Abolish the Presidency!
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The founding fathers never envisioned professional politicians, they thought we should have citizen legislators that would take a few years off their careers to contribute to the country and then go back to what they did before and not make a career out of politics. Right now the perks are too much to give up the position, good pay, great health insurance, power, get vested into the retirement plan after a few years…no incentive to go back to their previous jobs.
I have always maintained that the best way to fix social security and health care is to have congress have social security as their retirement plan and Obama care as their health provider…both systems would be fixed in no time flat. Without all the perks term limits would almost no be nessesary.
Politicians have made the system of government so complicated that now they claim you need years of experience to be effective which really is not true; while the system is complicated most of the details are worked out by aides and congressional offices personnel anyway and the congressman is just the front person.
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JayHawkFanToo said:
The founding fathers never envisioned professional politicians, they thought we should have citizen legislators that would take a few years off their careers to contribute to the country and then go back to what they did before and not make a career out of politics. Right now the perks are too much to give up the position, good pay, great health insurance, power, get vested into the retirement plan after a few years…no incentive to go back to their previous jobs.
I have always maintained that the best way to fix social security and health care is to have congress have social security as their retirement plan and Obama care as their health provider…both systems would be fixed in no time flat. Without all the perks term limits would almost no be nessesary.
Politicians have made the system of government so complicated that now they claim you need years of experience to be effective which really is not true; while the system is complicated most of the details are worked out by aides and congressional offices personnel anyway and the congressman is just the front person.
Don’t be too enamored with the original intent of the Framers as to whom they envisioned would be politicians. The assumed it would be a group largely like themselves, white male property owners. They also distrusted a standing army, never envisioned a bureaucracy as practically a 4th branch of government, and certainly never considered the nation engaging in numerous undeclared wars costing upward of 100,000 lives over 7 decades. Times change, and the country has, too.
@Kcmatt7 Well, @HighEliteMajor might fall off his chair reading this, but I am a First Amendment absolutist who believes that limiting any type of political spending by individuals or groups is unconstitutional. (Now, I only think that applies to people, not legal fictions like corporations. Unlike people, corporations have existence only insofar as defined by law, so I see no problem in restricting business speech.) I always just think how important Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was in rallying support fot the Revolution, and shudder at the notion that anyone in government should ever have the chance to decide who spends what on what things.
Everyone throughout the political spectrum needs a healthy detailed course in American history and needs to realize that disaster awaits any country taken into long-term constitutional and institutional upheaval by any group or party as a way of trying to defeat the short-term problem of having political opponents in power.
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@mayjay Do you believe anything has changed regarding the impressionability and interconnectedness of people today compared to at the time of Thomas Paine, and if so (maybe the answer is no.) does this affect areas that previously seemed well addressed with absolutist policies?
Also, in this nuclear, global age, is the option of revolution off the table, and therefore does this too affect areas that previously seemed well addressed with absolutist policies, as balance and preservation of the Republic is more imperative now?
Is the world so radically different that in some areas where it previously fit, absolutism no longer applies? is this a new age of political relativity?
I think the Thomas Paine example is a great one. What if someone you vehemently disagreed with were calling on the internet for revolution right now, and had a mob of 400,000 people actually ready to act, with millions of others passively onboard with the idea as well? Instead of limiting free speech, I guess the solution would be to allow the revolution to happen?
Isn’t this kind of like when Czarist Russia was aware of the communist propaganda Lenin was passing out, but did nothing to stop it?
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@approxinfinity When I say absolutist, I am discussing political speech and this is in reference to calls for campaign spending limits (which favor incumbents exponentially). I am not saying speech that is defamatory or militating for violence against individuals or by mobs should be protected. I am also not suggesting that calls for revolution are protected, for the best method of revolution is by constitutional means–even a new constitutional convention if desired.
Each example is of speech where there are consequences for particular types of speech that hurts people or threatens public safety. The government can choose reactively to intervene on these when necessary but faces a legacy of overwhelming precedent against overreach when it starts to define in advance what limits there should be on funding that goes into discussing public policy, or how much anyone can spend to help get his or her views out into the political marketplace.
My fellow liberals are so short-sighted in advicating speech restrictions like campaign finance limits that it literally hurts my head, but it scares me even more that the political left is working so hard to ensure the passage of laws that will eventually likely silence their own expression.
As for Czarist Russia, they failed to make massive reforms in favor of their feudal powers. The propoganda rallied enough people to allow the Commies to set up a horrid solution. No government that massively fails its people has the right to suppress its people solely to perpetuate power. If it hadn’t been Lenin, it would have been someone equally ambitious and bloodthirsty–oppressed people will support any change, even to their own detriment.
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@mayjay I appreciate your perspective, and I would like to agree with you; I really do not want government to have to define censorship limits and I am glad that it seems that the private sector limiting hate speech for their own businesses best interest might work out here.
