Broken Government

Sadly, the current debacle in Washington, while serious, is just a symptom of an even larger problem...our totally broken government.

I've written my Congressman and Senators until I'm blue in the face on this issue of raising the debt ceiling and dealing with our deficit, but I'm convinced that their minds are made up and my lone voice won't be heard. I'm just trying to counterbalance all those voices, very vocal, who have spoken out against conpromise. I have no illusions about the votes, however. They are what they are.

Maybe we can come up with a few simple and many complex suggestions for patches to this system...patches allowed by the Founding Fathers in the form of Constitutional amendments. So, here goes (in no particular order):

1) Reduce the deficit with both spending cuts and raising taxes. We just woke up in Vegas and have to go home now, pockets empty. It's time to pay the piper and face up to our profligate ways. It doesn't matter if we agree or disagree with the spending that got us here. It won't be easy. It won't be pretty. But we have to do it.

2) Impose term limits. The President is subject to term limits. Why not Congress? Some of them (Strom Thurman comes to mind) would like to die in their seats, clinging to IV poles. But we can't let them.

3) Lengthen terms for the House to four years and have half of them run every two years. The current two-year terms make it so that they are always in campaign mode. My guess is that new Representatives take a year to find the loo and then they are in campaign mode again. Four-year terms might give them a couple of years to actually work.

4) Get rid of the Electoral College. It might have made some sense in the days of yore, when vote counts had to travel by horseback to Washington. It makes no sense now, when frequently the popular vote is thrown in the toilet and electors can vote any old way they want, regardless of how the citizens of their state voted.

5) Increase the number of members of the House. Someone recently proposed a House of 10,000 members. That's ridiculous, of course, but there surely should be more. I think it was back in the 1930's or some such that the current number of members was set at 435. We have a few more people than we did back then, whenever it was.

6) Make the elementary assumption that a majority is a majority. We don't need a "super" majority of 60 senators. Fifty-one percent of the vote, last time I was in math class, is a majority, as it was at the time of our founding when they invented "majority rule." (see item #4)

7) Return to the idea, as stated in our Constitution, that church and state should be separate. When Catholic bishops "approved" the anti-abortion language in the House version of the health reform bill and no one even blinked, I was appalled. We have gone way too far down that slippery slope.

8) Make voting mandatory. Not how one votes but that one does vote. I have no earthly idea how this could be implemented, but a relative few voters are having a huge impact on our government simply because they show up. All of us should show up.

9) Reform campaign financing. The Supremes just undid decades of campaign financing reform by allowing corporations and unions and foreigners unlimited donations and therefore access to our Senators and Representatives. No one, no one organization or industry, even the Boy Scouts, should have that kind of control.

10) Make it illegal for any of our Congressional delegates to sign "pledges" to any organization right or left. One of the current candidates for President has stated that the only pledge he'll make is the Pledge of Allegiance. One of the reason that compromise has become such a dirty word is that some in Congress have signed pledges to a political PAC that they will, under no circumstances, raise taxes. And they define even tax reform as "raising taxes"! I should send them a Webster's Dictionary.

And so, Dear Reader, these are my ideas, the Dirty Decade of Government Patches, if you will. Some of them appear to be really insane (some of them seem out there even to me!). Some would require Constitutional amendments.

It has been said that we get the government that we deserve. I disagree. I don't think we deserve this mess at all. Let's fix this.