The collective malfeasance of the current Congress as it wallows around in the self-inflicted wound of the debt-ceiling fiasco ought to bring into greater clarity a starkly disturbing reality: the current system can’t be fixed. Our national political arena provides good government for corporate special interests that provide so much of the campaign money it demands so voraciously, and provides stale leftovers for the millions of Americans who have their own special interests, but seemingly aren’t regarded as all that special.
No less of a champion of the disenfranchised than House Speaker John Boehner solemnly intoned that he got 98 percent of what he wanted in that wretched budgetary dance that the rest of us have been forced to watch from just off the dance floor for the past three months. Presumably, the devastation of the American economy and the tanking of stocks on Wall Street fell within the two percent of something that the Republicans didn’t want, although you couldn’t prove it to me.
All the caterwauling, retching and mewing from the peanut gallery seems to overlook what ought to increasingly self-evident by now. The current political climate can’t be fixed, can’t be fine-tuned and ultimately can’t even be saved. And even if somehow fixing, fine-tuning or saving were feasible, none of these things could be engineered by the very scoundrels who have been getting greased by decades of public-abetted bribery.
Term limits, once bandied about by the very conservatives who have seemingly flourished in this grotesquely distorted system we have now, might seem now worthy of another look, but in the current climate it’s hard to shake the notion that even that’s not enough. Nope, it may be an entirely fanciful and quixotic notion – and likely can’t even be contemplated without the electorate being in such much pain from additional Congressional malfeasance that it’s downright terrifying – but there’s nothing left to be saved with this turkey.
What’s left is to scrap the idea of the career politico and revert to the citizen statesman concept. Change it to three years and out for the House of Representatives and one handsome six-year term for the Senate. No pensions, no lifetime medical coverage, no perks allowed, no jet planes from Phillip Morris. Just off to Washington with you, and do the best you can do in the time you have.
I can hear all the wailing now. The public would lose all that expertise and inside knowledge that their senator or congressman had accumulated over the years. So how’s all that expertise and vast experience been working out for us lately?
Whatever system would be installed for doling out campaign monies under the “one-term –and-out” idea would no doubt be flawed, but does anybody really think it’s possible it could be more flawed than what we have now. And yes, it would be tough for citizens in Alaska to lose a pork magnet like their former Senator Ted Stevens, but I am more than willing to have a debate with anybody who wants to hold up that particular campaign button as an endorsement for the efficacy and utility of the status quo.
The very nature of our form of government means that Congress passes legislation that typically tends to place a state’s interests well ahead of the needs of the country as a whole. Our elected officials wind up with agendas that encompass, presumably in this order: 1) Getting re-elected; 2) Greasing their major campaign contributors in a fashion that also enhances item No. 1; 3) Greasing their constituents in a fashion that enhances item No. 1 and hopefully doesn’t unduly aggravate the contributors mentioned in item No. 2; and 4) Addressing the national interest.
I don’t know about you, but being No. 4 in line behind a robust group like that would seem to be a daunting prospect. If you remove the onerous demands of the first two items by removing that huge re-election elephant from the room, that would leave a less-potent No. 3 (constituents would still like be greased, but hopefully not with the same fervor). And what could possibly be wrong with “national interest” moving up a couple of notches anyway?
I know, I know, it ain’t gonna happen, at least not in anything remotely approaching my lifetime, but that in itself hardly makes it a bad idea. The current unholy triumvirate of politicians, special interests (for purposes of this discussion, the military is lumped in as one of those interests, even though it is a disproportionately imposing one) and the vast Washington network that gleefully feeds off of it is never going to allow anything to undermine the very foundation of its power. But that’s hardly an argument against making such a change.
The truly disheartening part of all this is the vague feeling that the only way the electorate will ever turn to such an admittedly revolutionary idea will be when things get so ugly on the national political scene that ousting fat-cat public officials still feeding at the trough will seem like a minor diversion.
As I used to ask my father every 10 minutes or so as we piddled along in our 1955 Ford station wagon to our summer-vacation cottage in Three Lakes, Wis., “Are we there yet?”
- T.S. O’Connell
