Some Republicans have failed to heed those critical words of warning, and instead wake up each morning and look for the sword. It’s the same as throwing a grenade in your own tent. I really don’t think Nidal Hasan is the role model the GOP wants to emulate. We should leave the kind of Sunni/Shiite fights for the real jihadists. The goal of conservatives should be to build up America—not blow up the Republican Party.
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Rules for Reformers—(Redneck Remedies)—The Difference Between Killing Pigs and Making Sausage
YOU’VE HEARD THE SAYING, “Two things you should never watch being made—a law and sausage.” I don’t agree with half of that. I’ve been involved in lawmaking as a lieutenant governor presiding over the State Senate and as a governor negotiating every step of the process with a legislature that was 90 percent Democrat. I’ve also seen sausage made.
I still eat sausage.
For the faint of heart and those without a strong stomach, seeing the process of politics become the process of governing can result in serious reactions. It’s not a pretty process. It can be tedious, exasperating, and embarrassing. But let me let you in on a little secret—it’s supposed to be!
As hard as it may be to believe, making a law was never designed by our Founding Fathers to be quick and simple. When they wrote and approved the Constitution, it was intentional that the passage of a bill to become law would be a hard slog. They feared that passion would overwhelm reason and thoughtfulness, and so they built in plenty of speed bumps to make sure that a bill never whizzed through Congress and got signed by the President as hurriedly as Lindsay Lohan gets through another round of rehab. Now, I’m pretty sure that the Founding Fathers didn’t design total gridlock like we have today in Congress, but as much as it may surprise you, they would prefer gridlock to haste. Why? Because they feared government about the way I fear snakes, spiders, and sharks. They knew that the sheer power of it is an intoxicant and that most of the people who enter government will be like sixteen-year-old boys with keys to the liquor cabinet whose parents are gone for the weekend. It will be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on steroids (and boozed up). In fact, watching Congress make laws and oversee regulation is a lot like watching sixteen-year-olds with booze and a BMW. You get the distinct impression that they have no business with either one.
While I’ve sought to explain the differences in the way people from Bubba-ville think vs. the folks from Bubble-ville, I want to point out the solutions to how we change our culture and country and restore things to a constitutional republic, instead of a nation of narcissist numbskulls from the Northeast creating a plutocracy.
I will be fine with it should you choose to call these ideas “Redneck Remedies.” For many of us in rural America, being called a redneck isn’t a slur or an insult. I don’t get my shorts in a wad when someone labels me one. I consider it a compliment! I know for sure that if I were to be broken down on the side of the highway, I’d much rather a couple of rednecks in a pickup pull over than a Wall Street banker wearing a $4,000 Italian suit and driving a Porsche. The rednecks could change the tire, jump start the battery, or fix a carburetor; whereas if the banker were out of cell phone range to call AAA, I’d be left on the roadside.
We have an expression in the south that “if duct tape or WD-40 can’t fix it, it can’t be fixed.” Duct tape (commonly mispronounced as “duck tape”) and WD-40 are basic staples in any rural American’s garage or tool kit. Consider these proposals for governing to be the duct tape and WD-40 for reform.
TERM LIMITS
It’s ironic that politicians want to limit everything under the sun—the size of our sodas, the speed and number of miles we can drive, the amount of water and electricity we can use, where we can send our kids to school, and the list goes on and on and on—but the one thing they think should never be limited in any way is their own political careers.
Term limits are not a recent invention. The concept stretches back to Ancient Rome and Greece, where holders of certain offices were limited in how many terms they could serve consecutively. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle observed, “It is not so easy to do wrong in a short as in a long tenure of office” [Politics by Aristotle. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.5.five.html].
Of course, the most famous explanation for the need for term limits was made by English historian, politician, and author Lord Acton, who said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” And he said that long before Watergate, Whitewater, and the IRS scandal of the Obama era.
Term limits were also a part of the Founders’ earliest plans for the U.S. government. As Robert Struble notes in his book on constitutional history, Treatise on Twelve Lights, in June 1776, “the Continental Congress appointed a committee of thirteen to consider a frame of government. Among the proposals the committee considered was one from the State of Virginia, written by Thomas Jefferson, and urging a limitation of tenure, ‘to prevent every danger which might arise to American freedom by continuing too long in office the members of the Continental Congress…’ A month later the committee made its recommendations, which as regards the rotation of congress were incorporated unchanged into the Articles of Confederation (1781 to 1789). The fifth Article provided that ‘no person shall be capable of being a delegate [to the Continental Congress] for more than three years in any term of six years.’”