I do wonder in the case of Fox News, if there needs to be stricter rules NOT preemptively limiting free speech but around limiting relationships between media organizations and elected officials.
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@approxinfinity Nope. First Amendment applies to the nitwit press, too. It is up to other journalists to track down any corruption. Passing laws with restrictions just encourages secrecy.
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@mayjay As much as the liberal press irritates me, there’s the First Amendment. All nice and shiny and wonderful. I can yell Obama’s a loon, Trump is crazy, I love Lenin, Reagan rules, the Clintons are corrupt, or bring back Jimmy Carter. And I’m not going to jail. What an unprecedented and amazing creation, the First Amendment. Respecting it in all quarters is the best path.
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@mayjay I dont know if relying on other media is a complete solution. This assumes that:
- The other media actually does this and reports it well
- That people do something in response to their coverage
Do you believe there Is anything corrupt in the relationship between Fox and the President? Is trading influence for ratings corrupt even if money is not directly changing hands? When you say corruption are you talking illegal or immoral?
Isn’t favoring one news organization you have deep ties with, routinely addressing issues they bring up on the air with policy, and proclaiming all others as “fake news” several steps towards establishing state run media?
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@approxinfinity No different than many relationships presidents have had with media figures over the years. Violates journalistic ethics but that seems less important to everyone than it used to.
If you think Trump and Fox are unique, you probably need to do that history study I referred to earlier. I think you are seeing all the challenges and you view them as major threats. Modern technology has changed how everything works, but if the apocalyptic reactions can be minimized, the system will correct over time. If everyone sees Trump as the greatest threat to democracy and gets so bent out of shape over every word he utters, the reaction could be worse than anything the orange guy can do.
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@mayjay I think we are in unprecedented territory. There is no comp for what Fox is now and how Trump brazenly disparages the integrity of all other news sources save Fox. There has been no president who uses a network as his primary source for understanding the issues.
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@approxinfinity The media has made a point of focusing and all out assault on Trump during the election. The difference is, Trump fought back. Trump responded. Trump went straight to the people using Twitter. I don’t endorse all of his statements, certainly not, but he bypassed the bias. In return, the CNN and MSNBC, and the major outlets, went bonkers. The took the indignant approach, and then chose to compromise their integrity further by making news editorials. The chicken and the egg thing is easy. Trump responded and attacked – a different style, and the mainstream media couldn’t handle it. Do leftists like you have no shame, no sense of logic? Well, no you don’t. You are blinded by your hatred of Trump. And of course, you insult him as if he’s an idiot. Another leftist approach – any conservative is an idiot, a robot, blah, blah, blah.
Thank you for demonstrating exactly what I’ve been saying in my thread.
You seriously act as if the mainstream media was not Obama’s lapdog for 8 years. What a joke.
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@HighEliteMajor I don’t think I can argue with you about mainstream media, because you won’t acknowledge that Fox is mainstream media, and they certainly weren’t Obama’s lapdog while the Republican House and Senate took a party-line scorched earth policy on everything.
You act as if the media has no negative material on Trump, they’re only upset at being snubbed by him via his proclamations on Twitter (I think you can find the joke you seek here). Do I think he’s an idiot? No. Do I think he’s a warped asshole? Yes. And by no means a “very stable genius”.
If you want to call me names rather than talk, why don’t you go back to your Trump impersonation shouting in bold on your thread without acknowledging anyone else’s opinion? This does demonstrate well what you’re saying on your thread – that anyone who even questions the position of the President is a “leftist”.
I didn’t prescribe a solution; I tried to be honest explaining the problems as I see them, and you hit me with your rubber stamp. “Leftist”.
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I thought leftist is a badge of honor among you folks. I didn’t realize that’s name calling. What is the correct term — I mean, you all have introduced the varying pronoun nonsense, so I’ll play along.
You have demonstrated my point. Fox is mainstream media. You have Fox, and then you have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and nearly every major newspaper. Is this even a discussion point?
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@HighEliteMajor You want to shove me in a group and label the group with some bs title that you can easily dismiss. You know full well that the term “leftist” is a construct of the alt-right.
Treat people with some respect man.
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@mayjay note that I’m only in favor of campaign spending limits in combination with term limits. I don’t see a way to make one work without the other.
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@approxinfinity $170k is enough to not see what real peoples problems are. Especially when you can put a lot of your coat of living into your campaign. And add in that they get a VERY good retirement plan added into that.
They don’t live like normal people. Look at a lot of their net worths.
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@Kcmatt7 I just don’t see what the salary will make that much difference. You’re right about the net worths being high. I think a lot of those are carried in from jobs before public office, and I think all the other ways a politician can build net worth would just become more tempting if you lower their salary.
