|
|
Expert Opinion
One of the more regular arguments against imposing term limits on congress is that it would put the bureaucrats in charge, effectively exchanging being governed by used car salesmen with being governed by the post office (staffed by vogons). I'd never found any counter-arguments, until now:
To judge any proposed reform, it should be compared with what currently exists. As things stand today, Congressional staffers are often young people with little or no experience in the real world outside of politics, and often their skills are largely confined to political skills, with their highest priority being to get their bosses re-elected.
...
Some people still have Utopian ideals of a government run by ordinary folks. But when making serious decisions in real life, we go to people who know what they are doing -- whether what we want is a transmission fixed or medical treatment.
It took the Democrats some fifty years in power to become so rotten they started to frighten small children. With the advantages of Democratically-engineered post-Watergate reforms, it took the Republicans a little more than a decade to do the same. Considering the three most likely ways of getting a Congressman out of his job are death, retirement, and scandal (in that order), perhaps it's time to re-open the whole idea of tossing them out on a regular schedule.
But that leads to the question: if there is suddenly more permanent political power in being an unelected staffer than in being an elected congressman, how long do you think it will take for the staffers to become jaded and corrupt politicians, and the congressmen to become naive incompetants?
The reason why congressmen stay in power so long is because their job is literally to win favors from the government for their district. That is the yardstick by which their constituents will always judge them, and becoming jaded and corrupt allows them to acquire more and better favors from other jaded and corrupt members of government, thus making them better congressmen. New, uncorrupted congressmen aren't worldly enough to win anywhere near the same number of favors, and the worst are moral authorities who p!ss off the rest of the government, resulting in their districts being re-zoned as toxic waste dumps.
So yes, pretty much the only way to get a congressman bumped from power is through death, retirement, or scandal (generally defined as "enriching himself instead of the people who elected him.")
As such, the most convincing argument I've heard for term limits is that it prevents the electorates from becoming corrupted by the prizes their congressmen win for them. I, for one, would love to see some of the other districts in my home state suddenly lose their expert representation, and have to accept some of the crap that keeps getting dumped on my own neighborhood where maybe five people vote in the congressional elections.
But there would have to be some guarantee that the ex Congressmen don't wind up entrenching themselves in the bureaucracy, still wielding their influence without having to fear it being taken away any more.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian on January 27, 2006 03:44 PMThe problem is, though, that the bureaucracy is already permanent. It's not as though they fire everyone at the FDA on a regular basis and replace them an entirely new set of people! (Although maybe they ought to...)
Posted by: DensityDuck on January 27, 2006 11:31 PM