On March 17, members of Congress spent more than 11 hours interrogating the most muscular baseball players they could get their subpoenas on about steroid use.

“We’re here to protect the nation’s children,” the congressmen and congresswomen declared.

In the early morning hours of March 21, Congress wrapped up an emergency weekend session to pass a bill designed to prolong the vegetative state of Terri Schiavo. The bill was passed despite its blatant violation of the constitutional separation of powers and a long legal battle with consistent decisions by all levels of the Florida state judiciary. “We’re here to defend the sanctity of life,” they said.

On March 22, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack signed into law a bill dictating how products containing pseudoephedrine, a methamphetamine ingredient, will be sold in private businesses. “We’ve got to keep the public safe,” Iowa lawmakers said.

All three of these actions are examples of the lack of principled, critical thought in the political process today. It brings to mind a childhood game — “Pin the tail on the donkey” — where each participant is blindfolded and then stumbles around with a pin and a tail, hoping to attach it to the hind end of the donkey on the wall.

The actions of lawmakers today seem to be a more advanced version of this game, with the donkey replaced by critical issues of foreign and domestic policy and the pins replaced by legislation and congressional hearings. The blindfolds remain, however. And while the mistakes in the childhood version give it its humor, the mistakes made in the government version are no laughing matter.

The thought process by which lawmakers choose issues on which to focus their energy on is baffling. The use of steroids in baseball demands we take action to protect our children? Protection from whom?

The permanent vegetative state of a woman must be extended even against the wishes of her husband and herself, and in contradiction to the Constitution and years of legal proceedings? By what logic?

Methamphetamine manufacture and use constitute a public safety crisis? What is “public safety” and where is the “crisis?”

None of these questions have been answered with sound logical arguments. In fact, it is rare they are asked at all. Lawmakers are obsessed with action, with “getting things done.” The purpose and legitimacy of the action are typically ignored or explained by some vague cliche invoking the children or the “public good.”

The result is the 11-hour spectacle of a roomful of smug members of Congress questioning baseball players about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the proper function of U.S. government while Iranian mullahs brazenly declare their simultaneous goals of destroying the West and acquiring nuclear capabilities for “peaceful” reasons. Or lawmakers proudly declaring victory against the methamphetamine “crisis” while budget deficits grow ever larger.

What is lacking in today’s political climate are rational principles and the understanding of proper role of government, which is strictly the protection of the citizen’s individual rights. This requires a clear understanding of the nature of those rights, which are described in the Constitution as the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

When the Founding Fathers wrote those words, they intended them as the guiding principle of the new nation. The Constitution itself was a document designed to strictly limit the power of government, not a mandate for its expansion into every crevice of individual life. Today’s guiding political principle, if it can be called that, is that the government can never do enough, that only through its expansion can the nation’s problems be solved.

I can only guess what the class of lawmakers deems to be the proper role of government. Perhaps they would say it is to be the surrogate parent to all of the nation’s children, the manager of every business, the preacher in every church, the doctor in every hospital, the loan officer in every bank, the teacher in every school, the owner of every baseball team or the conscience of every individual.

Or perhaps, in any case, they would respond by asking for a blindfold and a pin.