Over at Bloomberg View, Stephen Carter writes that it’s time for Congress to go home. I agree. As he notes, lame-duck sessions are an artifact of of transportation technology.
When the Constitution was first ratified, no one could travel faster than the pace of a horse, and it could take weeks to travel from the farthest reaches of the young nation to its capital. Even in 1932, the last time the end date of a session of congress was stipulated, in the 20th Amendment, the fastest safe means of travel was by train. It still took days to travel across the country.
But in the 21st century, with the jet age over half a century old, it is possible to get all the way from all the way even from Anchorage or Honolulu to Washington DC in a single day. There is no longer any excuse for Congress to last more than a week past an election. In fact, I would propose that it be dissolved on the Friday following.
Whether the new Congress was sworn in the following week, or waited until the current January date would be of little moment, as far as I’m concerned. The Founders didn’t require or expect Congress to be in permanent session, and the Republic would survive (and even benefit from) a couple of months without one, absent a national emergency such as the need for a declaration of war. But to maintain the current situation, in which people who had just been repudiated at the polls are allowed to continue to vote, is abhorrent to the very notion of representative democracy, and (as history has shown) a recipe for profound and damaging mischief.
Because the current dates are now established in the Constitution, changing them will require another amendment, and historically, amending the Constitution is difficult. But with Republicans controlling both houses of the Congress and so many state houses (and the president having no say in the matter), the time hasn’t been better in a while for doing amendments in general. Many will be difficult to get past the requisite number of states, but I’ve never heard any good argument for why a Congressional session should long survive an election, so I think amending the 20th Amendment may have good prospects. But if there is one, let’s hear it.
Well, without Lame Duck Sessions, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to watch Reid, et. al. flounder around and show their true colors, trying to call a vote on Keystone XL to improve Mary Landrieu’s chances of winning her Runoff election, or to see any of the other ugly sides of humanity vis a vis sore loser actions.
The flip side of the Lame Duck elimination talks is resisting the urge to also be a sore winner: telling the losers that they MUST go home because, well, they lost.
If everyone started acting like adults, treating each other like human beings, and conducting themselves with a sense of honor and integrity, we wouldn’t even need to worry about having such discussions.
The flip side of the Lame Duck elimination talks is resisting the urge to also be a sore winner: telling the losers that they MUST go home because, well, they lost.
Relax. Most of them won’t go home. They’ll stick around DC, become lobbyists, and make money than ever. Hardly suffering at all.
As long as we are at it we should change tax day from April 15 to the Tuesday before elections.
Yes, we should swear in the new Congress a week after the election. For that matter we could swear in the president too, though the executive has gotten used to a lengthy transition period.
If we want to clean up some other Constitutional anachronisms we could also set fixed-length terms for federal judges, repeal the 22nd amendment, drop the requirement that presidents be natural born citizens, declare a national holiday for national elections, and abolish the electoral college.
I still wonder how you could possibly see the electoral college as an anachronism.
I recall hearing a historian say that after the Civil War Americans started treating United States as a singular noun, i.e. started saying “the United States is” rather than “the United States are”. The electoral college is a state-centric remnant of that pre-Civil War viewpoint.
It’s also an anachronism because there’s no required connection between the electors (who technically have all the Constitutional power) and the voters (who we treat as deciding the results). It’s a matter of custom, not Constitutional requirement, that electors vote the way the citizens of their state (or, in ME and NE, their district) voted. At any point the electors could choose to defy the voters, and force a Constitutional crisis. It would be better if the law and our practice were formally aligned.
That would not force a Constitutional crisis.
What would happen if, say, Scott Walker won the popular vote in states adding up to 300 electoral votes, but 31 electors from states that he won cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton instead? Do you think Walker would just stand by while Clinton was sworn in? He would sue, and the Supreme Court would have to either disregard the text of the Constitution, or the clear will of the voters. That would qualify as a Constitutional crisis.
I think that’s vanishingly unlikely, but in those circumstances, I would think that (unlike a Democrat) Walker would abide by the Constitution.
I think you are dreaming. That would be like George W. Bush deciding in 2000 that since he’d soundly lost the national popular vote, and electoral college votes not counting Florida, and Florida was so close as to be a jump ball, that he’d gracefully concede for the good of the country. Stuff like that happens in movies written by Aaron Sorkin; in real life, not so much.
Walker, like any victim of faithless electors, would avail himself of every possible legal avenue, and he’d have the Republican party and most of the country behind him. He’d have an excellent argument: why should a handful of renegade electors be given the power to overrule the clearly expressed will of the American people?
One of these things is not like the other.
Yes, and you’re saying that this move to The United States rather than These United States was a good idea.
Not everything before the civil war was a bad idea, you know. Maybe we should remove some anachronisms from the Roosevelt era.
