WHAT TO DO ABOUT A BAD CONGRESS

Polls show that 60% of Americans favor getting rid of all congressional representatives, which reminds me of the tea shirt of many years ago. It said across the back, “Kill Them All and Let God Sort Them out”. In a democracy, there always will be problems with the choices electors make. In addition, a corrupt Supreme Court has made thing difficult by turning dollars into words. Of course, there are these and other faults with our form of government, but really, has the congress gotten so bad that we want to sweep them all—100%—out of office. The news commentator’s interpretation of the pollster results are framed incorrectly. It is almost impossible to obtain accurate information on individual legislators performance by a measure of collective action; therefore justifying getting rid of them individually.

The flippant answer to the question to should we get rid of each of them, is yes, at least for 6 out of ten people the answer is yes. People tend to feel that their representatives are good but everyone else’ are bad. Logically, we would expect voters to consider representatives from the opposition party to be bad and those from their own party to be good.

On the other hand, we would expect non-partisans to make the most valid judgment; swing voters and people who do not vote make the most valid complaint. This creates an almost impossible task for pollsters. If you ask people if they voted Republican or Democrat, they will deny association with an unpopular government while tending to claim an association with what they consider a well functioning government. It would be more difficult for card-carrying party members of political partiers, meaning people with known political affiliation, than it would be for swing voters; therefore, the answers given by swing voter would be less reliable because they would find it easier to claim allegiance with the winner.

Physiologists and psychologist have developed techniques to determine if a person is telling the truth or not but they also know that people can have an intuitive or immediate response but give a reasoned response that is different.

The real question is, what would be people’s response to the question, “Do you favor getting rid of all congressional representatives?”, if they were happy with congress. On a scale of 1 to 100, the lower the score the better the government makes this 60% answer valid; the government is not working. What we must do is “kill” them all and let the voter do the sorting; isn’t that what we do every two years for representatives, four years for presidents, and 6 year for senators.    

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