This could work


It's certainly no wackier than what we have had to endure so far
Robert McHenry makes a pretty startling suggestion.

My suggestion was for an amendment to the Constitution: Members of the House of Representatives shall be chosen each two years by lot from among the adult citizens of each congressional district.

Pretty simple, eh?

First, the pros. There would be no elections for the House, so there would be no primaries, no need to choose between a hack incumbent and one of a new set of the same old blow-dried overachieving real estate agents or lawyers or funeral directors. No campaigning, no campaign finances, no hard money or soft money or disappearing money, no negative ads, no ads at all, no campaign consultants, no scurrilous attack sheets in the mail, no garish campaign signs in everyone else’s front yard, no speeches, no stupidly simplistic answers to poorly posed questions, no phone calls from pollers, no need to worry about why these particular people want this particular job so badly.

Convinced yet?

There are some cons, of course, that we’d have to face up to. It would probably turn out that an entire complement of brand new congresspersons every two years would be slow to get themselves organized and begin legislating. No, wait; that sounds very much like a pro, too. (There’s more to this: Without the seniority system that keeps the House so rigidly structured, there would be no entrenched powers, no rule-by-vanity, no common currency for the trade in favors. If a budget bill did manage to pass, it would likely be free of the “earmarks” so beloved by the current incumbents. Emphatically a pro.)

He never does think of a con, and off the top of my head, neither can I.

Any ideas?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - January 11, 2006 at 04:47 AM  Tag


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