Yesterday, North Carolina’s Democrat Governor, one Bev Perdue, made the following joke (at least, she says it was a joke):
“You have to have more ability from Congress, I think, to work together and to get over the partisan bickering and focus on fixing things. I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that. The one good thing about Raleigh is that for so many years we worked across party lines. It’s a little bit more contentious now but it’s not impossible to try to do what’s right in this state. You want people who don’t worry about the next election.”
OK, I don’t think the above would be a comedic hit on SNL, nor would it have drawn much laughter had Jay Leno or Jon Stewart said it.
No one is laughing. Conservatives and libertarians are irate, and even lefties like ThinkProgress are not amused:
It’s not hard to sympathize with the sentiment behind Perdue’s remark. Because they have to run for reelection every two years, congressmen remain so fixated on fundraising and campaigning that they forget to be lawmakers and have trouble putting politics aside to focus on compromise and what’s good for the country. However, it’s a dangerous precedent to set to suggest we simply suspend democracy every time unemployment goes above 9 percent.
The serious, responsible way to pursue Perdue’s idea would be through a constitutional amendment.
Gee. It isn’t every day that I see a major leftist site acknowledging that the Constitution means something. (I might say it restored my faith except I haven’t had faith in the left for decades.)
Here’s what the Constitution (Article 1, Section 2) has to say on the subject:
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
There is of course no provision for suspending elections. While I don’t think the “joke” was funny (and I doubt it was a joke), I share the governor’s concern about not wanting people who worry about the next election. I think that is why Congress is held in such extremely low esteem. (83.3% disapprove.)
I think the founders wanted congressional representatives to ideally be persons of good character (who have consciences and want to do what they consider to be right), and I worry that wanting to be elected to political office creates an inherent conflict of interest rendering it difficult if not impossible to be guided by what is right. Instead, they are guided by the principle of “I will keep my job, by any means necessary.” Election to Congress is a huge investment; the average cost of a congressional seat in 2008 was $1.1 million.
People do not spend that kind of money to get a job unless they want it for keeps.
All this prattle about how to “get the money out” of elections and politics is silly. There is only one remedy for the situation of government by people who want to get elected, and that is term limits. But it will never happen, for the simple reason that it would destroy gigantic career investments.
The president is limited to two terms, and while it would take a constitutional amendment to limit congress in a similar manner, the general public is overwhelmingly (78%) in favor of congressional term limits. Politically, that breaks down into 84% of Republicans, 74% of Democrats and independents, i.e. a whopping landslide majority of the voting public. That’s pretty close to the percentage of Americans who disapprove of Congress.
If Congress got behind such an amendment, would their approval ratings improve? Perhaps, but I don’t think the only approval they care about is getting reelected.
So term limits will go nowhere. It is a joke.
(Might as well talk about ending the war on drugs.)
Comments
18 responses to “A funnier “joke” than suspending elections?”
Something you posted has screwed up the sidebar. It is now at the bottom of the blog.
Do I think the Democrats will end the WODs even if they promise to do it to win an election?
No.
The Rs will do it. Nixon to China etc.
And my comment is now on the sidebar. Cute.
I’m running the latest FireFox.
Someone named norwalk virus at DPUD had the best response to her comments
http://doubleplusundead.com/2011/09/27/im-joking/#comment-6101
I’m okay with suspending elections for two years. I’m not okay with extending the terms of Congress to cover the gap.
I could get behind that.
I just looked at the html and it looks like you have a closed </div> tag with no opening. Plus some other unnecessary html.
I removed the unopened </div> tag and that fixed it.
I found three more divs and removed them. I don’t know how or why these div tags are appearing. They seem to be buried invisibly inside quoted and pasted text.
Term limits without other reforms will just encourage more looting during the time the bastards have.
Kill the gerrymandered electoral districts, redraw them with a set of rules on using things like state and county borders, Interstates, rivers, mountain ranges, etc. to mark the borders, and severe penalties for using voting trends and you get the term limits built in because there’s no such thing as a “safe” district any more.
That’s even less likely than term limits. The real owners would object. (Where do you think the money for the campaigns comes from? It sure as hell isn’t the electoral districts they’re allegedly representing. Megacorp X donates enough to get Candidate Y elected, Megacorp X damn well expects Candidate Y to jump when it says. It sure explains the lavish corporate welfare, doesn’t it?)
