Posted on 05/03/2010 6:15:04 AM PDT by Pharmboy
THE American public is not pleased with Congress — one recent poll shows that less than a third of all voters are eager to support their representative in November. “I am not really happy right now with anybody,” a woman from Decatur, Ill., recently told a Washington Post reporter. As she considered the prospect of a government composed of fledgling lawmakers, she noted: “When the country was founded, those guys were all pretty new at it. How bad could it be?”
Actually, our founders were not all that new at it: the men who led the revolution against the British crown and created our political institutions were very used to governing themselves. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and John Adams were all members of their respective Colonial legislatures several years before the Declaration of Independence.
snip...
If one wanted to explain why the French Revolution spiraled out of control into violence and dictatorship and the American Revolution did not, there is no better answer than the fact that the Americans were used to governing themselves and the French were not.
snip...
“A long continuance in the first executive departments of power or trust is dangerous to liberty,” declared the Maryland Constitution. “A rotation, therefore, in those departments is one of the best securities of permanent freedom.” In addition to specifying term limits for its plural executive, the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 likewise required that after four annual terms even the assemblymen would have to give way to a new set of legislators so they would “return to mix with the mass of the people and feel at their leisure the effects of the laws which they have made.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What we really WANT is a legislature that does not accomplish much!
We have too many laws and regulations already and we need to stop. The Government has no business meddling in our affairs like it does now.
We do not need career politicians. They are always the reason countries go down hill.
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Objection, your honor, leading the witness!
Yep...”No man is safe when the legislature sits...”
A random selection from the phone book would provide better results than the politicians we have now. And I mean that seriously.
That might be a "Good thing".
I think he does at least somewhat indicate that rotating terms might be a good idea. Something like, Senators could serve two terms and then must "sit out" two terms. House members could serve 4 terms and then sit out 4. (I would make it 1 and 3 terms respectively).
In the modern world, the power of incumbency is just too great. Even in times like we are in now, where anti incumbent sentiment is high, huge fractions of all incumbents who run for re-election are indeed re-elected. People tend to be against other peoples' Congressmen, but are OK with their own.
I would have no problem with the rotation concept, as long as they are required to leave Washington, DC and prohibited from all government jobs. At this point, most would just stay in DC collecting big paychecks until they could run again (and probably just switch back and forth between the Senate and the House)....
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Consider what else we know about progressives, evident from a track record of roughly one hundred years: They consistently advocate more and more centralization of power through collectivism and wealth redistribution. Inescapably, this leads to a progressively powerful state, one composed of widening regulations and agencies and departments -- launched mainly under the presidencies of Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Carter, and now Obama -- fueled by a (literal) progressive federal income tax that in less than thirty years skyrocketed from 1% (1913) to over 90% (1940s). It is a one-way expansion of power sliding almost entirely toward the national government.
There are certainly enough laws on the books to last us many lifetimes. The problem is that leftists fervently believe we are only one more law or regulation away from Utopia.
We have too many laws and regulations already and we need to stop.
Am I wrong or were our forefathers only part time legislators? OUR government has given themselves full time jobs, with healthcare, pensions and other perks that we can only imagine. They they sit around making stupid laws (most of which are already on the books somewhere) so they can appear useful. I believe they are useful idiots who can’t fool the American public any longer. Most need to go come November.
14 presidents were in officr before Washington they held office for one year term limits worked Wood is nuts.
I would prefer it if Congress “got less done”.
Term limits don’t affect the most powerful people in Washington: the paid political staffers.
Unless and until you can find a legal way to limit their influence, term limits are counter-productive to the idea of accountability.
Ratify Article the First!
We need to do away with the arbitrary 435 Representatives set up in 1929 and go back to what our Founders wanted: Fewer represented per Representative!
bttt
Interesting data in your link. Thanks so much for posting...
Get a congress full of first timers and the bureaucratic viper pit will viciously protect it's own.
Term limits will only work if we ever seriously reduce the size and influence of the federal government...by a lot!
I would rather see congress use technology to vote from their home district office and spend way less time in DC.
That way the people they represent have more access to them than all the ex-congressmen lawyer/lobbyist who work overtime loading up bills with pork.
The Constitution specified that there was to be 1 representative for every 30,000 citizens. That would put the number of representatives in our current congress at 10,268.
The first Congress had 69 seats for the House of Representative.
Do you really think that the Founders that had 69 seats in the lower house of Congress and 26 seats in the upper house of Congress (almost 3:1 ratio) would have really have wanted a Congress of 10,268 seats in the lower house and 100 seats in the upper house (a 1,027:1 ratio)?
Let’s be serious.
Tex, check out my link posted just above this. Article the First is a Constitutional Amendment proposed by the Founders back in 1789 to enumerate Representatives by the census up to 50,000 citizens. Essentially, we would have roughly 6,000 Representatives at this point, and we could have more localized Federal representation based on technologies available to most major corporations. The idea that the seat of the American Federal government is in one city is ridiculous! We should be broken into federal districts and have adequate representation contingent on a smaller portion of the overall population.
The 435 Representatives number was an arbitrary number settled on back in 1929 under the rule of Progressives. Up until then, the number of Representatives in the House grew every 10 years with the census.
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