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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe only way to fix Congress
Getting rid of all of them won't help. There are some good Congressmen, and we don't want to lose Alan Grayson or Keith Ellison just to get rid of Louie Gohmert.
Term limits are just a form of getting rid of all of them, and for every Michele Bachmann we lose, we also lose a Nita Lowery.
The only way to get rid of the shitty congressmen while keeping the good ones is to elect congressmen statewide.(No, this is not something the Founding Fathers did, but the Founding Fathers required voters to own land and have white skin and penises, and allowed slaveholding, and we fixed that shit...we can correct yet another of their horrible mistakes.)
How it would work: a panel of citizens who are registered voters but who have never run for any elected office higher than county commissioner would join to decide what is a midsize state. Say a midsize state has 27 electoral votes. This means it has 25 congressional districts. Anyone running for Congress in a midsize state, or smaller, will be voted on by everyone in the state. Anyone in a larger state will run in his or her own district plus the 24 closest to it. Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert can win in districts designed to elect anyone with a heartbeat and an R behind his or her name. They'd have a harder time winning in this system. It would also force the GOP to confront their unelectability problem...think back to all the postmortems of the Romney disaster. Not one focused on the real problems: their presidential candidate was less likeable than Richard Nixon, their vice presidential candidate scares people and their platform would have amplified the problems America has. Cleaning all the Republicans out of the House would force them into sober reflection. Maybe.
And yes, House candidates can campaign statewide. Senate candidates do it. Governor candidates do it. The representatives in Alaska and Montana do it. In the days when you campaigned in a horse-drawn carriage you couldn't do it, but we have TV commercials, cars, buses, planes and 501(C)(4) groups now...
It is obvious that this would never pass...consider the state of Washington. They have nine congressional districts. Most of them are solid GOP seats because most of Washington's land is rural and rural voters lean Republican. All those seats would swing Democratic if they had statewide voting because Spokane has Democrats and...well, let's say the Puget Sound isn't the bluest thing in King County.
closeupready
(29,503 posts)Money is fungible, and can be directed towards any race desired by oligarchic interests, regardless of how simple or complicated the electoral system is.
jmowreader
(50,451 posts)Ask President Romney how the millions in dark money he had behind him helped get him into the White House.
Very simple example: Michele Bachmann. The state that gave us Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken is not going to also give us Michele Bachmann no matter how many dump trucks full of David Koch's money land on the state. Campaign finance reform is crucial but with the country gerrymandered as it is, there are districts Republicans could win with nothing but yard signs. Statewide voting eliminates the ability to effectively gerrymander.
stillcool
(32,626 posts)and help even more if they stopped voting for crackpots. But then..why would any sane person want to run for office? I think our political reality very much reflects the mental health of our society.