I trust Enlightenment philosophers over nattering Progressive administrators. The founding fathers understood corruption and the self-serving aims of the electors and the elected. They built in safeguards to protect from factions.
Progressives think that they are above the fray of politics (to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson.) In other words, their hubris shadows their own, self-serving interests. You are a perfect example, where you believe you are above the normal fray of politics, but you are actually voting to get free stuff.
When did I ever say I was above the fray of politics? I definitely am not.
And you want fixed terms for judges but not for the executive?
Fixed (e.g. 18 years) as opposed to lifetime. I wouldn’t limit the number of terms for either the president or federal judges.
I know what you said. My question implied a why.
Why what? I think federal judges (including Supreme Court justices) should be appointed to their posts for a fixed term. I think presidents should be elected to their position for a fixed (i.e. 4 year) term. Neither should be arbitrarily limited in the number of terms they can serve.
I would *expand* the 22nd Amendment, personally. My proposal for the new amendment is:
Limit of 2 terms in US Senate
Limit of 6 terms in US House
Limit of 2 terms as US President
Limit of 16 years combined Legislative service (House/Senate combined), 20 years combined House/Senate/President, inclusive of all other term limits.
And, yes, this means that a House member would need to have 5 or fewer terms in the House if they wanted to run for Senate; if they had already served 6 terms, they would only be able to fill a vacany in a partially-term-completed office if they already had 12 years of Federal Legislative Service under their belts.
I don’t think I would even support eliminating the 22nd Amendment if the 17th was repealed with it. As far as anachronisms go, the 17th has “anachronism” written all over it. And, as with Lame Duck sessions, is due in part to travel and time restrictions in days gone by.
If the voters would rather re-elect someone to their nth term than have the position go to a newcomer, why shouldn’t they have that option?
“If the voters would rather re-elect someone to their nth term than have the position go to a newcomer, why shouldn’t they have that option?”
Because the “it’s always been done that way, there’s no other way to do it” excuse never allows progress to be made. Fresh ideas are necessary to keep a society moving forward.
Perhaps if legislators needed to campaign on something other than “you might as well vote for me, I’ve been doing this for 30 years already”, people might actually pay attention to who they were electing, and perhaps even show up to vote. And if a fresh set of newcomers to the legislature can never get anything accomplished because they’re too busy getting their feet wet, I don’t really have a problem with that, either.
When one combines the idea of “career politicians” with longer and longer lifespans, term limits make more and more sense. I happen to agree with how Dewey put it when referring to the presidency: “Four terms, or sixteen years, is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed.”
In my opinion, since it was asked for.
Fresh ideas are necessary to keep a society moving forward.
And this principle is more important than the principle that the people should be allowed to choose their leaders?
Noted without comment: The area west of Detroit area has chosen a representative with the last name Dingell in every election since 1932.
Rather than a limit in the number of terms or total years of service let the rule be that you cannot run for any office while you are in an elected office. This way everyone goes home after one term but can serve as many times as they want just not consecutively. This way no one has the advantage of incumbency and everyone needs to get some kind of job since they cannot receive a permanent paycheck for being in office.
I think an “all non-incumbent” government would shift power to the permanent bureaucracies, since their staffs would be the only people with institutional memory. And the revolving door between Congress and lobbying would spin even faster, with all those former-and-future officeholders needing a paycheck between terms.
Then we could say no one can run for office who is currently receiving a check from the government.
“If we want to clean up some other Constitutional anachronisms we could also …”
We could……….but sensible people don’t want to.
What about congressmen traveling from Mars or the Moon? They might need that extra time.
We could invent some communication system that operates at the speed of light and allows votes to be conducted remotely.
In fact, why not eliminate the Capitol entirely? Turn the Hill into a museum. Require Congressmen to reside in their home districts. Conduct all votes and debates electonically.
That would be a huge inconvenience for lobbyists. “K Street” would no longer enjoy a geographical advantage over the local yokels. Quite the opposite. Power and access would be decentralized.
“In fact, why not eliminate the Capitol entirely? Turn the Hill into a museum. Require Congressmen to reside in their home districts. Conduct all votes and debates electonically.”
A little while ago, I took my family to see the Senate, which was in session. The room was empty; a few Senators at the front and a few staffers wandering around. Joe Lieberman was giving an empassioned speech to an empty hall.
On inquiry, I found that most Congressmen watch the proceedings from their offices (if they choose!) and only wander in for votes.
They should have monitors at their chairs and cameras in their offices so that people can see what their senators are up to if they want to claim telepresence. Just like that Halloween episode of Southpark, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twlz91LKNnE
The same applies to the UK’s parliament chamber. To be fair, however, a fair number of MPs spend much of their time in various committees (select and standing) – and they really are an important part of the workings of government.
Whether something applies to the USA, I confess to having no idea.