I agree with the commenter here, it is absurd that any legislator should be allowed to vote after losing an election. I don’t understand why there should be such a long delay to seat the new Congress, or why they should be allowed a post-election session. I assume that this is a relic of the long travel times in the late eighteenth century, but there’s no excuse for it now. Perhaps we need a Constitutional amendment to fix this.
15 thoughts on “No More Lame Ducks”
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I think another reason is to give courts all over the country enough time to deal with complaints of fraud. In the case of a hung Electoral College Congress could end up electing a President and Vice President and you don’t want to end up reversing that.
I don’t know that we need “immediate seating” so much as limiting votes to a very limited list: Declaration of War or perhaps Disaster Area. Most anything else can wait, or has already been fundamentally delegated to the bureaucrats anyway.
We don’t need an amendment to fix it, since that particularity of Congress’ business is subject to Congress’ own whims, rather than specified in the Constitution.
They can fix it just by voting to fix it; and if they’re unwilling to fix it in that manner, they’re sure as hell not going to go through with an Amendment, which would require 2/3 in each chamber, rather than a bare majority.
This is definitely something that needs to be “fixed.” There should not be a session between elections and seating the new Congress. We don’t even need the limited list Al suggested – the President can take emergency actions, even war or mobilizing the National Guard, for up to 100 days without Congressional approval.
Also, if they knew that they wouldn’t get a lame duck session, there might have been more pressure on them to pass a budget and fix the tax problem before the election, making them more accountable.
Of course you could limit them to only the lame duck session.
i.e. they get to pass laws for only a month every two years and the ‘mandate’ is what they’ve been bidding to the voters to get themselves re-elected.
I reckon C-SPAN might get better ratings.
Well, if they’re not going to have a lame-duck session, which would happen every two years, you might as well just call a recess on the other years and shut down Congress from November until January every year, like a number of State Houses and Senates who don’t have full-year sessions. There are enough holidays in that period to make it worth doing regardless.
Can’t imagine that many of the members of Congress would agree to the pay cut, though…
No More Lame Ducks
Sounds like a job for Dick Cheney…
“Perhaps we need a Constitutional amendment to fix this.” Of course, there was one, the 20th amendment, which adjusted the end of the presidential and congressional terms from horse-era to railroad and automobile transport times. The main problem in pushing it back further to fibre optic latency is the litigation involved in settling close elections. Do you really want to seat a new Congress when some number of seats have not been certified one way or another by state election officials?
Can’t imagine that many of the members of Congress would agree to the pay cut, though…
Perhaps if we offered to pay them more for “working” shorter sessions, they’d go for it.
“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”
Will Rogers
I was going to say keep the new congress time but send the old Congress home after the election, but John B beat me to it.
The less Congress is in session the less time they have to fiddle with our lives
Look, we just need a faster way of negative reinforcement than elections every two years. I mean, you can’t train a dog or a child by waiting two weeks after they crap on the floor and then giving them a smack on the behind.
What we need is faster negative feedback training. This is the 21st century. We have the Internet and smart phones and stuff. We can do this!
Say, electrodes installed in each Congressman’s and Senator’s seat (and we put his voting buttons on his seat arm, so he has to sit down to vote). You’re pissed at your Congressman, or all of them, or all of a certain type, you just dial *666 on your phone, or text GRRGOP or GRRDEM to some number, or go to http://www.badcongressbadbadbad.com and click on the helpful color-coded (red and blue) links, and every time a Congressfellow sits down a cheap Cisco server tots up the most recent plus and minus votes from the yeomanry and delivers the appropriate voltage to his bottom.
Would you want CSPAN to cover the votes? There might be a tendency for people to dial up the pain threshold just to see the congresscritters jump; maybe they’d get lucky on the older ones and trigger a seizure or cardiac arrest.
I’d really like something even more immediate–turn the pain up to 11 if he votes for that dog-turd of a bill. That might be a way to guarantee that they only vote for innocuous bills–ones that don’t arouse much ire one way or the other.
While not as much fun as the dial-a-shock, how about proportional votes for congressmen? Each member of the house gets a certain fraction of a vote, proportional to the number of people who voted for them. People could log in to a server to withdraw their vote from their congressman (I’ll leave how to do this anonymously and securely as an exercise for the reader).
You’re pissed at your Congressman, or all of them, or all of a certain type, you just dial *666 on your phone, or text GRRGOP or GRRDEM to some number, or go to http://www.badcongressbadbadbad.com and click on the helpful color-coded (red and blue) links, and every time a Congressfellow sits down a cheap Cisco server tots up the most recent plus and minus votes from the yeomanry and delivers the appropriate voltage to his bottom.
This reminds me of a very good Simpsons episode.