Politics Congress - the body you love to hate

I can see your point about previous Congresses being worse for doing bad things but you have to agree that there have been no Congress worse for doing NOTHING.
This Congress has proved has made the Do Nothing Congress the Truman ran against look like a beacon of activity.
They can barely get a budget bill passed in time and that is somehow a major accomplishment.
Breaking the record for being the least productive Congress last year, then promptly breaking that record this year is a pretty good sign that our system of government is broken.
There's a reason Congress rates under used car salesman for respectability.

 

Congress still rates higher than the Kardashians and gonorrhea.

 

I love that you couldn't get a job as a convicted felon but you can stay a Congressman.

Rep. Michael Grimm pleads guilty to felony tax fraud, but does not plan to resign - The Washington Post

 

I haven't been following this thread, but I wanted to make a couple points in response to recent postings.

First thing: term limits are a really, really bad idea.

There's this romantic notion of the sensible citizen-legislator who goes up to the state capital or Washington for a couple years to straighten things out, then goes back to his plow or his lathe or his dental practice.

That's a myth, because politics (or governing) has become just as professionalized and specialized as everything else.

If you need a root canal, you're plainly better off with a professional dentist who has a degree and certification and experience and does the work full time than you are with some amateur. People get into dentistry, and thrive at it, because they have the kinds of skills that a dentist needs to be effective, and those skills are not evenly distributed across the population.

Moreover, greater experience deepens a practitioner's skill. The surgeon who took out my cataracts had done this same operation more than 10,000 times. He would be enormously better at it than someone who was doing his tenth.

Negotiating laws and policies and budgets in a democracy is also a skill that is not universally distributed, and improves with experience. And the polity does better when the people doing these things are better at doing those jobs.

If the goal is a legislature that actually grapples with real problems, that works out reasonable budget compromises, etc., etc., forced turnover is not going to help.

Here in Michigan, strict term limits have made reasonable governance or consensus impossible.

We still have professional politicians, as does every state, but now we have a rapidly changing cast of characters. Pretty much every member of the Legislature is thinking about what his or her next employment situation is going to be. Anyone who has the resources to make future job offers (e.g. lobbying firms and major corporations) will have state reps and senators panting after him.

Six years as a representative is barely enough to learn your way around a $50 billion state budget. In my experience, individual state reps and senators have become startlingly ignorant. The institutional memory of the legislature has been erased.

Legislators now rely on party leaders or lobbyists or bureaucrats to tell them what to do. Powerful interest groups that align themselves with the majority party are never defied, even when such defiance is what the state desperately needs.

There are no longer any "independents" or "mavericks" in either party. That's a national trend, admittedly, but in Michigan, term limits have wiped out even the possibility of such people emerging and gaining influence.

Anyone who looks at the failures of governance in Michigan comes to the conclusion that term limits have been a disaster. And a great many people who follow state-level news or have dealings with the state government have come to agree. It's common to hear people, from across the political spectrum, express regret over having voted for term limits in 1992.

But the polling on this is just heartbreaking. Term limits have a deep populist appeal, especially given the many failures of the Legislature. There is no realistic possibility that they will ever be repealed or even modified.

 

Have to agree with you on term limits @StreetPattern.
They are a perfect fit for the H.L. Mencken quote "For every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong."

There is however a certain value to sweeping the bastards out and getting in some new blood.
The only problem is all too often the new blood are crazypants.

 

Back in the early days of PCs, people used to ask me what was the best database package. I came to realize that they were asking the wrong person. As a programmer and a data guy, my tastes in software had nothing to do with what would be "best" for them.

Your question is a bit like that.

To most voters, the people running are just names on a ballot, or maybe pictures on a flyer or in a TV commercial. But when you're part of the process, many of those folks are people you know personally. You know their strengths and weaknesses and foibles; you know the people they bring along with them as campaign operatives and staffers. You have a sense of what motivates them and how effective they are. And you have some kind of relationship to them, which is likely to continue after the election.

Also: when you're a politician, politics is very much a team sport. To openly support a candidate on the other team can erode your own support and endanger your standing in the political community. Of course, you can vote for whoever you want in the privacy of the voting booth, but that's just one vote.

Moreover, especially with the growing polarization of the parties, even the jerks and yahoos on your own side start to look pretty good compared to the people the other party nominated against them.

A few years back, when the Democratic nominee for a significant office was someone I heartily detested, I voted for his Republican opponent. I don't regret doing that, and indeed, I still do it from time to time. Still, if the detested guy had won (admittedly unlikely), he would have advanced goals I agree with, whereas the winner did some bad things.

It's easy to see why most politicos just swallow their reservations and vote straight party.

All that being said, we all kind of rely on the fiction that there are neutral arbiters out there, a whole class of highly aware voters who consider the options and vote for the objectively better candidate. Those people don't really exist, at least, not in the requisite numbers, but the process often works as if they did exist, so pretending that they do is a usable model.

What really happens is that the objectively good candidate tends to do better than the inept or unsuitable candidate at each step of the process. Not invariably, of course, but as a general rule.

 

I have to wonder how many of the Republicans that just voted for the repeal and replace, are actually counting on the Senate to kill it. The engineered the vote so that they passed it by one vote (thereby exposing as few Republicans as possible to having to stand up for the bill).

It's fascinating to watch the shit show that is the Republican controlled congress. Let's see if it can get any better in the Senate.

 

I don't know, my moron of a Congressman voted for it even knowing that it would hurt Alaska more that it would many other states.
He might be counting on the more moderate Senator in our group to pull his fat out of the fire because she has voted against this shit in the past but there will come a point when she isn't interested in putting her ass on the line after being primaried out once before and only getting back in by a once in a lifetime write in ballot.