As I watched C-SPAN Tuesday afternoon, I was appalled by what Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, said.

"We've spent the last nine months cleaning up the mess the representatives across the aisle created," Ryan said on the House floor.

Ryan went on to say the Republicans have controlled Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court for the past 16 years, and their control of all branches of the government is responsible for two wars, the recession and the rising national deficit.

First, the Constitution states that only Congress has the power to declare war on a country. So, blaming that on a president is ignorant – Congress didn't have to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq. Perhaps, Ryan should read the Constitution again before blaming any war on a president.

Second, the recession is a direct result of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. In 1999, President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was in the White House. In an interview with Maria Bartiromo, a reporter for BusinessWeek magazine, former President Clinton even defended his signing of the act.

The GLB Act made one fatal error, which helped to create the current recession. It repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. The Glass-Steagall Act was passed in 1933 to prohibit commercial banks from partnering with investment business. This act was designed to protect banks from becoming unstable and creating mass bankruptcy.

For months, Americans have been losing their homes and jobs because the financial sector collapsed as a direct result of the crash of the housing market. Several banks and lending institutions failed because their investments in the housing market collapsed.

Then, after President Obama took office, he passed the stimulus fund that bailed out the financial sector.

If President Clinton had vetoed the GLB Act, the financial sector would not have been hurt as severely as it was because of the separation of investment institutions and banks. Americans would not have lost as many jobs, and President Obama would not have passed the stimulus package or urged President Bush to pass the failed TARP fund.

Democrats supported the GLB Act, repealing the Banking Act of 1933, and allowed the recent recession to cripple the American public. Democrats passed the bailout, increasing the deficit. Democrats still support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which Congress had no small part in.

I think both Democrats and Republicans need to stop pointing fingers back and forth across the aisle and start looking at the three pointing back upon them. Stop the political mudslinging and start producing laws that actually help the American public become better, safer and healthier, both economically and financially.

Too many laws have been passed by Congress in the past 20 years for special interests, and too few have actually helped create anything but public distrust, poverty and socioeconomic barriers that keep this country from becoming the land of opportunity it once was purported as being.

The U.S. claims to be the richest country in the world. If this is true, there should not be more than 75 percent of the population living below or at the poverty line in this country. There should not be any businesses deemed "too big to fail," because that goes against antitrust and antimonoply laws, like the Sherman Act, passed in 1890. The Sherman Act was designed to increase competition in U.S. markets.

If a company fails in a true capitalistic society, then it fails on its own merit. If a company is "too big to fail," then by the definition of competition in a capitalistic society, it has been restricted due to the size of the company.

If a company's failure creates an economic hardship on the market so overarching that the government must give it large sums of money to stay in operation or face massive unemployment and loss of property, then it should be obvious to everyone in the country it is too big to exist.

- Corene Brisendine is a senior in print journalism. Please send comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu.