I guess I’m going to have to be one of those people walking funny because that essentially is what I believe. The problems that third parties have are internal not external.
Third party supporters can argue all they want about how the system is wrong because people don’t vote for them. Or the voters are wrong because they don’t vote for them. Do you ever stop and consider that maybe you’re the part that’s wrong?
Maybe the voters are looking at the Republican platform and the Libertarian platform and making a rational and reasonable decision that they prefer the Republican platform. Or you can substitute the Democrats and the Greens if you wish. But my point is that the Democrats and the Republicans understand that they have to go to where the majority of people are. The third parties all seem to say that they shouldn’t have to move anywhere and the people are supposed to come to them. And then they complain when the people don’t do it.
Just curious – are you likewise against the term limits on Presidents, or do you feel the job is too crucial to be left in the hands of an incompetent electorate that might keep voting for the same pinhead?
(And, for that matter, take the other restrictions: we’ve apparently decided the electorate should be shielded from its own incompetence if they feel a woman of twenty-five would make a fine Senator, or if they’d like to vote for a guy who only became a citizen maybe six years ago, and so on. Is your beef really with save-us-from-ourselves restrictions on a potentially incompetent electorate, or are the term limits in question different in kind from the other stuff?)
Well, I can only speak for myself here, but personally, I vote for the person that I want to hold the office. If that’s what every Democrat or Republican voter was doing, I’d have no problem with them whatsoever. As for the parties themselves (and/or the leadership thereof), I certainly don’t fault them for trying to appeal to the majority; that’s what they’re there for.
Where I take issue, and what my rants in this thread have been focused on, is the (quite substantial, IME) voter population that votes Dem or Rep while bemoaning that though they hate both of the major-party candidates, it’s the “only choice they have”. Bull and shit. The only argument that supports this attitude is so full of fallacies you could teach a semester of prop logic on it.
You seem to be saying that the parties blame the voters for not flocking to them. I don’t think voters should flock to parties either. (Hell, I don’t think parties should formally exist, but I’m pissing into the wind with that one.) I think people should vote for the person whom they think will best execute the office if elected…and that cause would be far better served if they occasionally stopped to remember that their number of options for that decision is in fact greater than two.
ETA: If my own viewpoint is relevant, I’m a self-described civil libertarian. My main disagreements with the LP are economic (I favor UHC, for example), but these days that seems to be all any of their candidates give a shit about, meaning that I’m back to voting for the “anyone who recognizes that individual rights (including those not related to guns; thanks, Republicans) exist and maybe ought to be mentioned once in a while” party.
But the implication you seem to be making is that a lot of voters actually want to see Libertarian candidates get elected but they’re forced to settle for Republican or Democratic candidates because they’re “electable”.
And I don’t think this is true. Suppose we invented a new election system - voting by lottery. One voter’s name gets randomly drawn out of a hat and that voter gets to cast the single vote. So he has the sole and absolute power to vote for anyone he wants with the knowledge that whoever he votes for will get elected. In my opinion, this system would not alter the fundamental two-party system. I think that the majority of solo voters would still choose a Democrat or a Republican.
I have always generally opposed term limits on the premise that if people want the same guy in office for 40 years, they should have the right to make that happen. Even if it’s a bad decision.
However, I have sort of moved away from that general opinion. What really swayed me is I’ve done a lot of reading about developing democratic countries and lack of term limits is one of the things that seems to make it really easy for politicians to eventually lock down all the power in the country and use corruption and political spoils to become dictators. Obviously in some countries if you have enough guys with guns on your side you’ll always be the de facto leader, and term limits or not might will prevail in those societies. However, there are others that ostensibly respect the electoral process but where you have one guy who won election in 1960 and can keep winning Presidential elections for 30 years just because he’s better at passing favors on to the people who can perpetuate his government.
But to what extent is this a systemic self-reinforcing condition?
A third party isn’t going to go from zero to winning elections overnight. And at a very early in-between point, the effect of the third party is to tip the balance of the election toward the party that is the more antithetical to the views of those in the third party. (You may remember a certain for-instance of this about a decade back. :))
So no matter how great your third party is, there’s just no viable route from zero to electoral success. Right now, there are a hell of a lot of frustrated progressive Democrats who’d simply like the Dems to fight for the very things that Democratic platforms for years have said that the Democratic Party supports. That’s hardly the territory of loons. But nobody’s going to form a third party of what Dean aptly called the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party because it would just turn the U.S. government over to people who’d make GWB look sane and reasonable by comparison.
I don’t see how you can say that the reason for the lack of success of third parties since the GOP replaced the Whigs is due to the parties, until a vote for a third party isn’t half a vote for the other side. The procedural mechanism for doing so is easy: runoff voting (instant or otherwise).
It’s not like term limits are unique in this regard. A plethora of laws or changes to the laws or Constitution desired by many fall into this category, from balanced-budget amendments (stop me before I pass another appropriations bill!) to drug laws to who knows what.
It’s a common enough thing that, IMHO, one has to do the dirty work of explaining why this one in particular is wrong, rather than trying to use this slam as an attempted shortcut to winning the argument.
I am, as a matter of fact. the 22nd Amendment was passed for one reason, and that is FDR. His winning of 4 terms was seen by some as empire building, and they wanted to limit the possibility of that. If the person is doing a good job, what difference does it make? Of course, that is in many ways opposed to my OP in that the people that get elected for 20 terms to the House of Representatives or 6 terms to the Senate may very well be doing a good job, so why get rid of them? Are the voters idiots for returning those people to office? It’s an interesting quandary, to say the least. Nevertheless, the place to limit your elected officials should always be the ballot box. that is one thing that I am certain of.
I thought I laid out a good case in the OP, brief though it was. I don’t need any shortcuts, this sells itself. Or does it? For all my chastising of the electorate, I’m not under the impression that this makes a tinker’s damn of a difference. If I really wanted to make a difference, at least where I live, I’d offer myself (and my family) up as the test case, the sacrificial lamb as it were. Alas, I don’t feel that strongly about an academic conversation to put my family through hell just to try to stroke my own ego, so there it is. I’d prefer that you take the point I was making on its own merits.
I think Pennsylvania should get term limits, so you can be as fucked up as California. We have term limits, and our state runs like a charm. :rolleyes: What seems to have happened is that the lobbyists are the ones who know what is going on, not being termed out, and so they run the show and write half of the bills. The legislative leaders, who are senior guys and thus close to getting termed out, change nearly every session, no one learns how to compromise, everyone is planning either to move up to the higher house or get a cushy job after getting kicked out, and nothing gets accomplished.
I agree, overall. However, term limits are not such a bad idea. Obviously, we thought highly enough of them to have a Constitutional Amendment limiting the President’s terms.
I hope you realize that I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was merely pointing out that sneering at the idea of “save me from myself” not only doesn’t win the argument, but it’s really kinda silly.
Take Social Security. I don’t know if you’re for it or against it, but it’s fundamentally a “save me from my inability to get myself to save for retirement” program. Instead, the Federal government doesn’t give you any choice: it takes your money now, and gives you a modest pension later. And it works at saving people from themselves: there’s a lot less poverty among the 65+ set now than there used to be.
Hell, direct deposit of paychecks saves me from myself, and my own carelessness and forgetfulness. Thanks to direct deposit, I don’t have to remember to walk that paycheck over to the bank, or worry about losing the check before I do so. Take away my direct deposit? Over my dead body. Thank you, Uncle Sam (in the capacity of my employer) for saving me from myself.
Social Security is an instrument that takes your own money and invests it so you have a more secure future. It is not a government gift. It has a huge surplus. The cold truth is a lot of people do not have the ability to make wise investments for the future. Some think they do and are wrong.
I saw a show on Enron where one of the line workers who had over 30 years of work and had accumulated 340,000 dollars in retirement . When the big execs destroyed the company, they froze the accounts of the workers. The execs sold hundreds of millions of dollars in stock . By the time the workers could sell their stock ,they were worthless. he got 1200 bucks for it all. I suppose none of you could have had that happen to you.
My sister in law works for a company where the 401k and retirement was all stolen. The company had an inside and got Madoff to take their investment portfolio. They were all wiped out. But it could not happen to you.
Did you have big money invested in real estate? You made money for a long time. How about now? But it could not happen to you. … or could it…
I look at the ballot, and I often see five, even six different parties trying for a particular slice of the electoral pie. 'Pub, Dem, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law (where the hell did they come from…?), and less-known entites. All on my ballot. Oooh… Look! I can choose to not vote for any of them! And I can write my own candidate in, if he or she isn’t on the ballot!
I don’t know what kind of a dictatorship you live under, but in my own comfy corner of this messed-up land, I’ve got choices. I 'spect you do, too.
Just after FDR turned the Federal Government into the powerful leviathan we know in our times. There were reasons to be apprehensive (I’m not saying they were great reasons, but there were.)
In my experience, which focuses at the state government level, people tend to be unimpressed with the effect of term limits vis-a-vis good government, specially in the realm of legislatures and where the limit has been quite tight (for instance, Maine: 8 years, 4 consecutive 2-year terms, you can sit out one and come back but* seniority resets to zero.*) Now, in many states you have a part-time “citizen legislature” rather than a full-time legislature, whose members are NOT career public officials - they’re businessmen, farmers, practicing professionals, college professors, jazz singers (met one), etc. who have had a lifetime of being *political activists *but have not necessarily been sucking at the public teat all that time. Yet last August 15th an Op-Ed in the Portland newspaper was blasting that the Maine legislature was doing too much legislating and that they should cut down their numbers and limit their session time and bills submitted.
Thing with that is, if you were not a career public official it’s by the time you’ve been in 8 years that you develop enough contacts, knowledge and accumulated favors to actually exert a strong leadership role. Paradoxically, part of what happens under limits is that members find themselves wanting to be as busy and impressive as possible as soon as possible so that by the time thet make year six they’ll be in a leadership spot. That’s not always good, it leads to legislating for the sake of legislating, publicity seeking, and makes the climb up the ladder a bit rougher sport.
Also, with an overtight term limit, you significantly ratchet up the relative influence and power of the NON-elected staffers, aides, consultants, contracted legal counsels, party committees, think-tanks and lobbyists.
Biggest advantage of term limits is you avoid entrenchment and allow fresh faces to cycle through the legislature, but what if you find a fresh face you want to keep? What if it’s Mr. Awesome who is entrenched?
Now, take term limits in the case of a powerful-individual-executive position: POTUS, Governor of PR, Mayor of Chicago (the latter two not limited at this time). At a gut level, I can buy that – not so much for a high risk of “monarchizing” such a position (hi there, Mr. Daley), but more for that of fossilizing policies, and that many of the various political attendants and hangers-on whose power flows from the Boss would seek to make their position of derived power be a lifetime career, and the interests that back him would never have to at least try and field a new spokesman (still, the single-term limit for governor of Virginia - and of several other states before - was going too far IMO). But make it a weaker executive and I may not care too much if he sticks around for a long while.
OTOH, in a legislature, which is a collective body and your individual power is diluted and dependant on your ability to move a majority or create a consensus, or be the one holdout deciding vote that deadlocks, it’s hard to become so individually powerful - only a few of the members can really be people who “make things happen” on an individual basis. There are only a handful of Ted Stevenses or Robert Byrds at any given time. Problem is that sometimes what you get is someone with the longevity and seniority of one of those, but who’s merely occupying space and slowing down the adoption of new policies - then you have to worry if the voters value good governing more than pork (or even just more than a familiar name)…
Ideally, in the legislature you’d have at any given time a half dozen grizzled old veteran lifers, a dozen or so freshman newbies rarin’ ta change the world, and a bulk of people who have been there long enough to know what they’re doing and the People ratify as such, but who have a real job/life to go back to when someone else comes along whom the People think would do better.
The whole term limit debate is not finished yet, and will likely get revisited repeatedly in my lifetime.
The Constitution has term limits in it. The term of a Representative is limited to 2 years, the term of a Senator is limited to 6 years, the term of a President is limited to 4 years. Some idiots added an amendment to limit presidents to 2 terms. The biggest problem is the lack of term limits on judges.