The Real Scandal of American Politics

Every now and then my email inbox – and probably yours -- disgorges a new version of a chain letter proposing a “28^th Amendment” to the Constitution that would impose term limits on Members of Congress and eliminate alleged special privileges they supposedly enjoy.
           Most of the email’s alleged special Congressional privileges never existed or were eliminated long ago, and the presumption that a massive email campaign will bring about change is naïve. Term limits would force out competent and effective members along with the less deserving. A better mechanism to limit terms is the ballot box.

Furthermore, if voters want to unleash their frustration about congressional abuses, their principal target should be the very real threat to democracy embodied in the increasing costs of political campaigns, and the disproportionate influence of large donors on the process of government, not the presence of perceived special privileges.

In all its guises (sometimes it claims Tea Party authorship, sometimes it appears to originate from the progressive camp), the email campaign against perceived Congressional abuses is a fantasy concocted by authors who don't understand the mechanism for amending the Constitution and the hornet's nest that would be opened up if anyone actually tried to implement this idea.

But readers are asked to send the message on to twenty others, promising that in three days’ time everyone will have seen it. At least that part of the message seems to be working.

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett is quoted in most versions of the email, telling a television interviewer that "I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election."  Why lawmakers would ever pass such a law is not explained.

In another version of the email, Buffett himself leads the charge. The email  states, implausibly, that “Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.”

“Buffett” didn’t explain why anyone in Congress would want to vote for such an amendment -- and that’s what’s absurd about this and similar proposals to amend the Constitution.

Unhappily for the email’s hopeful author(s), even if members of Congress implausibly ever wanted to vote to reduce their own powers, the Founding Fathers made it very difficult for something like this to come about. 

The Constitution provides (Article V) for amendment through a purposely difficult process: any proposed amendment must be approved first by the Congress (2/3 of each house) and then by 3/4 of the state legislatures. This amendment would never pass stage one. Would 290 Representatives and 67 Senators willingly vote to eliminate their own jobs or Congressional perks?

Article V prescribes a second way to amend the Constitution, which has never been tried: two thirds of the state legislatures may request that Congress call for a constitutional convention, which then can propose amendments which must still be approved by three fourths of the states. 
           And of course, once such a convention is assembled, every hot button issue could be on the table for possible inclusion: religion; abortion rights; gun control; gay marriage; immigration; voting rights; social security; Medicare; "Obamacare" -- somewhere there'd be a zealous clique ready to push forward its idea of "reform."  Some people might welcome this, but I suspect it would be a nightmare.

Just maybe the Founders were smart to make it hard to change the system. "Be careful what you wish for" may have been one of their watchwords as they cobbled together their (and our) Constitution.

The Founders did not anticipate the instant mobilization of sizable segments of the population through email, of course, but far more significantly, they anticipated neither the emergence of political parties (they called them “factions”), of lengthy election campaigns, or of the vast sums of money needed by politicians to influence voters.

The disproportionate influence of money in politics is the real scandal voters should be addressing, not some fancied and outdated lists of abuses of privilege. As the cost of campaigns – particularly the multimillion dollar cost of television time -- continues to increase, and campaigning politicians are forced by necessity to turn to large donors to meet those costs, the likelihood that legislators will be called upon to vote for measures to advance those donors’ interests, even when they run counter to those of the majority of their constituents, is bound to grow as well.

I was a legislative assistant to a United States Senator in the 1970s, and well remember how one big donor after another would buttonhole me to tell me how my boss should vote. They weren’t asking me; they were telling me. And they were used to having their way. After all, they had paid for it.

Forty years later it’s much worse. On one critical domestic issue after another, be it the defense budget, environmental regulation, abortion rights, gun control, drug policy or immigration reform, and on international affairs from opposition to arms control treaties to support for overseas wars to adherence to the International Criminal Court to resolution of the Arab/Israeli conflict, the positions taken by too many legislators reflect the views of big donors, not those of their constituents. But money talks, all too effectively. 

All this was true even before the outrageous 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision which declared a corporation to be a citizen and its political contributions to be free speech, protected by the first Amendment to the Constitution.

And that’s the real scandal of American politics today.

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