Final Blog Post

            I think that the purpose of writing these blog posts was to encourage us to keep up to date on the current news not only in congress but also within the American government in general.  Before this class, I really didn’t know what was going on in our country.  I never followed politics or what was happening within Congress.  Being enrolled in this class and learning the layout and history of Congress and simultaneously watching real life examples play out in the real world allowed me to fully emerge myself in the class material. 

            I enjoyed writing about a new topic every week instead of following the same stories because it allowed me to touch on as many different issues as I could get my hands on.  The topic that interested me the most were the two blogs I wrote on the cyber security situation between the United States and China.  The cyber security controversy allowed me to not only look into legislation on that topic but it also allowed me to understand how foreign relations may work when issues such as cyber security arise.  I knew very little on how we as a country deal with outside threats such as cyber hacks from other countries.  It was interesting to see how China originally said that they were not to blame for the attacks but later confessed and we as a country had to take their word that they would not do something like that again.  Another aspect that I learned from writing about cyber security was the fact that scheduling within Congress is so difficult.  The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act continuously got pushed aside on the agenda of important things to work on even though this was a major issue and concern for many American citizens.  This brought in the aspect of the two congresses.  It was possible that many constituents were concerned about their personal information being safe when word got out about the government system hacking but within Congress this seemed like a lesser issue in comparison to things like terrorist threats.  Congress members have to deal with balancing situations like this on a daily basis.  

            Overall, I think that writing these blog posts and this class as a whole has opened me up to many new realms of government that I had never really focused on before.  Congress was always just a chapter in many government classes but really being able to go into the many different aspects (ex: women in Congress, structure of Congress, campaigns, and interest groups) of Congress that I really didn’t know anything about was very useful for me.  It was helpful to be able to dive into something and be surrounded by people that were so thoroughly interested in this class.  Even though our blog posts are over, I will do my best to keep up with news sources like The Hill so that I know what is going on in Congress as well as my individual representatives and Senators.