Evan Solomon, host of CBC Radio's The House, reflects on the failure of Democrats and Republicans to reach a budget deal, resulting in $85 billion in U.S. government spending cuts, in his weekly radio essay as heard on March 2, 2013.

It's come to this in the U.S.

A president bemoaning the fact he doesn't have the power of a dictator or the mind tricks of a Jedi, as if those would be better options than the democratic tools he has at his disposal.

Mere months after his re-election, U.S. President Obama now admits he can't strike a basic deal with Republicans to stop the so-called sequestration cuts that began to hit the U.S. just before midnight on Friday.

The sequester hoicks $85 billion in spending cuts out of the U.S. economy.

Cuts of this size are usually done with a surgical political scalpel.

This is like removing a gall bladder with a snow shovel.

'I am not a dictator, I'm the president. Ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say we need to go to catch a plane, I can't have secret service block the doorway. Even though most people agree that I'm presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don't take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind–meld with these folks and convince them to do what's right.' —U.S. President Barack Obama

Remember, the whole point of the sequester was just to be a threat, not a plan.

The potential cuts such an odious punishment that it would motivate a bipartisan super committee to agree on real, discretionary cuts.

Now the punishment is the plan.

What does this tell us about the state of the U.S. democracy? Essentially the government there is now working not because of politicians, but in spite of them.

It's as if politicians have given up. They now simply build into the system their expected failure to communicate, remote control cuts.

Call it drone democracy. This slide into a kind of feckless federalism in the U.S. has been accompanied by a shiny new technocratic jargon:

You've been on the fiscal cliff, you've hit a debt ceiling, and now you've been sequestered.

Monetary metaphors meant to explain the surreal quality of it all.

Now get ready for a total government shut down if both parties don't come to an agreement on spending by March 27.

The great political game of chicken Obama and the Republicans are playing has global implications.

The U.S. cuts could throw their economy back into a short recession, and it could hurt Canadian exporters and slow down trade at the border.

While Republicans and Democrats blame each other for the impasse, you have to wonder has scoring political points finally suffocated the very point of governing? Has partisanship become so pervasive that politicians don't even bother to govern, they put the hard work on auto pilot?

Welcome to sequestration, let the cuts fall where they may.