A lot of
people express ire at Congress these days.
I share some of that, but not all.
Mostly, I think Obama and the media have successfully planted blame on
Congress for everything. “Congress
doesn’t run things right!” But it’s a legislature, meant to deliberate laws,
not a CEO and has no direct control over operations. Obama does and does nothing, but he has made
an art of running a perpetual campaign of being a perpetual critic. He doesn’t govern. He just scolds Congress when they don’t
fulfill his fantasy government.
Nonetheless, there is a lot of
unaccountability and remoteness of Congressmen and Senators. They run TV and radio ads every 2 or 6 years
and most people don’t know them. Ha!
Most people can’t even name them! Money is the way they get elected, buying
sound bites and carefully organized messages, in contrast to state reps and
senators who shake hands and speak in person a lot. You can walk up to your state legislator and
ask a lot of questions. Worse, some in
Washington use the power of the office to line their pockets as we see from
time to time. We made a mistake by the
17th Amendment for the direct election of Senators. They no longer are representatives of the
state’s business (except at election time), but seem to be a collection of
prima donnas yearning to run for President.
Hillary Clinton from Arkansas barely represented NY. She was using it as a stepping stone to run
for Prez.
I should say that I like our two
Oklahoma Senators and my Congressman. I
have met and spoken to all of them and they do a very good job, even when I
don’t agree over some detail. But this
isn’t true for most people who don’t attend political events.
So what should we fix? First, the US House is represented by 435
members. Nothing in the Constitution
establishes that number and it has varied (mostly grown) over the years. In
today’s world of telecommunications, it could just as well be 3435
members. Hmm. Come to think of it, we could do this. It would require a large arena to hold the
sessions, but voting could be handled by computerized techniques, even
remotely, allowing Congressmen to be home for part of the session. Having one member for about every 90,000
people (35,000 active voters)makes a district similar in population to the
original districts in 1788, where a House member could personally know just
about everyone in his district—and almost identical to an OK Senate district. It would create a mélange of
personalities—artists from New Orleans, farmers from the panhandle, coal miners
from West Virginia. Real people who look
like those they represent. And the House
could still have leadership to be present on the floor. There would likely be designated
speakers. How to handle all the bills
from so many members? It would be similar
to today, but maybe there would have to be geographic region committees to screen
legislation. Most of all this kind of
system would take the big money and influence buying out of the equation. Good Representatives would be found speaking
in small civic meetings of 15-25 people and townhalls of a hundred. Also,
gerrymandering would not be the issue it is today, just as gerrymandering is
not such a huge issue in state legislatures.
Bottom line: people would know their Rep and their Rep would know
them. And if we still have to pay over
$100,000 annually for a guy to travel to Washington and have a staff, that
seems a lot less to me than our trillion dollar deficits. Now that I think
about it, having a local friend in the House we could call probably wouldn’t
begat trillion dollar deficits. We’d
hold them accountable. They couldn’t go
to Walmart without hearing about it. And
it takes no Constitutional Amendment to make this change in the House.
The Senate is a tougher fix. Repealing the 17th would be
difficult. I suggest that we keep the
six year statewide system of election, but allow a legislature and governor to
recall a senator after two years with a special election. Hence Oklahoma wouldn’t have to wait around
for six years to recall Fred Harris while he grandstands for President and does
nothing to represent the state. The
legislature would be cautious to use their power lest they transgress the will
of the people who genuinely like their Senator.
But mostly it would force a Senator to act more in concert with their
state. No more mavericking just because it will be years before they face an
election. Can you imagine the hell our
state governments would give the present Senate which refuses to adopt a
budget? And I don’t think a
Constitutional Amendment would be required to make this change in the Senate. But if it does, that’s a lot easier to argue
than just allowing the free reins we now have.
Thirdly, I would make the following
change. Allow the House, Senate, and
Executive branches to select and petition the Supreme Court on 3 or 4 issues
apiece each year to ask if something is constitutional. Rarely does a bill get challenged in the
Court like Obamacare. Rarely does a
practice like drone killings of US citizens.
SCOTUS seems to take the attitude that these kinds of things take too
much time and are better left to elections.
So then who will protect us from a tyrant determined to seize power? History is full of dictators who got elected
and then seized power before the befuddled citizens could unelect the
joker. This kind of 9-issues-a-year
decisions about our governance would require the Supremes be more forthright
and to not contort their logic on individual cases. (Think about how they go back and forth about
abortion questions, trying to twist and circumvent with logic) And this too would only require an internal
rules change to how they do their agenda.
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