When your team is about to get trounced by its rival during an important game, how can you make sure that never happens again? Change the rules, of course, and that's exactly what David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan called for in an opinion piece published by the New York Times.
“There was a time when midterm elections made sense -- at our nation’s founding,” Schanzer and Sullivan stated before calling for an end to two-year terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. “We should get rid of federal midterm elections entirely.”
However, John Nolte of the breitbart.com website called the proposals “insane, anti-Constitutional and un-American” and an attempt by liberals to change the fact that midterm voters tend to be “whiter, wealthier, older and more educated than during presidential elections.”
Schanzer -- a professor of public policy at Duke University -- and Sullivan -- a junior at that school in Durham, N.C. -- began their opinion piece by stating: “By Tuesday night, about 90 million Americans will have cast ballots in an election that’s almost certain to create greater partisan divisions, increase gridlock and render governance of our complex nation even more difficult.”
“In the modern age, we do not need an election every two years to communicate voters’ desires to their elected officials,” the writers asserted. “But the two-year cycle isn’t just unnecessary; it’s harmful to American politics.”
The Times writers then complained that:
The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation.
Since the end of World War II, the president’s party has on average lost 25 seats in the House and about four in the Senate as a result of the midterms.
“These effects are compounded by our grotesque campaign finance system,” they asserted. House members “spend up to 70 percent of their time fund-raising during an election year. Two years later, they’ll have to do it all again.”
Schanzer and Sullivan declare there's an obvious, simple fix: “The government should, through a constitutional amendment, extend the term of House members to four years and adjust the term of senators to either four or eight years, so that all elected federal officials would be chosen during presidential election years.”
“To offset the impact of longer congressional terms, this reform might be coupled with term limits that would cap an individual’s total congressional service at, say, 24 years, about the average for a member of Congress today.”
“The framers included an amendment process in the Constitution so our nation could adjust the system to meet the demands of a changing world,” Schanzer and Sullivan noted. “Surely they would not be pleased with the dysfunction, partisan acrimony and public dissatisfaction that plague modern politics. Eliminating the midterm elections would be one small step to fixing our broken system.”
Meanwhile, Nolte responded to charges of racism in midterm elections by stating:
Mind you, no one is stopping the non-white, non-old, or non-educated (i.e., Democrats) from voting in midterms. There is no law against Democrats voting (except for that pesky citizenship stuff).
The only problem, according to our media overlords, is that voting every two years is something conservative-leaning voters are more willing to do than Democrats.
“The answer to this hideous crisis, obviously, is to rewrite the Constitution so that voting is more convenient for Democrats,” he stated sarcastically, “meaning you only have to make that arduous journey to the polling place once every four years instead of two. The way to do this is easy: Congressional terms become four years instead of two, and Senate terms move from six to four or eight.”
“And … viola! Democracy is fixed,” he joked.
“Other than taking away the vitally important power We The People currently enjoy to make a national course correction every two years, the Times also believes that eliminating the midterm election will strengthen the power of the presidency -- as though more power in the hands of one person is a virtue,” Nolte stated.
The people at the Times “are not dumb,” he continued. “They understand perfectly that the framers of our Constitution knew what they were doing, which was … to discourage exactly what the elite media want: less democracy and more power in the hands of a central government, the president, and America's elite (like the media).”
“These proposals from our media elite come from a place of frustration, a place that makes them believe that they would not be losing a major election tonight if things were structured in the 'correct' fashion,” Nolte concluded.
