You don't have to be crazy to want the job, but it doesn't hurt.

I have often joked that a person would have to be crazy to want to be President of the United States and therefore anyone who wants the job should not be allowed to have it. I am currently taking a graduate school course entitled Legislatures and Legislative Behavior. From what I am learning in that course added to what I already knew, I think my observation about the job of President applies also, though maybe not as much, to the job of member of Congress. Who can observe the work product of the politicians in the federal government and conclude that those people are sane? The work product includes laws whose pages measure in the thousands and are too complex for anyone but an attorney to understand and even they have to go to court to argue among themselves what it all means. If we expect people to obey the law, is it too much to ask that the laws be understandable and not unreasonably complex?

In the first place, think about what it takes just to be considered for the job. You have to beg people to give you money to finance your campaign. During the most recent election cycle, the average winning Senate race cost $5.6 million and the average winning House race cost $1.1 million. Then, you have to travel all over your state or your district and convince people that you are a really nice guy who has their best interests at heart. You tailor you message to your audience and say things that contradict each other, hoping that no one will notice. You have to have your competition for the job and the people who support them saying things about you that are nasty and often not true. You have to spend time away from your family and give up leisure time. If you get elected to the Senate, you get a little break, but if you get elected to the House of Representatives you have to begin running for reelection almost as soon as the election is over. In effect, you have to reapply for the job every two or six years and prove yourself all over again. Once you get elected, what is the job like? The salary is not bad, about three times that of the typical American family, but well below that of top corporate executives, whose jobs involve no more responsibility or hard work. Considering that most people who run for Congress come from a background with high status and earnings potential, few politicians (at least the honest ones) are in it for the money; they could usually find ways to make more money. Each member of Congress serves on several committees and subcommittees, with meetings whose schedules often conflict. Committees are where the real work gets done, but what kind of job is it that involves attending committee meetings all the time? They have to understand and know how to take advantage of arcane procedural rules. Members of Congress typically put in long days and travel frequently between the Capitol and their states or districts. They attend events of constituents and interest groups. They have to answer questions that they would rather not answer and deal with hostile people.

Who would want such a job? Unfortunately, the answer is that the person who usually wants such a job is a person who wants to pass laws to change things, whether they need changing or not. It is a person who thinks that working ridiculous hours and trying to please everybody is a rational thing to do. It was a mistake to call these people legislators or lawmakers. We should have called them something like code maintainers. What we do not need is more laws; we have plenty. All we really need is a code of laws that needs to be maintained, so that laws that have become obsolete or never worked to begin with are repealed or amended. Introducing laws that are entirely new should be a rare event, and less common than laws that amend or repeal a law that is on the books. Some states, Texas for example, have part-time legislators that meet for a few months every two years. If it is not necessary for the job of a state legislator to be full-time, it is not necessary for the job of a member of Congress to be full-time. In fact, it would be good for members of Congress to spend much more time outside the Beltway, living a life that resembles more the life that a normal person would live and understanding the problems that normal people have. I have learned that the approximate time that being a member of Congress became a full-time job was when air conditioning was installed in the Capitol building. Letting them install that air conditioning probably ranks among the the biggest mistakes that the United States has made.

I'm a Yankee Doodle Teabagger

Yankee Doodle is now the state song of Connecticut, but it was created by the British during the French and Indian War to make fun of American soldiers. I don't know how the word “Yankee” came to refer to Americans in general or New Englanders in particular, but I did find out that the word “Doodle” came from the low German word “dudel,” which means fool or simpleton. In the first verse of the song, Yankee Doodle sticks a feather in his hat and calls it macaroni. Macaroni does not refer to a kind of pasta, but to a kind of wig that was considered highly fashionable. The unsophisticated Yankees were being made fun of for pretending to be high society. So, a song that was intended to make fun of and possibly to intimidate Americans is now sung proudly as a patriotic song. As Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