Incidentally, serving as President didn’t soften Jefferson’s views about the need for regular rotation in government positions. In 1807, halfway through his second term, he wrote that “if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life.”
Struble notes that the American preference for turnover in leadership was so deeply ingrained that it took until the twentieth century for the concept of career politicians to take hold. The popular novelist James Fenimore Cooper summed up the prevailing attitude in 1838 when he said that “contact with the affairs of state is one of the most corrupting of the influences to which men are exposed.”
Unfortunately, among the many bad ideas that arose in the twentieth century, like Nazism, socialism, and letting movie actors talk, came the argument that “experience” in government was a far more valuable asset than a fresh perspective or a knowledge of business, farming, or other fields in which the vast majority of Americans work. (It’s funny that the same hothouse academics who mock the idea of those hayseed Tea Partiers having enough experience to make legislation also hailed Barack Obama, the least experienced President ever, as not only the most qualified person in America to be President, but the most qualified in all of history, more qualified than Jefferson himself.)
Not everyone swallowed that argument, including twentieth-century Presidents of each party. Republican Calvin Coolidge said:
When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions … It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.
Coolidge must have been passionate about this subject because I believe those are the most words he ever said in one sitting.
I especially appreciate the view held by Coolidge that the presidency is not an office so extraordinary that there is only one person on earth who can “pull the sword from the stone,” so to speak. I was interviewed by Karen Tumulty of Time magazine in 2011 as I contemplated running for President in 2012. I remarked that I didn’t think that in a country of over 300 million people there was only one person capable of being President, and that anyone who thought he was the “only one” wasn’t fit to be P
resident. She took that to mean that I didn’t have the proverbial “fire in the belly” to make a go of it. My reasons for not running in 2012 had nothing to do with lack of “fire in the belly.” It had to do with having more than “mush in the brain” and “ego in the gut.” I truly fear the megalomaniac who believes he’s the “last hope for America!” That is a dangerous person. To run for President, a person needs to believe he or she can do the job and have the inner peace and strength and resolve to take on the responsibility, but God help us all when a person is so filled with himself to believe that he’s the only one who can do it. Spare us from the haughty horrors that comes with such hubris!
In 1953, after deciding not to run for a third term, Democrat Harry Truman said:
In my opinion, eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity. There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.
Interesting quote, considering that he became President because he was Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President when FDR died in office shortly after being reelected to his fourth term. Truman saw FDR from as close a vantage point as anyone alive, and that was his impression of what the lack of term limits did to a person. Hmmmm …
Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, originally opposed the Twenty-second Amendment, but later changed his mind. He and Truman both thought it should be extended to Congress, too, limiting members of both houses to twelve years. Eisenhower said that if a Congress member were limited to twelve years, he “would tend to think of his career as an important and exciting interlude in his life, a period dedicated to the entire public rather than as a way of making a living or making a career of exercising continuous political power.” But he recognized that Congress would never pass term limits on itself, so it would be up to the states to pass an amendment forcing it on Congress.
In his 2007 book, A More Perfect Constitution, University of Virginia political science professor Larry J. Sabato promoted the idea of federal term limits modeled on the popular state-level limits. He agreed with Eisenhower’s prediction that it would take a new constitutional convention to force Congress to limit its own power.
FDR was the first President to be reelected more than twice, but he wasn’t the first to try to break the tradition set by George Washington of voluntarily stepping down after at most two terms. Grant and Wilson both tried to win third terms but lost their party’s nomination, and Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt sought nonconsecutive third terms. But FDR was the first to win more than two terms. His success at becoming President for Life alarmed Republicans, and anyone else who thought that America was founded on the principle of not having a king, and inspired the passage of the Twenty-second Amendment. It was passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified by the states in 1951, limiting Presidents to two terms. One of its early supporters was New York Governor Thomas Dewey, the GOP nominee against FDR in 1944, who announced his support for the amendment during his 1944 campaign, saying that for one person to be President for “four terms, or sixteen years, is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed.”
For the record, my support for term limits has not diminished with my own service in government. I was a term-limits advocate from my very first run for public office in 1992 when I ran for the U.S. Senate. That year, I first met Paul Jacobs, who was then the president of U.S. Term Limits. I officially joined the fight and haven’t quit since. I believed then and now that when people elected to public office become more focused on holding office than on making the tough decisions of governing, our great Republic is sunk.
