A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% would vote to replace the entire Congress and start all over again. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure how they would vote.
Overall, these numbers are little changed since last October. When Congress was passing the unpopular $700-billion bailout plan in the heat of a presidential campaign and a seeming financial industry meltdown, 59% wanted to throw them all out. At that time, just 17% wanted to keep them.
I find it interesting that people usually dislike Congress more than the President, yet the latter has more power in deciding the country’s path.
NO COMMENT
Also known as Operation Clean Sweep (OCS).
The same people wouldn’t lift a finger to write or call their congressman.
The only thing that would get Americans to act is if you mess with their beer, cars and NFL.
NO COMMENT
Put me in there and I fix the place.
Suppose a friend or neighbor tells you he will do something and you are counting on him. He then fails to come through.
A responsible person would never do business with that person again.
Move on. Integrity is like an eggshell, once broken it can’t be put back.
Look up the person thats SUPPOSED to represent you..
Look at where he/she/it was raised.
FIND OUT WHO they are.
you will be surprised..
Most bizarre to me in the article is this “… more than 90% of Congress routinely gets reelected every two years. It’s a shock when any incumbent loses.”
The power and advantage of incumbency is exposed by these numbers. Most want them out, but we can’t get rid of them.
# 10 Number6,
Has more to do with the power of advertising.
Corporate America has long known you can sell shit by the truck load, if you advertise it as greatest thing since milk.
People hate congress but they like their congressperson. They rarely vote out an incumbent.
The reason you can’t get rid of them is because the cost for getting elected is too high. What if the system were publicly funded? Everyone gets the same amount of dollars and appears in the same venues. Level the playing field, and you’ll get new blood and more choices.
Nah… too much work to change anything. I doubt Congress is losing any sleep over this.
Pelosi, Frank, Reid and all others will be back. But people will still be blaming the Republicans alone.
Strange as it sounds, I do remember back during the “Contract with America” days, some reporter referred to the “baggage” of incumbancy.
Bullshit. If this were true, none of these assholes would be in office now. Voters are indiots.
There is no use kicking the people out of congress unless you get the money out of it, too.
100% public funding of campaigns would save us taxpayers BILLIONS of dollars.
# 17 Greg Allen,
That and they can’t go to work for lobbyist firms for 3 yrs.
Christ, Guilherme, did you mean “former” instead of “latter”? If not, it doesn’t make sense.
And once again — another total waste of space from Guilherme.
Didja know you can find statistics that show that most Americans believe a dolphin could be president? Holy cow! Get it on the blog!
I’m sorry, but Guilherme has got to go. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but he’s dumbing things down so far — I might as well be reading some YouTube page…
Ones thing is certain. If these 57% vote R or D in the next election, NOTHING WILL CHANGE. New Ds and Rs will slip right into the extant corruption scheme. The only chance for true change is to make Ds and Rs extinct. And that means anyone who ever served in either party. No promises tho. Any third party in charge might fall right into the pockets of big money just like Rs and Ds are now. But not trying doesn’t make sense.
It would have been 100%, but 43% of us couldn’t bare to loose Ron Paul. I’ll vote him out of congress if it means he gets to be president.
We all agree that Congresscritters suck ass but they don’t get voted out due to our indifference and the power of incumbency. OK. Then term limit them. Term limits work in local politics, they work on the Executive level. No reason term limits on Congress won’t work. Being a congressman shouldn’t be a career with lifetime retirement benefits and unlimited free travel benefits.
dO YOU KNOW how TO GET THEM OUT??
EASY.
GET 66% of the USA to VOTE.
LESS THAN 1/3 vote and GUESS who they are..
POLITICIANS…
None of the situation we are in will change until we remove the current system.
It doesn’t matter if you vote all of the congress out and replace them with another set of people.
The basic workings of the government are BROKEN.
No matter who you elect in any of the three branches will have the same broken set of tools to work with and therefore produce inferior results. VOTING will not work to fix the system.
Reform will not work to fix the system. No matter how much paint you slap on. No matter how much siding you nail on. No matter how many colourful lights you string on it, it will still be busted.
We need a new constitution and a new government. It is naive to believe you can fix it or reform it within the current construct.
We are no longer a largely agrarian nation.
We are no longer even an industrial giant.
Yet our government is a hybrid of these two lifestyles that have come and gone with the added baggage of Post-French Revolution ideologies.
Representation can no longer be justified by ideology which in large part modern Americans don’t even know correctly.
The county is a consumer nation now. Started in the 1920’s and has been ever since. We do not find a voice though the ideologies of the current system. We need one based on socio-economic levels. The high have their representatives, the middle theirs and the low theirs. All of the current representative are Plutocrats. They have no real concept of what it is to make below 100k a year. NONE. They all make at least 1 million a year. Most could retire today and never lift a finger and have money to last them for the next 100 years or more.
We need to throw out the broken tools and start over.
Cursor_
If a congressman with hundreds of thousands of constituents receives 100 letters on an issue, it’s considered a landslide of public opinion.
Face it — most people are slugs.
They work for us, and we’re not supervising them properly. That means keeping up on current events, sending an email once a week or so. Hell, you don’t even have to do that, just go to their website and fill out a form. But most of us are slugs, so our employees go unsupervised, and you know what happens when employees are unsupervised — they do what they want, they get into trouble, they cause trouble.
When Benjamin Franklin left the Continental Congress after they’d finished with the Constitution, he was supposedly asked:
“Well, Doctor, what have we got —- a Republic or a Monarchy?”
And he replied:
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
(http://www.bartelby.net/73/1593.html)
It’s not the system that’s the problem, it’s the citizens. We can’t have a democratic republic if the citizens won’t do their part.
Vote them all out.
They’re all politicians, the ones in office and the ones wanting to get into office. What makes you think the ones wanting to get into office will be any different from the ones that are there now?
Voting them all out is the lazy man’s way. The only long-term solution is to properly supervise the politicians we have. That’s what a representative government is all about. If we can’t properly supervise our politicians, then we don’t deserve a representative form of government.
Politicians are like lawyers, nobody likes them until they need one, then they don’t care how ethical they are as long as they get your ass out of trouble. Nobody likes the other guy’s congresscritter “pork”, but loves the “business” their congresscritter brings them. Everyone would vote the other guys’s representative out of office any day of the week.
When you have a member of Congress requiring a ticket to ask a question at a town-hall, then mocking a retired cop who gets kicked out of the town-hall, I can see why people would be a bit upset.
Of the 57%, how many actually bothered to vote in the last election? Or have ever voted?
Again, what’s needed is representation in fact not representation in theory.
How about returning the ratio of representatives to citizens to what is was in the 1700’s?
You could maybe still buy them all but not for chump change.
How can the President have more power when he can’t make laws or appropriate funds and can be removed at will by Congress?
Just asking.
Ironically, I really _do_ like my current Congressional representative. He’s a relative rarity — an independently wealthy Republican (was once an aide to a Republican senator) turned Democratic liberal. He’s only in his second term, and I voted for him both times.
Hate both senators, though. At least one will be retiring next year. Hope the state parties can come up with halfway decent people to run…
Can anyone tell me just why we got rid of selection of senators by the state legislatures?