The modern equivalent of the British singing Yankee Doodle is making fun of members of the Tea Party movement, accusing them of racism or even violence, or calling them “teabaggers.” In a column in Nation magazine dated May 3, 2010, Richard Dreyfus says that the recent bungled car bombing attempt in Times Square was likely the work of either a “... lone nut job or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right.” I for one am not even mildly intimidated by such an outrageous mischaracterization of the Tea Party movement. I have a bumper sticker on my car that proclaims me to be a Tea Party Patriot and have considered buying a tea-shirt from Cafe Press that says “Teabagger and proud.” I think I will not buy the tea-shirt, however, for the very reason why members of the Tea Party movement have been called teabaggers – because “teabagging” is a slang term for a particular sexual practice. If you are unfamiliar with it, you can consult the Wikipedia article, “tea bag (sexual act).” I don't mind being called a teabagger, but I don't want to have some dudel read a tea-shirt I am wearing and think that it refers to anything other than my political beliefs. I have other tea-shirts and bumper stickers to make it clear what kind of teabagger I am.

The accusations that the Tea Party movement is racist, anti-government, and having violent tendencies are completely off base. I forget where I saw it, but a survey found that 79 percent of members of the Tea Party movement are non-Hispanic caucasians, which is not far from the 75 percent of the general population that is non-Hispanic caucasian. I have been to several Tea Party events and have not yet heard a racial slur, although there is a particular President of the United States that is not totally caucasian that many at these events are not particularly happy with. They are also unhappy with non-Hispanic caucasians who share his political philosophy, such as Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Christopher Dodd, and Barney Frank. What these upsets Tea Party members about these people is their political philosophy. Race has nothing to do with it. Neither does Nancy Pelosi's gender or Barney Frank's sexual orientation. The accusation about having violent tendencies is backwards. The only violence I have heard of associated with a Tea Party was when Kenneth Gladney was physically assaulted at a Tea Party in St. Louis and called a “nigger” by some thugs wearing SEIU tea-shirts. Note that it was the people attacking a Tea Party member that were the violent racists. The charge that Tea Party members are anti-government is partially true. We are not anti-government; what we are against is big, bloated government. I, for one, fear that if the federal government doesn't get its debt under control, the time will come within a decade or two that nearly the entire budget will be composed of entitlement payments and payments and interest on the debt. When that happens, the government will not be able to function effectively. I am not anti-government and I don't know anyone who is. I am for government that is sustainable. and does things that only governments can do.

As in any large group of people, the Tea Party movement does contain some kooks. There have been some people who oppose the Tea Party movement who have advocated infiltrating it and exhibiting extreme behavior in order to discredit it. We shouldn't be judged by the fringe and by whatever moles there may be, but we have been and will be again.  Critics don't have our consent to make us feel inferior.

Broken Promises

Do you tell the truth? Do you keep your promises? Both questions are asking pretty much the same thing, because a promise is a statement that you will do something or that you will not do something; if you don't keep your promise, then you didn't tell the truth. The usual punishment for not telling the truth and for not keeping a promise is the same – you lose credibility and people tend not to believe you. Every official of the government of the United States and every official of each of the states is required to by Article VI of the Constitution of the United States to promise by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution. However, many government officials at the federal and state level behave as if they have never read the Constitution that they have promised to support, have forgotten what it says, or never had any intention to keep their promise. When they have no respect for the truth or for promises, they should not be surprised when people hold them in low regard. A journalist recently asked a prominent member of Congress where in the Constitution the Congress finds the authority for some of the provisions in the health care reform legislation that recently became law. His response was that there is no authority in the Constitution for most of the things that Congress does. I find such arrogance and contempt despicable, but unfortunately not surprising. A man that could make such a statement without seeing the contradiction between that and the fact that all members of Congress have taking an oath to support the constitution has no morals and no honor. The health care reform legislation is being challenged by the attorneys general of several states because several provisions of it are unconstitutional, but that is the subject of a different discussion.

