You present some interesting points. I’m going to read up on this more and get back with you!
@Ken-Howe
That process will take imposing fiscal restraints and reducing the power and scope of jurisdiction of the federal government which will ultimately have to come from the states through an Article V convention where the states propose such amendments. After all, Congress could have simply refused to fund most of the now 438 federal agencies that were created based on no constitution authority to exist and did not. The only way is to clarify the Article I sec 8 authority they have using clear and unequivocal language that even they can understand and eliminate any spending not for something in those 18 authorities. There is another topic on calling such a convention under the Liberty category here from the co-founder of Convention of States, Mark Meckler called "Call a Convention of the States to Limit the Scope, Power and Jurisdiction of the Federal Government.
I agree and I think Mark Meckler is doing a great job with the COS. We do not. of course, know yet what that will eventually bring. I believe I could la
In reading the other responses I don’t get the idea there is angst but more agy out some great points for their consideration but there are others who would have different priorities than I.
After reading other responses on this thread I sense there is pretty widespread agreement that something must be done and I would suggest that whatever it is be done quickly. Let’s make it happen.
I have to disagree. The swamp being replaced by a super swamp is still a swamp. There has been too many congressmen that have stayed in office for decades.
These life term congressmen allowed for “Insider Trading” which is a Conflict-of-Interest. They have become so cozy with writing bills to fill their own stock portfolio that they think Insider Trading is a Perk of the Office.
The long serving congressmen have created powerful interests that protect their stay in office. I don’t want to see or hear about another congressmen that has one foot in the grave, that reads off of a teleprompter, and is given instructions by their aids. These congressmen are past their golden years, and have entered the twilight.
There is already a revolving door of congressmen who serve as lobbyists, which should be illegal, but its just another Perk of the Office allowing for congressmen to be bribed.
Long Term Congressmen have not only allowed for a strong bureaucracy- they created it. The entire idea of congressmen having no term limits was to ensure the interests of government was For the People, and not the bureaucracy-
IT DIDN’T WORK.
Perhaps term limits could be overwritten by 3/4 of the votes by their constituency. Instead of House Members having to run for congress every two years, could be increased to six.
I don’t know. The other side of the political aisle would say Pelosi was worth her decades in office. She made millions from Insider Trading.
Are we to deny the other side of the political aisle their own long term stay, just because we don’t like their own political view? There are politicians well worth their stay, but the other side of the political aisle will say the same thing about their congressmen. They will offer “Two Chickens in Every Pot.” They will say anything to buy the vote, or do anything as in providing political favors- just to keep themselves in office.
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Sorry to take so long in getting back. Been pounding on doors and ringing doorbells.
I my mind collaboration is a must for a proposal such as this. Has anyone else shown interest in chipping in? We need lots of folks to pick the ideas apart so better ones can be developed.
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Merit-Mitigated Term Limits
Many of the criticisms of term limits would be resolved by the following provision:
“Upon enactment of this provision, each sitting or subsequently elected senator or congressperson shall obtain 52% plus one vote at the next succeeding primary and general election for the same office. Said percentage shall be raised by an additional 2% at each succeeding term’s election unless the candidate shall have been out of office for an entire term during which the serving member shall not have been the member who immediately preceded the candidate’s most recent term.”
As you can see, after a few terms your party would tap you on the shoulder before you ran again, or you would simply fail in the primary. And any tag-teaming would still trigger the escalator.
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Nice try, Nancy. We know this is your alt account.
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No sweat!
I have been getting a lot of feedback on this, much positive and some negative. I would so we need more ideas, but I would also argue that at a certain point too many people fighting over ideas, and not finding compromise, simply becomes unproductive, Like our current Government. Lol.
I think there is more that can be added, but we also want everything to short and simple.
I still think term-limits are not the win people think they are, and I believe we will all come to regret that sooner than later. (It’s only a matter of time before someone figures out a way to game the system.)
But if we were ty term limits to our advancement as a society, ie How you measure the GDP, but also make a Baseline for our Education, and Standard of living. Now That is something I would get onboard with.
Example, the standard of living for all Americans dropped by x% NO ONE qualifies for re-election, The US General Eduacation drops from the tp 10 (Which we are not even in currently) NO ONE QUALIFIES for Re-election, not only would this force compromises and better ideas among politicians but would also completely redefine our Immigration System along with our Education System, and all of these metrics, and tools to measure these metrics must always be open source and available to the public to ensure consistency.
Idk. Lol
A. I despise that creature.
B. Here are some concessions!
LOL
I worked some of your ideas into this new proposal.
