snarkyman

I was in favor when Reagan proposed it and wish it was in effect when Clinton was in power. Trust in the people's judgement.

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With all due respect, the people are idiots.

"In a democracy, everybody gets what the majority deserves."

Less than 50% of the eligible US population voted in the last election. The result? Look at the bozo we have in the white house.

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I agree with you on that one. I also hold with the paranoid belief the election was fixed. I also hold with the idea that since the total at the end really DID show gore should have wone meant BUsh should have abdicated. I aslo really beolve if a good leader exists, why get rid of him/her?

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Instituting any rule that facilitate a police state is bad for democracy.

I'm not panicking, yet. But I'm really curious to see if the current administration will try to cancel the next election in the name of "Fighting Terrorism" or "Homeland Security".

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Wait - did I miss something? We ARE talking about simply letting a president have more that two terms, right? How did cancelling an election happen? No war before has ever warrented that.. If THAT happens it's a whole different ball game and bush takes on teh Hussain mantle I said he had siince before the electino was even started way back when.

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Generally, this proposition has come up every year or every other year ever since the 22nd Amendment was enacted. Every single time, it has been either brutally shot down or quietly smothered. Very, very few people - Repubs or Dems, progressive or conservative or whatever - really have a taste for the prospect of someone effectively becoming President-For-Life by ensuring endless re-election.

That's why it slips under the radar.

In fact, it's my understanding that every year Congress raises a crop of at least fifteen to twenty proposed Constitutional amendments, some of which are truly loopy. I suspect that producing your first Amendment proposal is just a rite of passage for Congressional reps.

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With all due respect, the 22nd Amendment was passed because FDR threatened to become President-For-Life (actually, come to think of it, he did become just that).

In Congress, >95% of those seeking reelection win it. Largely, this is because incumbents are able to use the power of their office to do things like secure pork-barrel projects, and because incumbents enjoy a perfectly gargantuan money advantage over challengers. Power perpetuates itself.

This is even more true of the Presidency. Hunter Thompson, writing in 1972, put it very succinctly: "Any incumbent president is unbeatable". We who can remember 1980 and 1992 know differently, but the fact remains that in the absence of external forces (the hostage crisis, economic impasses) an incumbent President enjoys an overwhelming advantage in a re-election: there's the money that just naturally flows into any reelection campaign, but especially a Presidential one, and there's the President's amazing power to manipulate domestic and foreign events and conditions in order to impress (or deceive, or distract) the public.

Then too, the consequences of an eternally re-elected President are much different and greater than those of a relentless Senator or Congressional rep. A long-term Senator turns into an institution (usually about the same time as he should be put in an institution), but a long-term head of state turns into a monarch and a despot. We have seen this in Haiti (Duvalier), Iraq (Saddam), Russia (first Lenin, then Stalin, then Khrushchev), Japan (Hirohito), Germany (Hitler), Great Britain (Thatcher), France (de Gaulle), Spain (Franco) - and I'm just naming leaders that aren't explicitly monarchs. It's a phenomenon that's been well-documented right back to Augustus Caesar. Put someone in supreme power for too long and they come to think they own it and have a right to it - and will do whatever they have to to maintain it.

There's a slightly more abstract and theoretical value to limiting Presidential terms: agency. A President who need not consider reelection (as any American president in his seconrd term under the 22nd Amendment) is able to pursue courses of action that may not fly in the opinion polls but are for the long-term good of America. I note that this is theoretical because in the real world such a President is also thinking of his Party's power and the future electoral hopes of his Vice President, but it's still of real value.

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There's nothing simple about it. Did you ever think about why the 22nd amendment was put into place? It was enacted after FDR died during his 4th term in office. Remember also the history of the period: This was during and just after WWII. The US took a lesson from Germany - we wanted to prevent the abuse of governmental power structures that allowed Adolf Hitler to come to power in the 1930's.

This is why I believe that keeping the power of the presidency in the hands of one person for too long is not a good idea. The 22nd amendment was enacted to prevent a police state.

The 22nd amendment to the constitution codified our founding father's original intent: that no one man should server more than two terms as president. This was a decision not taken lightly - the 22nd amendment only went into effect after passed at least a 2/3 majority of each house of congress on 21 March 1947 and ratified by at least a 2/3 majority of all the states on 27 February 1951.

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(1) I referred to Hirohito as not explicitly a monarch. Foolish, stupid me, I had a bit of cerebral flatus and forgot his title was Emperor; I'd always been referring to him by bare name. So pretend I didn't cite him as an example.