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I would like to think and the Federalist Papers appears to back up the idea (as a I read them many moons ago) that the “citizen legislator” the founding fathers envisioned would be representative of the society at the time. Yes, back then it would have been primarily white but now it would be of all color and denominations. Still, the concept that regardless of color or ideology citizen legislators would serve for only a term or two instead of becoming professional politicians should still be the ideal goal instead of having life time legislators.
Short of term limits or limiting the perks to make it unattractive to stay long I just don’t see any other way to force current legislators to leave. Changing their retirement system to Social Security and 401s like the rest of us, replacing their Cadillac health plan with Affordable Care Act plans and an absolute ban on lobbying for 5 years after theirs terms are over (a non-compete type of clause) would certainly do the trick; I believe the military has already something like the last one although it is very short and easily by-passed.
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The Presidency is currently so hamstrung by the Intel-Deep State complex that there is no need to abolish the Chief executive. Let’s abolish the Intel-Deep State complex exactly as John Kennedy was preparing to do before they reputedly whacked him.
A duly elected President keeping his promises without being hamstrung by the Intel-Deep State is the way to give the biggest stick to Americans wanting to be free and self-governing again.
Being citizen property of a private oligarchy that operates through an embedded deep state with access to all of our national secrets we free Americans are denied sucks!!
Abolish the Intel-Deep State complex!!!
I’m comfy with mil int.
Or else let’s make both Intel and Deep State elected offices.
More democracy is the antidote to predatory unelected power.
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The salary of a politician should be high enough that they cannot be easily bought, but low enough that it doesn’t cause people to run just for the money.
If the salary is too low, corruption will be high because there’s a temptation to take a little on the side because the job itself isn’t worth it.
If the salary is too high, corruption will be high to obtain the office, because the desire to get and hold the power (and the great salary that comes with it) will attract people that have no public interest at all.
You’re threading a very thin needle here.
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Wouldn’t term limits and a ban on lobbying for 5 years afterwards solve the problem?
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JayHawkFanToo said:
Wouldn’t term limits and a ban on lobbying for 5 years afterwards solve the problem?
Actually, no.
Term limits might encourage people to cash in quickly (or cash in towards the end of their final term) whether the pay is high or low.
A lobbying ban is also problematic because that makes it difficult to transition from the public to private sector.
Let’s say you leave politics after 10 years. You’re now a 50 year old person. Your salary was decent, but you’re not set for life to be able to retire right now. You have some policy expertise in a couple of areas, but if you are hired in the private sector, you have to be completely disconnected from the government/policy side of things - what do you do for 5 years?
You’ll be 55 when your ban is up. Nobody wants to hire you to a low or mid level job, and you can’t really do the stuff at a higher level because you have to screen away from any governmental involvement.
That’s why you see people either retire in many of these jobs, or leave for lobbying positions.
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I am looking more at the concept of the citizen legislator as envisioned by the founding fathers where an individual takes a few year off (2-4) to serve the country and then goes back to doing what he did before and not as a springboard for a new career. The only incentive is serving the people and not personal gain or future employment.
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I’m afraid a citizen legislature is nearly impossible in today’s environment.
How many people do you know that can leave their career for 2-4 years, then return and pick right back up? I know maybe a couple of people that are in that type of position.
And even if people could, how many people could truly pick up the expertise necessary to run a country this size (or even a state like Kansas). The Kansas budget is fairly complex. Even that limited summary would be over the heads of most people if they were to pick it up cold.
And that doesn’t even contemplate other state services (roads, commerce, taxes, etc.). Here in Kansas, there are maybe a dozen legislators that truly understand tax policy. That’s one of the reasons its difficult to move good economic policy through the legislature. Very few legislators understand the policy implications!
A true citizen legislature would make that worse. The instant someone starts getting some subject matter expertise, they are term limited out. It would be a constant churn.
Imagine if KU had to change basketball coaches every 5 years. There would be no way to maintain consistency. Instead of KU having eight coaches in 120 years, they would have had over 20! Chances that some of those guys were bad would be incredibly high. Chances that KU would be working on a 14 year conference title streak would basically be 0. You just can’t maintain that kind of consistency with that level of turnover. Politics is the same way.
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The current system is complicated because it was purposely made that way by self serving politicians; there is no reason why the system cannot be made considerably simpler. Keep in mind that most of the heavy lifting is done by the staff and not the politician himself so when he is gone the support personnel can bring the new legislator up to speed fairly quickly.
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I favor returning to/moving forward to free, sovereign American politicians and their individual corruptions that checks and balances were designed to limit, and to jettisoning the current compromised career politicians controlled by a private oligarchy and reputedly embedded Deep State the Constitution was not designed to function with or constrain.
This can be done quickly by ending unlimited contributions and requiring politicians spend time in prison for profiting in any way from their service.
There. That was easy.
But they won’t willingly go along with this, will they?
