Forum Post: How can we regain control of Congress?

One method available to us to regain control of Congress is to vote our representatives out of office every two years for the House and every six years for the Senate. Our representatives would then know that their performances had no bearing on their future electability. This may sound like a bad idea because we usually expect rewards to encourage good performance.

I must admit at this point in our discussion that my definition of good performance is independent performance. I anticipate that many independent representative will reach a consensus that is better for all than could be achieved by representatives voting along party lines.

In the above I am of course also assuming that re-election is a reward for the incumbent. While the re-election of an incumbent may indeed be rewarding, the greater constituency has no real means of influencing performance during any term of office. We must admit that money is a much more powerful reward than re-election and that if large numbers of modest income voters cannot guarantee significant amounts of monetary reward to the incumbent, then someone else will, and they will get the results from our representatives that they want, and this will not usually turn out to our advantage.

Certainly the combined actions of our representatives have not turned out to our advantage in the past. Therefore our only option as voters is to not renew their jobs in Congress.

How will limiting by the ballot the terms of representatives to two years and of senators to six years affect the influence of monied interests? Well, there may not be much of an incentive for special interest to fund re-election campaigns if the incumbents are sure to be defeated in the next election. Monied interests can still promise monetary rewards for the elected representatives once they are out of office. Such rewards might include cushy jobs or just plain cash payments. But, I am hoping that with the great turnover in Congress that would result from this plan the monied interests would be less incentivized to make big payments to any retired representative, and this in turn would reduce the effects of the promise of modest rewards on the behavior of the representatives compared to the possibility of extreme chastisement from his or her constituency for failure to act independently.

There is a downside to this method however in that much of what goes on in Congress is determined by seniority. If we locally replace our representatives whenever we have the chance, and other districts do not, we will be conceding power to those other districts. For this method to work, the majority of districts and states, if not all, would have to follow it.

The other part of the problem is the selection of candidates for the next election. We surely do not want to legally prohibit any incumbent from running again (for example a term limit of one term), but we would need a better method of selecting people to run for office who will pay attention to the best interests of the country, whatever those best interests turn out to be. It would likely be possible for the major political parties to place their preferred candidates on the ballot each election, and simply not repeat any incumbent. The political parties could recycle old candidates or just offer new ones and manage the performance of the elected representatives from some central party office. There has been no such thing as a contract between voters and candidates, though there might be gentlemen’s agreements between party bosses and candidates. To break the power of the parties, the voters would have to abjure from party affiliations and select candidates who have at least made no such strong gentlemen’s agreements. Indeed, the “best” candidates could be those who have never been involved in politics at any level before their appearance on the national ballot.