WASHINGTON D.C.—As the One Hundred Twelfth Congress takes control of the U.S. House of Representatives this week, we should be prepared for anything. There are three pressing and urgent matters that need to be given priority, but we should not expect a sudden possession of adult behavior from such a wide and diverse group of power players, many of which have been brought into power by non-serious and nonsensical voters. We have the Democratic Party, which didn’t understand that the results of the midterm elections last November were a referendum on their continuing to spend taxpayers money, much like the Republican Party did before them; and we have two factions within the Republican Party. A group of moderates, who understand the dangers we face, will be drowned out by the right wing of the Republican Party, which voted in Tea Party candidates bent on doing something to change America.

The one thing the Tea Party does have in common with the rest of us, is that they believe government spending is out of control, but they are determined to purify the Republican Party of moderate Republicans, whom they have nicknamed “Rhinos.” They expect to turn back the clock and have a president in office that looks the way they believe he should look. We don’t have to go into their reasoning for such a thing or have to stretch our imaginations to see what that really means.

After having liberals equal to President Obama run our nation, including former President Jimmy Carter, we never heard, “We want to take our nation back, he’s a Muslim, he’s scary or dangerous.” Those accusations are limited to the first African-American president in our great nation’s history—whose African-born father seems to override his maternal grandfather’s service to the nation during WWII—even though it was his white grandparents who raised him, and he never met his father until he was an adult.

The serious matters we face are deficit spending, which needs to not just be curtailed but we need to cease doing it with the exception of the current entitlements (Social Security and Medicare) and the wars we are fighting. Then we need to tackle the nation’s security. Despite a Stanford University economist’s ridiculous attack on the TSA, we should have a serious and sober discussion in the halls of Congress and with the White House about making our nation safer from the terrorists who seek to destroy our way of life and kill innocent Americans. The other important issue we need to debate seriously is dealing with the educational crisis in our schools. The political right needs to stop the demagoguery of blaming the teachers’ union, and the political left needs to stop claiming the answer is to spend more money per student. Perhaps if parents showed more respect for teachers, or the same level of respect that they show celebrities and professional athletes, their children would learn to respect education a lot more.

It would surprise me if we had anything less than political theatre at its worst all over again as we have witnessed for the past 20 years. We have now replaced a Speaker of the House who simply does not understand Americans and associates the nation’s core values with her own constituents. These constituents live in the Bay Area of Northern California with a Speaker who cries on cue better than any current actor in Hollywood. This new Speaker also panders to people who claim the nation has been destroyed in the last two years. However, these same people didn’t bother to complain about the same out of control spending when the White House and the Congress were both run by people who look like our iconic leaders on Mount Rushmore.

Perhaps if the One Hundred Twelfth U.S. Congress, who are highly partisan, took their jobs seriously, we’d possibly see an end to a deterioration of the nation’s security, fiscal health and lack of education for the youth in America. As for family values, that’s not a politician’s job, that belongs at home with the parents. With the past two decades of American political bloodletting from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich referring to then First Lady Hillary Clinton in a not so polite manner, to the most recent and our first woman Speaker of the House referring to our former President George Walker Bush as a liar, who knows if either side has had enough bickering and is ready to tackle serious issues that cannot be ignored much longer.

God bless our troops, who fight on the frontlines of this war on terror. Pray for them and their families who miss them all greatly.