I’ve got it! Fire all the members of Congress, and our problems are over. We can knock off all of the House and one-third of the Senate in November.
That’ll teach them to do what we want, not what they want. I keep getting it. E-mail pours in from naive geese who think they are on to something and from cunning would-be Karl Roves.
For the benefit of the goslings, let’s do the math they don’t do. There are 257 Democrats and 178 Republicans in the House (counting the empty seats by those who held them when they died).
Replace the Democrats with Republicans and the Republicans with Democrats, and you get a 257-178 majority of Republicans. Duh.
Do you think the Machiavelli who thought up the simple solution didn’t think of that? The ploy doesn’t change the Senate. Because of retirements, there will be 36 seats up this year instead of the usual 33 or 34.
But 18 are Democratic and 18 Republicans.
The fire-them-all plan flips to the same lineup in the Senate.
It puts Republicans in charge in the House, where they can thwart President Obama as only the Senate can thwart him now.
If that’s what you want, vote Republican. Just don’t try to pass it off as a solution to a dysfunctional Congress.
What you would get is the mother of all term-limits. The Florida Legislature has been under term limits since 2000. If you have seen a notable improvement in its competence or deportment, you can probably see quarks with the naked eye.
The rest of us see disoriented tourists in leather chairs plus many of the same old faces despite a constitutional amendment that promised to get rid of them for us. (John Thrasher, as I live and breathe, fancy meeting you here.) Some of the purveyors of fire-them-all go on to say that if the incumbents don’t get the point in 2010, do it again in 2012. That idea — flipping back to a Democratic majority — obviously did not originate with whoever thought this up. It would be good for the Washington area rental housing market, though.
Some of the passers-along are tea party enthusiasts who dream of their own candidates. A Quinnipiac University poll shows that they could do to the Republicans what Ross Perot did to George Bush the Elder in 1992.
In generic two-party races, the Republicans win the tea party vote. But if a tea party candidate enters the race, he or she sucks more votes away from the Republican than from the Democrat.
Democratic tea guzzlers show more party loyalty.
If non-incumbency is the sole qualification for office, you have no assurance of competent officials. That may not matter to you if you want your Congress member to read your mind, or Bill O’Reilly’s, and vote accordingly.
Should you want that? Whether a representative owes his constituents simple obedience or his best judgment is an old argument. Edmund Burke, the 18th-century statesman, whom some count as a founder of conservatism, came down hard on the side that says his constituents can have his judgment and his study of the issues but not his conscience.
“Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests,” he said. It is “a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.” That was then. There are few Burkes in our Congress.
We have blocs of different and hostile sheep who run on slogans. Their mind is closed. Deliberation won’t change it. Changing the color of their wool won’t change that.
You’d never attract people of Burke’s quality into politics by firing everybody willy-nilly when the mood hits.
“It would be no worse than what we have now?” Oh, yeah?
Tom Blackburn is a former member of The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board. E-mail: tom_blackburn@juno.com.