(2) In the subject line: for "Erratum" read "Errata".

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Please understand the above statement. I would not want to live in a democratic state without liberty. What does this statement mean to the above argument? Just because the people may want to repeal the 22nd amendment, doesn't mean they should. Sure, it would be a democratic decision, but in the end, I believe it would reduce the peoples' liberty.

Many of the structures of the US are not very democratic. Perhaps the best example of this is the Judiciary. While these institutions and structures may not be democratic, they exist to preserve liberty.

Think about the recent attempts in Massachusetts to "Protect Marriage" by an amendment to the State Constitution defining marriage as "the union between one man and one woman". Even if I agreed with the position, I would be opposed to the method being used to bring the it into law. The proposition's supporters want to give the people the right to restrict other people's liberties by a vote. This seems very democratic, but it is being used to reduce the rights of a disliked population.

In a Liberal Democracy, you CANNOT use democratic processes to reduce someone else's liberty.

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Sure, I'll buy.

You'll have to come to Cambridge to get it, though.

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Actually, that would be fun. It's been a long time, and now that I have a car again, it's possible.

Great goddess, I've got places in all of New England, plus New York and New Jersey, to go to now that I've got a car again. :-)

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Sure, it would be a democratic decision, but in the end, I believe it would reduce the peoples' liberty.

More importantly, if the President's political position becomes unassailable, the range of national political discourse will suffer. Not that it's very wide as it is.

I'm curious, and I'm sure Wess will know, but the DOMAs have popped up now in most of the states: have any of them passed?

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jducoeur

I'm with

snarkyman on this one. The reality is that re-elections tend to violate the rules of basic democracy quite badly. The power of incumbency is mind-blowingly strong -- basically, once in office, you usually have to do something egregiously idiotic to get voted out.

In clubs I tend to be against terms limits, mostly because the leadership doesn't usually matter all that much. But in real civil society, lack of them can be pretty devastating. The fact is, when you have the bully pulpit, it's very easy to hold onto it for pretty much as long as you like. Don't forget, most dictators claim with a straight face to be democratically elected. They just tweak and twist things in their favor. Doesn't take all that many tweaks to win every time.

Every time I find myself thinking that the comparisons between pre-Nazi Germany and the current administration are ridiculously overblown, something like this comes up. Very goddamn creepy...

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Nice to see you have your facts in a row. Very impressive. Respectfully though, I just don't agree. That's all.

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No, no - not the terms - the halting of election due to war. I'm very versed in the amendment, and it's history. Haltng the elections is another thing entirely

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dglenn.livejournal.com

That's more or less what folks told me when I panicked about this in my journal recently -- that it's not going to go anywhere, despite how potentially scary it sounds.

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learnedax.livejournal.com

Although I am in general agreement with the limitation of presidential terms (it's designed to be the highest turnover of the three branches, primarily because it is so focused on one individual that the risks of abuse are greater), the power of incumbency is not nearly so strong as it might appear. A quick count reveals that of the 42 previous presidents, 16 got reelected, 19 did not, and 7 died before their first term ended. So powerful though that position is, it is not overwhelming. Also, in the special case of FDR, I would argue that his continued presidency was at the time the best option.

Your reference to the bully pulpit, by the way, is from the wrong Roosevelt: it was Theodore who said that he was grateful to have such a "bully pulpit."

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tpau

i find it annoyign and slightly disturbing that every n years the stupid get rid of a president who started soemthing good, without letting it pan out. this is especially a problem withthings likeeconomic plans where 4 or even 8 years is not always enough to see the difference, and ususally if it is, then it was not a solution but a bandaid. i think it should at least be possible for a preident to be around for longer.
i understand all the problems with incumbants and endless presidents and dictatorships, i really do. i just don't think it is that much of a issue. why is noone panickign when they realize that we have senators who have been in office longer then twice their lifespan? that bothers me a lot more. the president has baely more power then the queen of england. it is congress that i would worry about. they actually pass the laws.
i also find it funny (and not in this forum btw, i have heard of this previously elsewhere) that the people who are loudest protesting this were the same people who complained that clinton couldn't stay in office longer. it is rather humorous that people's opppinions change depending on it beign their party on stage...

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sapphorlando.livejournal.com

..but a pointless gesture. A few hardcore Republicans are surely excited about the idea Boy Wonder staying on the end of the puppetstrings for longer than eight years, but I think that most Americans are scared shitless by the idea of a long-term President of any sort.

It's sort of ironic, because the 22nd Amendment was installed by Republicans in the first place, to keep FDR from running again.