This is clever. I like it!
f they were doing what we are paying them to do than experience would be a bonus. We need to bring back taking responsibility for our actions.
If we are going to take the responsibility entrusted to us as Americans seriously we should know everything about what people who are making decisions about large amounts of our resources are doing and why
We should have a searchable database where our smartest people are finding, discussing, and debating in public, every bit of available of information.
See my policy proposal for repurposing surveillance infrastructure.
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Speaking to “The Real Fix, Point 2”, I would suggest instead of tying salaries to the median income of their district, to tie it to an equivalent salary as is received by their State representative or senator (depending on their office) adjusted for cost of living from their home State to D.C.
The cost of their salary should be billed to the State they represent and the States should collect the salaries directly from their district and pay it to the U.S. Treasury each year as a reimbursement for what the US Treasury paid to the Senator or Representative. This way the people they represent directly feel (through the tax they have to pay for the salary) whether or not they are receiving the representation they expect for what they pay.
All salary increases should be Representative or Senator specific as a raise for good work must be approved by popular vote from the members of their district. If the incumbent fails to win reelection, or is replaced by their constituency, then the salary defaults back to the beginning salary based off of their State legislative salary adjusted for D.C.'s cost of living. This ensure a pay raise for one person does not automatically transfer to someone who has not earned it. Adjustments for inflation will affect their State and Federal legislatures equally and in the same degree when the State deems it necessary to make such adjustments. This removes from the hands of Congress control over their own salaries and gives it back to the people they represent (or the State they represent) directly and the cost is essentially paid by them as well.
This would need to be done by Constitutional Amendment as it would violate the uniformity clause of indirect taxation and the apportionment clause of direct taxation in the Constitution. For this to be implemented a third form of taxation would be needed to allow the federal government to lay a direct tax to the States, not subject to the rule of apportionment or uniformity, for the specific (and limited to the) purpose of the reimbursement of congressional salaries.
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Great points! Revolving door would lead to an unstable government.
please link it next time. I will look for it and in general like this idea.
Another comment I will make regarding term limits is that back when Senators were appointed by State legislatures, there were times when legislatures failed to make an appointment and left their Senate seat unfilled. On State and local elections, there are a LOT of offices where an office runs unopposed and the only person running IS the incumbent. It can be hard to imagine in the modern day this happening on the federal level, but I urge everyone to look at your election history and see how many offices run unopposed where their is only one candidate listed for the district.
Getting people to run for office can be difficult as most people with any common sense have no interest subjecting themselves to the cesspit of politics. This alone reduces the number of available options with very good candidates choosing NOT to run even though they would be great at the job (from the people’s perspective). Imposing term limits on Congress, could create a situation faced with State and local offices on the federal level where there are no candidates to run if the incumbent is prohibited from running for re-election. Just stating this as an unintended consequence of term limits. Though I will say I am for term limits personally, I think other factors do need to be considered to ensure each district is still represented or stating a contingency if the seat is left vacant. Prior to the 17th amendment it was considered the right of a State NOT to send representation to the Senate, same principle would apply to the House.
I like some of these ideas and not others. Some I have thought of myself.
Technically Congress is both houses, not just the HoR, though I am familiar with how “congress” in common vernacular tends to only refer to the House of Representatives (I disagree with the term “Congressman” for the same reason and prefer “Representative” for that reason.)
I agree with the concept that members of Congress should be subject to the same laws as the everyday citizen and that they should receive no special retirement or benefits or treatment when it comes to healthcare. As members of Congress are not in the United States Armed Forces, then unless they have served in the military, then I am against them getting TRICARE and am in favor of them being forced to participate in the same healthcare options afforded to other “civilians”. They do not put their lives on the line any more than the local fire department or city council and are therefore not entitled to military benefits.
I agree with the “None of the Above” voting option because a lot of our elections we have such poor choices to pick from, I know we can do better. If a Game Master in a table top role playing game has the power to declare a player’s character to inadequate to survive in the game and require the player to make a new character, then we as voters should have the same power over the people we have to choose from that are literally going to affect our lives and who have power to take our property, our lives, and our freedom.
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Using 2020 census data, if there were 1 representative for maximum of every 30,000 people (this means if a State has 30,001 people it would get two representatives with districts composed of 15,000 and 15,001 people respectively). Then our House of Representatives would have 11,023 representatives. At 40,000, 8,259. At 50,000, 6,605; 60,000, 5,497, 70,000, 4,712; 80,000, 4,118; 90,000 3,659; and at 100,000, 3.290. It is true that the 1st generation of Americans under the Constitution ranged between around 15,000 to 75,000 per seat so they were not consistent with their proportional representation either.
