Analysis —
- Members of Congress have increasingly remained in office for decades.
- Congress has designed its bureaucracy to protect incumbents, shielding them from punishment for misconduct and cloaking the institution’s dirty laundry in secrecy.
- Even members of opposite parties do not go after each other for ethics issues, part of a truce to avoid mutually assured destruction.
Members of Congress are old. Really old. The House Democrats’ top three leaders are all 78 or 79.
Democrat John Dingell was re-elected to the House every two years from 1955 to 2014, even though he represented Detroit during the period in which the city sank from America’s crown jewel of manufacturing to a symbol of urban blight. In 2014 he was replaced — by his wife.
Republican Strom Thurmond was a racial segregationist born in 1902 who served in the upper chamber from 1956 until 2003. The nation changed, but he remained in office. By the end, his aides were dragging him around and propping him up like a marionette. Who did this serve?
Congressmen have used their power to design an institution that’s first order of business is keeping current members as current members for as long as possible.
How did we get here?
Protecting Their Own
Inside Congress, members have shaped the institution to protect incumbents through secrecy and even creating bureaucratic offices that break the House’s own rules in order to do so.
Shielding themselves from facing consequences for malfeasance isn’t about Democrat versus Republican, it’s about insiders versus outsiders. After all, with fewer than 10 percent of congressional districts “toss-ups” according to RealClearPolitics, chances are a congressman forced out of office for misconduct would only be replaced by a member of his own party anyway. read more
Hell of a gig if you’re sleazy enough to do it.
With all the Trump investigations, you would think these corrupt, filthy bastards might be worried that their own ox may get gored?
Pitchforks and guillotines.
It’s the only way to be sure.
BuT bUT bUT Trey Goudy gave ‘Em hell
didn’t he ???
Sounds exactly like “a ruling class” that our founding fathers wanted to prevent — it developed especially before the civil war to protect the white aristocracy from the south who wanted to be shielded from the slavery question and grew into union (Northers) privileged with the carpet baggers and industrialists of the nouveau rich in the 1870’s on.
Here’s a novel idea.:.. how about abolishing the Congressional Ethics Committee and investigate/remedy shenanigans in the same manner as the rest of us jamokes?
I’d pretend not to know if a little Sarin gas was mixed in the HVAC along with the rarified air they breathe on the Hill. Am I a bad person?
As for the House, each member now “represents” some 3/4 million people.
That is an abject absurdity.
One man (person) cannot – CANNOT – represent the interests of 700,000 people, by any stretch of the imagination. That man (person) represents himself. This is why lies, bullshit, and money are the absolute minimal essentials to elected office.
It is a simple mathematical fact that the greater the franchise, the less each vote counts. Our politicians are acutely aware of this simple fact and make all manner of lies to confuse the issue and expand the franchise. The House is held to 435 “representatives” by statute, not by the Constitution, thus the number of people “represented” grows with the population and the effectiveness of each of those voters’ vote diminishes proportionally.
The Senate was wrested from the Several States by the 17th Amendment and put into the stream of even more perfidiousness – instead of the individual states’ legislators choosing their Senators the door was thus opened to all manner of voter fraud and money influence – and the consequence is that no one is responsible for any individual Senator’s malfeasance (see McCain, Menendez, Feinstein, Boxer, Franken, Reid, Schumer, McCaskill, &c.) and they are at liberty to bloviate and pontificate and lie about anything and everything – whereas if they were answerable to the State Legislators, they would answer.
Thus are the totalitarians now trying to destroy the Electoral College – instead of 435 electors we’ll have 330,000,000 and an open door for fraud.
izlamo delenda est …
To work as intended the whole system depends on people with integrity filling those positions as a term of temporary service. Needless to say that concept was quickly rendered extinct when lowlife’s smelled opportunity. Now with few exceptions we are governed by swine.
I have always wondered why Paul Ryan walked away. Which cookie jar did he get caught in. There certainly more to the story than family.
Just for the record… Strom Thurmond was a Democrat until 1964.
You mean you don’t like the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection act?
“Republican Strom Thurmond was a racial segregationist” yet had an illegitimate black daughter. Double standards.