Haven’t you wished we could vote to throw all the bums out, and start over? Well, let’s give ourselves that right!
We need a constitutional amendment that would have another option on the ballot for every Federal election; something on the lines of,
“Do you want to remove everyone in Congress and start over?”
If three fourths of the whole nation voted “Yes,” there would be a second election and everyone in the just-booted-out Congress would be ineligible to run. At a time when approval ratings for Congress as a whole are in the single digits, starting over from scratch might get a three-fourths majority.
Some problems with this quickly come to mind. It would be impractical to start a second round of elections when the new Congress is supposed to convene in two months -- or would it? In parliamentary democracies, when there’s a vote of no confidence, new elections are held on as fast a schedule, although incumbents can run. In system with incumbents ineligible, some obvious candidates would be whoever came in second in the primary if anyone ran against the incumbent in the primary. That’s not very common; primary challenges to incumbent Representatives and Senators are unusual in our current system. Maybe they should be more common.
What about newly elected representatives who won in the first election? I think they should get to take office immediately. And all the old Congress should be out of office immediately if the ‘start over’ vote carries. That would likely mean there wouldn’t be a quorum in either house, depending on how the Constitution defines a quorum. A Congress with only a few seats filled probably shouldn’t be allowed to legislate. But states and districts that elected somebody new would have a slight advantage – they would at least have representatives in Washington who could do constituent service in the two months or so between the first and second elections. Being an incumbent would carry a slight disadvantage – folks running against you could campaign saying, “Elect me and you won’t go without representation even if ‘Start Over With an All New Congress’ carries.”
More important, Congress would have an incentive to avoid gridlock. If all 535 of them were kicked out at once, they probably wouldn’t have lucrative lobbying careers to look forward to afterward. All their buddies would be out of power. Their rolodex files full of contacts would be useless.
Anyone who has wished we could term-limit Congress should appreciate this change. Completely entrenched representatives in safe districts still might be swept out of office. One problem with that is it could give Washington bureaucrats more power vis-à-vis Congress. That might be remedied by a limit on how long someone could work in the same agency. And there might be some benefits if a few of the representatives knocked out of office went to work at the very agencies they used to oversee.
What if the Electoral College ended in gridlock at the same election that kicked out Congress? There wouldn’t be a House of Representatives to pick a President. Great! That’s a reason to abolish the Electoral College with the same amendment to the Constitution. Short of that, maybe we should only have the “Throw the bums out” option in off year elections, when we aren’t electing a new President.
Maybe we could even have a way to call a “Start Over With a New Congress” election with a petition drive. I’d favor having it as an always-open option: the government itself should keep a running total of voters who’ve supported having an election. Voters ought to be able to retract their support if Congress suddenly gets its shit together. (I know, ‘Congress gets its shit together’ is an oxymoron now, but if firing all of them at once were a real possibility, it might be more than a joke.) The count should probably start over each time a new Congress is elected.
Maybe we should borrow for this a term recently coined in Congress. Let’s call it the Nuclear Option. I think anyone who gets ‘nuked out’ of Congress ought to be eligible to run again after two years out of office, but anyone running as a ‘previously nuked’ candidate ought to have some explaining to do.