Two items today about strengthening Congress, one noteworthy for what is not being proposed and the other for its succinct, useful list of ideas and sage conclusions.
From the Washington Post on term limits for Congress:
In 1994, the last time there was a conservative grass-roots revolution, term limits were front and center. The Republican-written Contract With America included a vow to hold a vote on a term-limits amendment, and candidates nationwide got mileage out of pledging to back the bill or to limit their own service.
Yet in 2010, neither the Contract From America, endorsed by a host of conservative groups, nor the Pledge to America, written by House Republican leaders, mentioned term limits.
Even as the tea party movement swept the nation with calls to buck the political establishment and elect “citizen-legislators,” term limits were not high on the agenda.
And from the venerable Lee Hamilton, the former member of Congress who directs the Center on Congress, reflecting on the loss of public confidence in the legislative branch:
Removing the roadblocks to institutional effectiveness will take hard work. Congress has gotten its house in order before, however, and it can do so again.
It could start by addressing the filibuster rule, which effectively requires 60 votes in the Senate in order to move most legislation, a formidable hurdle in a closely divided Senate. In the name of efficiency, Congress routinely embraces giant omnibus bills which allow the leadership basically to undermine the deliberation, transparency, and accountability we expect and need in our system; it needs to return to the regular order developed by Congress over many decades.
The country also needs more robust congressional oversight into every nook and cranny of government, and a vigorous ethics system which enforces the basic rule that every member act in such a manner as to reflect credit on the institution.
A Congress seriously interested in effectiveness would pursue procedural fixes to reduce the excessive partisanship that too often paralyzes Capitol Hill. None of them are mysterious: redressing the outsized role of special-interest money in elections; reducing partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts; eliminating closed state primaries, which enable ideological activists to dominate elections; and wringing the intense partisanship of committee staffers out of the legislative process.
Hamilton goes beyond these procedural reforms to bemoan a loss of commitment by members of Congress to "a search for a remedy" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s phrase) and concludes:
It is not hard to find members on the Hill who speak for a defined narrow interest. It is much harder, though not impossible, to find members who search for a remedy, as opposed to a political position. We need more members who reflect the diversity of this great and varied country yet work to bring it together, not tear it asunder.
Turning Congress around will take some effort. But make no mistake. Congress can live up to the faith our Constitution and our democracy place in it. But we, as Americans, have to insist that the people we elect make this a priority. Congress has to want to change, and we as voters have a major role to play in helping to bring that about.
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