Senate Dems pussying out again

[awaken]

Sorry, but IMO you'd design a system where every congressman was essentially new and inexperienced, and therefore likely to need outside guidance. Both Houses would be without any continuity of thought and experience, or institutional memory. The only constant, enduring DC operators would be the lobbyists. Who do you think would run Washington if you constantly cycled in new freshman legislators? They'd need lobbyist money and experience just to understand how anything works. It's basically handing the entire federal system to K Street.

People don't come to DC with a firm understanding of the realities of the legislative process or how to govern. See The Tea Party. If you remove senior operators from the Houses, you create an experience vacuum. That vacuum would get filled by special interests lobbyists who are highly sophisticated in policy matters, have the jobs all the term-limited congressman want, and the money to determine who can get elected. That's not a good development. In fact, it's a nightmare. Or, rather, an exacerbation of our current nightmare.

You may be right. Perhaps freshmen legislators would be completely overwhelmed and reliant on special interests. Some might be able to adjust independently, and hopefully we could use the State governments as a minor leagues to DC. But the special interests are writing legislation today - how much worse could it really get? The reliance of getting oriented is less than the reliance of financial dependence. Besides, these people shouldn't be sheep.

The nice thing about experimenting with term limits from the voting booth is that if we see that you are right, we can quickly change our voting behavior. It is much more imposing to try to change the Constitution in either direction. I want those wishing for term limits to vote for term limits. Do what you can, now. Hopefully, we can get some folks in there to represent the people and not Big Corn, Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc.

 

[ArlingtonDeac]

But my point is, term limits would dramatically increase the majority of candidates' fiscal reliance on special interest funding. Who is going go through the arduous and risky process of trying to independently raise the mountain of cash you currently need to run for any DC office, in opposition to the easy cash a corporate-backed candidate would have (read: their opponent), all for a job they'd be guaranteed by law to lose in 8 or 12 years? Almost no one, expect perhaps the super-wealthy, but that's not a good outcome either.

The vast majority of candidates would simply choose the easy path--- let massive corporate and special interest groups bankroll their campaigns, then do whatever those funding sources required in exchange (during their brief stay in DC). Candidates would become direct employees of special interests, because they'd matter more than the government to the candidate. Special interests would become both the reason the person won the job, and the best hope for future employment once they are forced by law to leave the job. it's a horrific set of motivations. And that's how societies decay and fail.

Then answer isn't to limit how long people serve. The answer is to lower the fiscal barrier to entry, so that better people run --- people that aren't automatically chained by funding obligations to special interests as a prerequisite to even seeking the job.

The system as is it currently stands isn't far off for what I describe -- government in the US is very broken, though not in the way conservatives believe -- but term limits only exacerbate the problem. We need to campaign finance reform to limit how much influence money can have on elections. That's the key to fixing government.