California has term limits. It hasn’t improved the state legislature. If anything, the days of “Big Daddy” Jesse Unruh were better. But then that’s when the Democratic Party actually had a little morality on its side. From the Wiki article on Unruh:
…he authored California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination by businesses that offer services to the public, and was a model for later reforms enacted nationally during the 1960s and 1970s.
And the days of Willie Brown were far better than today. Unless the idea is to elect untried outsiders and hope nothing much gets done (which has a certain logic) term limits don’t accomplish much. The corruption is built in because of government’s long established meddling with business and its incursion into the economic area.
Even if it wouldn’t accomplish much, if given a chance I’d still vote for term limits – anything is better than nothing.
The problem lies with people who want to hold office, and thus run because they want to be elected. They have made it their goal in life to tell other people what to do, and their counterparts are locked out because those who don’t want to tell people what to do do not want to run for office. I like the idea of untried outsiders being able to run, and I think mandatory term limits would make the prospect of running for office less attractive, and perhaps drive down the pricetag. Nothing would be perfect, though. Kate, I like your idea, but how would it be implemented? By constitutional amendment? Drafting the language might be difficult in light of varying population densities.
I’m all for getting rid of gerrymandering, not so much on term limits.
I would think that with term limits the staff becomes the de facto lawmaker as it takes time for a new pol to figure out how to be a legislator so they’d rely heavily on the unelected staff of the previous office holder.
So we’d have people in charge of the staff, getting the next telegenic, blow-dried teleprompter reader to Stand Up To The Corporate Fat Cats(tm) and Grasp The Broom Of Reform And Sweep This State Clean! all while the people doing the actual legislating last forever.
Getting rid of gerrymandering, as Kate notes, would get rid of “safe districts” where pols don’t even have to run, they just win automatically because of the “D” or “R”.
V,
The staff runs the office now anyway. How else do you get 2,000 page bills no Cong Critter one has read. He assigns 200 pages to each of his staff. They give it a glance for anything that might impair election chances and tell the critter how to vote.
The only way out is shrink.
Eric, Veesheer,
Australia manages – with a much bigger range in population density. Two elections back, the prime minister lost his seat: imagine the current Congress Majority Leader losing a seat at a congressional election and you’ll get the idea.
In the US it would take a constitutional amendment to push the guidelines into place and keep them there: and make sure that it included language preventing any political party from being involved in drawing the district boundaries. I wouldn’t object to something that automatically invalidated all elections held in a state where more votes were recorded than registered voters.
The corruption levels in this country are breathtaking. After 9 years, I still find it amazing that people accept so much open corruption.
I would go more for doing away with Gerrymandering. Less Gerrymandering would mean more electoral diversity within districts, and fewer safe seats. Less safe seats means that Congressmen would have to listen more to all their constituents, instead of voting on grounds of ideological or party purity.
Which party benefits more from Gerrymandering?
Which party benefits more from Gerrymandering?
Depends on which one had the power when the districts were drawn.
Quite often it’s a deal between the two, “We’ll give you this one, you give us that one.”
I would love to get rid of gerrymandering, and I am sure a majority of Americans would too. The problem of course is that whoever has power does it, and I think it would be tougher to pass constitutional amendment against gerrymandering than against term limits — mainly because term limits is an easy concept everyone can understand.
What fascinates me is how something supported by such a HUGE majority is politically impossible.
You’d think the people have no say.
Re which benefits:
From January 2009 at National Review Online’s The Corner: Slate has a slideshow up today of the 20 most gerrymandered congressional districts. Not surprisingly, only four are held by Republicans the NRO article has a link to the Slate article. Unfortunately, Slate has deactivated the slide show, which was still active three months ago.
Zombie took the Slate slideshow, to produceThe top 10. This was done after the 2010 election. Some of the districts such as IL-17, which the Democrats had drawn to carve out a Democratic enclave in downstate Illinois, turned Republican. Zombie also says that Fl-22 , which Alan West won in 2010, was drawn for electoral balance.
What if, in conjunction with term limits, congressional representatives are selected in the same way as jurors? Then, instead of the power-hungry seeking office, you would have ordinary folks who were “drafted” into duty, if you will.
This isn’t, of course, a truly serious proposal… but if one wants to eliminate the power-hungry from the pool of prospective representatives, there aren’t many other options.