China has the largest representative body in the world at 2,977. members. This is followed by Germany: 735, the EU: 705, North Korea: 687, the UK at 650, Turkey: 600, Egypt: 596, France: 577, Indonesia: 575, and 15 other countries until the US comes in the the picture at 435 ranking 25th largest legislature.
Incidentally, using 2020 census data, Delaware has the most constituents per house seat at 989,948 with Idaho coming in second at 919,553. The average is 737,419 people per seat.
I agree that technology has provided the means for greater decentralization. By utilizing Zoom Meetings, we could change to a direct democracy where everyone represents their own interests in a zoom meeting of the entire American public, though I think this would be impractical and unwise.
As Madison cautioned too small of a legislature is not sufficient “to guard against the cabals of a few” and “render[s] the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests”. But there are arguments against increasing the size of a legislature as Madison also warned that a legislature too large “render[s] him [the legislator] unduly attached to these [local issues], and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects” and “in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude”.
I do personally believe that the House of Representatives needs to be increased in size as the size of the districts make it near impossible for one person, who is not well connected with large financial backers, to make any headways in running a successful campaign. This be default automatically stacks the deck almost ensuring that whoever runs for the US House of Representatives is already part of the corporate establishment and will NOT be working for the American people. (Same holds true for the Senate.)
But I would argue that a legislature affording proper representation (Washington and others at the Constitutional Convention felt 30,000 was the ideal number and 40,000 was too large prompting that change in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3. It was the only time in the entire convention that Washington interjected an opinion on what was being discussed at the convention) would be too large to manage or be conducive to proper legislative process. However, that said, the Bill of rights did propose an amendment that would based on population raise A1, S2, C3 from 30k to 40k and then up to 50k but this proposed amendment was never ratified and remains the only one of the twelve amendments proposed that has not yet been ratified to date.
I have not found a solution to this issue that I like, but I have taken interest in the old Swiss Confederation’s constitution as a possible solution but I admit, there are things I don’t like about this as well as I feel it could increase bureaucracy and obscure transparency.
What they did was have the people elect 10 members to their local canton. These 10 would select one of their number to be their ambassador to the national legislature. The national legislature would hear the proposals from the member cantons via their representative and work out legislation on the national level. The ambassadors would then take this back to their local group, present it, and locally they would debate, discuss and vote on what had been proposed and the result presented on the federal level when they returned. The ambassadors alternated serving one week in local and one week in national and vice versa. For a measure to pass, it had to be approved by the majority of the local canton members.
This would essentially create several regional legislatures between the States and the federal government. I think it is an interesting idea, but admittedly am hesitant to adopt it, but regional legislatures composed of States belonging to different sections of the country could have a legislature closer to 500 members each which would significantly decrease the size of the legislative district they were elected from, but at the same time, it keeps the size of the national legislature to less than 500 as well and thereby maintain a manageable size at any one time. In all, any measure to pass would require the majority of all the legislators throughout all of the regions in the aggregate to pass and turmoil in one region would not disrupt or necessarily affect the other regions assemblies. This is the same reasoning and structure the Framers of the constitution designed for the electoral college by having the electors meet in their respective State capitols to nominate, deliberate and then each cast a ballot (not deciding a winner) then sending those ballots to the Congress to be read and tabulated. (Read Federalist 68 for more information on how the electoral college was supposed to work because we are not doing it correctly).
The main reason(s) I suggested TRICARE stems from many of my friends being vets and getting poorer service than they deserve. If our federal level employees and politicians had to live with the issues our service members do you can bet the issues would be fixed in record time, and likely improved. I see this as a win-win for all concerned. Also, unlike most conservatives, I believe in basic healthcare for all and a TRICARE-like system might make a good foundation for that
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You definitely make some good points. But having young congressmen and senators and by young I’m meaning they’re duration of service in the senate or the house. I truly believe the lobbyist will not invest their money into someone that who’s gonna be short.Term. they would have to invest, get someone elected, and then that investment would completely deteriorate in two terms.Start the process all over again. Now i’m not saying there are companies out there with extremely deep pockets that would do this but the roi on that would be very low. Simply because we would have honorable people coming in, they could do the right thing before they were embedded and corrupted by the old school swamp, There would be no old school swamp to corrupt them. While this might be an imaginary silver bullet, I do think it’s a great arrow to have in the quiver.
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