Difficult Choices

There have been people talking about term limits for members of Congress for ages.  There is a lot of talk about that now even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that state imposed term limits for Congress are unconstitutional.  Since that same court made a decision in 2010 in the case Citizens United v FEC, there's been even more talk about amending the Constitution to overturn that decision.

Amending the Constitution is tough.  The Equal Rights Amendment failed to get ratified.  The Child Labor Amendment has been pending ratification since the 1920s and technically could still be ratified if it could get another ten states to ratify it.  Let's review the requirements to amend the Constitution. 

First you need either 2/3rds of the members of both Houses of Congress must vote in favor of a proposed amendment, or 2/3rds of the state legislatures of the 50 states must vote in favor of a Constitutional Convention.  After an amendment gains the required votes, 3/4ths of the states must ratify the proposed amendment. 

As I said, it isn't easy.  There is an additional problem with a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United because the SCOTUS decision cited First Amendment issues and no one is going to overturn that particular amendment in this nation.  The only method of change in this instance would be to eliminate corporate personhood and that's a discussion for another blog entirely.

So let's focus for the moment on term limits.  Imagine for a moment that as proposed in 1994, members of the Senate were limited to two terms of six years each, and members of the House were limited to six terms of two years each.  Senator Doe is about to be forced out by term limits after his/her two terms.  Whoever replaces Senator Doe will inherit a staff.  One theory discussed by those who are examining term limits is that the power would simply transfer from the elected officials to the career employees on their staffs.

A friend recently proposed sending the entire staff of each termed-out legislator packing at the same time.  An interesting notion.  But just how many staffers are there?  C-Span measured the size of congressional staffs in 2000.  They break down into five categories:

Personal staffs of the elected official - 11,692 people
Committee staffs (serving the two parties on committees) - 2,492
Leadership staffs - 274
Institutional staffs - 5,034 (includes floor staff and non-partisan staff like the Capitol Police)
Support agency staffs - 4,479 (this includes the non-partisan people at the GAO, CBO and CRS)

So we're talking about firing 15,000 or so partisan employees of Congress when term limits push out the people who hired them.   If you establish term limits in a way that works like Senate elections, with one-third being conducted every two years, that means that thousands of people would be fired every other January.  And unless you ban them from taking new staff positions with the newly elected members of Congress, the same power structure will remain in place.

I'm not even going to dignify the swirling cesspool of issues that lobbyists represent with a comment.

Which issue is more important to address, Citizens United or Term Limits?  I believe it to be the former.  How do we get around the issue of the First Amendment?  In essence, SCOTUS has determined that money is speech and yet there is a law that limits how much an individual can give to a candidate, PAC or national committee. 

Corporations are merely groups of individuals. Let's try this theory.  Since one person's campaign contributions can be limited, and corporate personhood exists, let's consider each corporation to be the equivalent of one person in terms of what they can contribute.  If the members of a corporation want to contribute as individuals to one candidate or campaign, so be it.  But it needs to be their own money, not corporate funds.

Just thinking in pixels.