Most people believe in term limits when they are “outsiders” running for their first office, but the longer they stay in office, the less support they espouse for the end of their own careers until they finally determine that we can’t do without them and their wealth of experience.
Horse hooey! William F. Buckley once said, “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” In a bit of plagiarism from the distinguished Mr. Buckley, I have likewise said that if we randomly selected 535 names from the phone directory to install in the House and Senate, we probably wouldn’t do any worse than we are doing now.
The longer I served, the more I believed term limits would improve the quality of government. I regularly heard from members of the legislature who had been elected believing in and supporting term limits, “I just can’t learn the budget process in a mere six years in the House and eight in the Senate.” In other words, if they stayed 14 years by spending all the time allowed in both the House and Senate (two 2-year terms in the House and two 4-year terms in the Senate), they still couldn’t understand the state budget of Arkansas. If so, then they aren’t smart enough to be in the legislature, and believe me, there are some folks that made it there that were probably kept back a grade or two. A person can become a neurosurgeon in less time than these guys thought it would take them to understand the budget, and having developed and balanced a bunch of state budgets, I can assure you that neurosurgery is much more complicated. I got pretty good at the budget—balanced every one of them and took a $1 billion deficit and left the state with almost a $1 billion in surplus, but I wouldn’t get near scrubbing in to do brain surgery!
While windbags like Dick Durbin claim they’re protecting the Constitution by keeping their own rear ends in the seat of power until the dawn of doomsday, the American people beg to differ. A January 2013 Gallup poll found that “75 percent of adults nationwide back term limits for members of the House and the Senate, while 21 percent say they would vote against term limits. Term limits received bipartisan support in the poll: Republicans would back such a measure 82 percent–15 percent; independents would do so 79 percent–17 percent and Democrats favored term limits 65 percent–29 percent.”
What about term limits for the Supreme Court, or as I like to say, the “Extreme Court.” There are currently no limits on how long a Supreme Court Justice can serve. All the Constitution says is that Justices serve during “good behavior,” which implies that the only ways ever to get rid of one are retirement, impeachment, arrest, or death. (Also the only way to get rid of a Democratic congressman from Chicago.) University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato has proposed a limit of fifteen to eighteen years for justices.
The argument against term limits for the SCOTUS is that lifetime tenure insulates them from political concerns and allows them to render fair and impartial decisions. In reality, the rise of activist judges and the evolution of the hyperpartisan vetting process have given us a Court that constantly teeters between being stacked either left or right, with an endless series of 5–4 decisions decided by one or two “swing justices” who aren’t predictably liberal or conservative.
Another recent development that’s complicated lifetime judicial appointments is that people are living so much longer. Between 1971 and 2006, the average SCOTUS Justice served for 26.1 years. That leads to court decisions being imposed on young Americans by judges appointed by Presidents and approved by Congresses that were elected long before the people affected were old enough to vote. Just as passing down the national debt to future generations is a form of taxation without representation, rulings by these Justices is adjudication without representation.
Another thing unlimited terms lead to is the embarrassing and dangerous spectacle of rulings on complicated cutting-edge topics such as cell phone privacy and net neutrality being made by octogenarian judges who don’t even know how to turn on a VHS player and still have a windup alarm clock. The same argument could be made about our ancient senators who make laws that affect, say, cable TV. In America, the walking dead regulate The Walking Dead.
A poll released in May 2014, by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a Democratic polling firm, found that by a 60–36 percent margin, Americans think
SCOTUS Justices often make rulings influenced by their personal or partisan opinions rather than rendering an impartial ruling based on the facts and the law. That opinion held across party lines.
The same poll found that 74 percent of Americans support ending lifetime SCOTUS appointments and limiting Justices to one 18-year term; 54 percent “strongly” support it. Support remained high across partisan lines (Democrats 80 percent, Republicans 72 percent, Independents 73 percent).
Michigan Representative John Dingell, who has served in the House of Representatives since 1955, announced his retirement from Congress in February 2014. Dingell’s legacy over the long run will be his tenure. He is already the longest-serving member in the history of Congress, with the closest runner up, Michigan’s John Conyers, trailing him by almost a decade. Dingell served since the Eisenhower administration, since—for scale—the first McDonald’s opened. He replaced his father in the seat to which he first won election; between the two of them, the Dingells will have served Michigan nearly half of the length of time that it has been a state. Part of the reason Dingell offered for retiring at this point was that he didn’t want “to be carried out [of Congress] feet first”—as his father was.
God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy Page 23