Speaking of promises, Congress has repeatedly created entitlement programs in which it has made promises to make payments in the future or to pay for services without making sure that the government will have the money to keep those promises. Across the country, state and local governments have done the same thing with the pension funds of government workers. It is easy to make promises; it is not so easy to keep them. It is especially easy for a politician to make a promise that will not have to be kept until after the politician is retired or otherwise out of office, in effect trying to commit someone else to keep the promise. Some states (California being the most prominent example) are on the verge of bankruptcy. If being unable to keep its financial commitments is the definition of bankruptcy, then the United States is already bankrupt. The credit rating agency Moody's has warned that the United States may soon lose its triple-A credit rating if it doesn't get its debt under control. If Moody's and other credit rating agencies took their jobs seriously, the United States would have lost it triple-A credit rating years ago. Social Security began paying out more money this year than it took in this year. As more baby boomers retire, Social Security will become a bigger and bigger drain on the treasury. Medicare is even a bigger threat to the budget. Congress has shown no restraint in creating even more entitlements. Entitlements and interest on the debt are growing so fast that if nothing is done to stop from growing at their present rate, entitlement and interest on the debt will consume the entire federal budget within a decade or two. That means that there will be no money for vital government functions such as defending us from criminals, terrorists, and foreign governments that mean to do us harm. The functions of the government will be reduced to doing nothing more than writing checks. The government will be forced either to break some of the promises it has made – to pay for such entitlements as Social Security and Medicare or to pay the interest on its debt or to inflate the currency so that it makes these payments with worthless money. Either alternative will lead to major social unrest.

Much of the financial problems of the federal government came from its assumption of powers that it does not have under the Constitution. The powers of the federal government are listed (or as lawyers say, “enumerated”) in section 8 of Article I of the Constitution. Actually the powers of Congress are listed there, and the power of the Executive and Judicial branches are listed elsewhere, but the point is that the Constitution attempted to define and limit the powers of the federal government. To hammer home the point, the Tenth Amendment in the Bill of Rights states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” If the federal government had kept itself within the confines of the boundaries set out for it in the Constitution, it would be much smaller, less expensive, and more effective in doing those tasks that the Constitution delegated to it.

What can we do to reverse or lessen the damage? It may already be too late to reverse it, but we can make the damage less severe by electing honorable people who will do more to keep promises already made and make new ones than cannot be kept, people who will actually keep the oath that they are required to make to support the Constitution. We can use the amendment process in the Constitution to strengthen the Constitution and to shrink the federal government back down to a manageable size. Since the Congress has historically shown little restraint and since members of Congress are not likely to propose amendments that will diminish their own authority, I think we need to think seriously of asking our state governments to propose a constitutional convention. Article V of the Constitution provides two methods by which amendments to the Constitution may be proposed. Only one of them has been used for all the amendments so far, and that is a vote of two-thirds of each house of Congress. The other method is a convention that the Congress must call upon application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states. Possible amendments that might be proposed by such a convention might include an amendment to provide term limits for members of Congress. They might include an amendment requiring the federal government to balance its budget each years unless there is an emergency as declared by three-fourths (or some other supermajority) of the Congress, or one that limits government spending to 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product. An amendment might be proposed to require Congress to state in each piece of legislation where in the Constitution it finds the power to do what it is attempting to do. Proposed amendments might clarify how many of the current parts of the Constitution are to be interpreted to frustrate the attempts of government officials to use vagueness of language to abuse their power. Amendments might be proposed to begin the orderly winding down of government programs that have grown “too big to fail.” Many people are fearful of a constitutional convention because there are no limits to what a convention might propose and it might propose bad things, like repealing the Bill of Rights. However, to become effective any amendment must be ratified either by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states or by conventions in three-fourths of the states. Any amendment proposed by a constitutional convention that was extreme or harmful would not be likely to be ratified in three-fourths of the states. We may need a constitutional convention to take our country back from the promise breakers and make it healthier, more durable, and a better place for our children to live.