Term limits are unnecessary and probably even undesirable. A free sovereign individual must choose how many times he wishes to run and free sovereign individual voters are quite up to deciding how many times re-election makes sense, if there votes are counted and propaganda and psy-ops are not permitted.
Compromised career politicians have apparently looted and bankrupted our country, egregiously conditioned almost the entirety of our Bill of Rights and adopted torture prisons and conditioned habeaus corpus for nearly 20 years. The only major disgraces they have not yet perpetrated are: mass internment’s; and capitulation to a foreign occupation, as the French Republic shamefully did the latter in the darkest early days of WWII. America’s career legislators since 1980 especially have frankly a despicable record and we should be horse whipped for tolerating it, had Groucho Marx ever found a horse to whip us with.
I don’t see how any non career politicians could have done worse than our actual, reputedly compromised career politicians serving as apparent lackeys of an oligarchy, as President Carter now calls us.
IMHO, a free sovereign American nation stands a much greater chance of legislating constructively than our current compromised apparent lackeys, whose experience and expertise appears often limited to using secrecy, misdirection, and fear mongering about “enemies” to justify continued looting, droning, pork, and knocking over of foreign countries.
At this point, I would much prefer to take my chances with ordinary Americans than the most experienced and savvy, but compromised and controlled career politician the oligarchy and its Deep State can select.
The country needs to dedicate a channel’s worth of public band width for politicians to campaign on for free. No more stinking paid ads on commercial TV. Each candidate receives equal time and there is no state censorship of candidates on the campaign network. Commercial bandwidth should be re-regulated to be commercial only. No campaigning. Vast campaign monies will simply be made unnecessary and outlawed.
Political campaign speech on a public campaign channel will be far freer than it is now on commercial TV. It will be unconditioned by the need for raising vast monies and prostituting one self to the high bidder. Some internet bandwidth can be set aside also.
America is facing nothing insurmountable here at all.
It’s actually quite like a memorable scene in Brian DePalma’s and David Mamet’s The Untouchables, when Sean Connery’s weary beat cop schools Kevin Coster’s new to Chicago Eliot Ness.
“Mr. Ness, everyone knows where the booze is,” says the weary beat cop. “It’s behind that red door. The question is: who is willing to walk through that door.”
In the end the beat cop, who teaches Ness the Chicago way is finally found savagely murdered by the Capone mob for “ratting out” a crooked cop “for all the shit that he had done” to try to get Capone.
Choking in his own blood, he clutches Ness’ hand and wheezes desperately, “What…are ya…prepared…to do!!!
America has gotten into these situations where corruption has overtaken the body politic a few times in her history.
It’s never pretty when the nation tries to retake its sovereignty from crooks.
Crooks never meekly give up the political machine they have spent many decades building up, corrupting and coopting for mega profits.
Rock Chalk!
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Its not the system. It’s the issues.
Foreign policy is complex.
Domestic budgets are complex.
Economics are complex.
All of these levers that operate civil society aren’t just simple things. Pull one, that may throw another off kilter in the same way that adding one chemical to a mixture will cause a certain reaction.
I remember when the “tea party” wave swept across the country in 2010. The thing that struck me more than anything, as a person that had previously very much been in support of shorter terms for politicians, was the lack of overall competence demonstrated by many of these newly elected “leaders.”
They didn’t know even the basics that you learn in junior high social studies or civics. Because of that, many of them were dependent on certain special interest groups to tell them how to vote on bills that they had no personal knowledge about.
One newly elected legislator, when handed a new bill in committee asked “how am I supposed to know what this bill does?” A veteran legislator told him he needed to read the bill. At that point, the freshman legislator asked “and then how do I know how to vote?”
While it may seem like getting rid of career politicians would limit the special interests, in reality, the opposite is true. Because the special interests are experts in their field, they can generally sway newer legislators more easily.
One year here in Kansas, the NRA sponsored a bill about knife length and crossbows. Before knowing that the NRA was behind the bill, the bill couldn’t even get a committee hearing. Once the NRA came out backing the bill, the bill flew through committee and passed through the House easily. When questioning the bill on the House floor, the response “this is the NRA bill” was given to answer the question of why this bill needed to pass. Like I said, it passed easily.
Term limits don’t eliminate lobbyist influence. They increase it.
As for the idea that @jaybate-1-0 poses to allow government workers to educate and keep things operating, in this partisan climate, that is troublesome.
I have seen non partisan workers skewered by politicians simply for telling them that something would not work, or that it was a bad idea. Because an idea like lowering taxes is partisan, telling a legislator that its a good (or bad) idea is seen as partisan rather than sound policy advice. That’s how it is on most hot button issues - advice is viewed through a partisan lens rather than sound or unsound policy advice.
This cripples the internal bureaucracy because they can’t just advise without sounding partisan if they disagree with what certain interest groups suggest.
