have ruined more than just the pending health care legislation. Which begs the question: Are such cowards fit to govern?

Post-Bush II, the Republicans are generally returning to their familiar complaints about the size and reach of the federal government. In terms of health care this manifests itself as death panels, socialism, and Obama requesting access to your bank account. Federal involvement in everyday life is, to these folks, something of a parasitic action — never mind the fact that they rely on the stuff to pay for the luxury trimmings that come with being a representative of the people. Meanwhile, the Democrats (or at least the head of that party) hope to effect the most major collection of policy changes since the New Deal while remaining on speaking terms with the entire country, right and left. Politics may indeed make for strange bedfellows, but it’s not often that everyone squeezes into the Lincoln Bedroom all at the same time.

For both parties, it seems, extra-ordinary duplicity is the order of the day.

Either way, it’s all wrapped-up in the two-party system that serves to monopolize what used to be the American Experiment — and the fact that the notion that very few of our politicians are actually fit to serve is an open acknowledgment that is broadly used by candidates to justify their asking for votes seems to beg for a change in business is usual. This, of course, is both the issue that Obama ran on and the reason that some of us worried that whatever fresh start he promised (earnest or not) would be short-circuited by the system. Worse, things are so stacked against outsider political parties that a defensible organized challenge to the status quo works better as a myth (see Roosevelt, Theodore and Perot, Ross).

Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about the set-up of other people’s democracies and start thinking about the nature of our own. A good place to start might be with a question about why the “summer district work period” has morphed into “summer recess.”