Generally, though, I agree that it's pretty unsettling when something like this hits the bricks and it fails to usurp last week's "killer tornadoes" [sic] on CNN Headline News.

Which reminds me, anyone heard anything new (or anything at all) about the Patriot II bill?

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sapphorlando.livejournal.com

At this time, 41 states have some kind of legal provision installed that effects some or all of the intended purposes of what is commonly called a 'DOMA', after the federal law by that name, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. It's much easier to list the nine states that don't yet have DOMAs: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Of these nine, at least two (Connecticut and Massachusetts) have proposed some form of DOMA, and only one (Rhode Island) has stated that it will not propose such a law.

The federal DOMA has two points: First, that the federal government defines a "marriage" as only the legal union, under state law, of one man and one woman. Second, that states are not obligated to recognise or respect any legally executed marriage not meeting the federal definition under the Act. What this means is that even if some state does enact same-sex marriage, the fed does not need to respect it, nor does any other state. It does not bar states from enacting same-sex marriage on their own, nor does it bar states from recognising each other's same-sex marriages.

Individual state DOMAs, like the many 'domestic partnership' provisions around the country, are not identical, do not have the same provisions, and did not come into being by the same route.

Five states (Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, Texas, and Vermont) have a 'semi-DOMA', which provides only a state definition of marriage, but does not disallow recognition of same-sex marriages from other states. Most DOMAs, however, cover the same ground as the federal DOMA, and are modelled after it. The main purpose of these cookie-cutter DOMAs is to protect these states in the event that the federal DOMA is found unconstitutional and invalid (as many legal scholars believe it is, as it appears to violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause). It's interesting to note that if the federal DOMA falls, all DOMAs fall, but these states don't seem to understand that.

In most cases, DOMAs arrived through legislative process, but in a few cases, other routes were taken. California is one of the few states, like Massachusetts, unlucky enough to be saddled with 'ballot initiative', a funky-junky kind of lawmaking process that allows large populations to pass laws by state referendum and bypass the stodgy old legislature, who might otherwise insist on talking it over first. This is also the process by which Maine lost its statewide antidiscrimination law a few years ago, making it once again the only state in New England providing no protection for gay citizens. Anyway, California got its DOMA from well-organised street-level lobbying. Nebraska and Hawai'i went one further, by actually amending its state constitution, so that liberal nutballs down the road would have that much harder a time pushing equality for all citizens.

Massachusetts is currently enjoying Round 2 of the DOMA debate, after Speaker Finneran spiked the bill late last session--an action that seems now to have fueled the opposition rather than suppress it. (Insert my comment to him here: "I told you so.") Massachusetts' proposed DOMA is more of a 'super-DOMA', in that it seeks not only to invalidate same-sex marriage, but any similar legal provision, including, according to some analysts, all standing and proposed DP provisions anywhere in Massachusetts. The bill is being pushed by the Massachusetts Family Institute, among other sweet-natured garden clubs. The proposed Connecticut bill is essentially the same as this one, and is being pushed by Connecticut's sister group, CFI, along with the K of C, who collected tens of thousands of signatures from Roman Catholic churchgoers, at the behest of their ministers, at the request of the K of C. (The K of C are the same folks, by the way, who gave us "In God We Trust" and "under God", during the post-war religious fervour of the early 50's.)

At this point in history, a married same-sex couple cannot travel across the country through a contiguous series of states where their marriage would be considered valid. Southern New England is the largest contiguous block where such a union is still valid (or at least not clearly invalid on an interstate basis.

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sapphorlando.livejournal.com

..The Queen of England is not Commander-in-Chief of Britain's armed forces, and cannot send men and women into combat at her whim. The President of the United States is and can.

The Queen of England is not Chief Executive, and cannot veto laws passed by less than a two-thirds majority of Parliament assembled. The President of the United States may veto Acts of Congress that do not have overwhelming support of the legislature.

The Queen of England does not have the power to appoint justices or other high-ranking officials of the national government. The President of the United States personally appoints over 200 federal positions, including all new federal court justices--including all new Supreme Court justices.

The Queen of England is not empowered to directly negotiate with the leaders of other countries on behalf of the United Kingdom. The President of the United States is vested with substantial individual negotiating powers, and may cut personal deals with the leader of any foreign nation, with only limited Congressional restraint.

The Queen of England is not, in either law or in fact, the leader of the world's only remaining superpower, the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, commanding the most powerful and most technically advanced military force the world has ever known. The President of the United States has up to ninety days to crush any other nation on earth before he has to answer to Congress.

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