Perry Wants Part Time Congress

[Meister]

I don't care about their wages....they can keep them, they just wouldn't spend as much money and the taxpayer would have more of their own money.

That's an entirely unfounded thing to say. The truth is that the Congress can barely get the work done when working full time. If they became part time, they'd still be arguing about the budget for 2006.

Dude.....they would stick to the important issues and not make up so many such as making "In God We Trust" our official motto. I could go on and on with the trivial crap.

 

[hortysir]

A Part-Time Congress and Term Limits would solve most of our problems. They just meet too often and constantly over-reach. And they get too entrenched with the special interest groups. New & fresh faces every few years would be great for the country. That's how i feel anyway.

Seems to me like they'd just have more time to rub elbows and grease palms with lobbyists
**shrug**

 

[tinydancer]

A Part-Time Congress and Term Limits would solve most of our problems. They just meet too often and constantly over-reach. And they get too entrenched with the special interest groups. New & fresh faces every few years would be great for the country. That's how i feel anyway.

I personally feel that the "lifers" truly feel as though they are the "ruling class".

 

[Seawytch]

Aren't they already part-time?

Isn't the House on some ridiculous schedule where they have district work days for a week every other week?

 

[Stephanie]

LOL, I see one Democrat congresscritter has come out wailing and screeching about this..



they might have to get a REAL JOB like us little peons they supposedly Represent.


Hoyer Slams Perry’s Proposal for Part-Time Congress
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/...-proposal-for-part-time-congress/?mod=WSJBlog

 

[Ava]

One of the better ideas any politician's ever come up with. The less they're all in session the less mischief they can get into on our behalf. Sounds like Rick would bring a little Texas to the cesspool that is D.C.

Our congress need not be in session any more than the president actually spends on the job working with congress instead of against?

 

[hortysir]

One of the better ideas any politician's ever come up with. The less they're all in session the less mischief they can get into on our behalf. Sounds like Rick would bring a little Texas to the cesspool that is D.C.

Our congress need not be in session any more than the president actually spends on the job working with congress instead of against?

I'm sorry.....did you say something??

 

[Meister]

One of the better ideas any politician's ever come up with. The less they're all in session the less mischief they can get into on our behalf. Sounds like Rick would bring a little Texas to the cesspool that is D.C.

Our congress need not be in session any more than the president actually spends on the job working with congress instead of against?

I'm sorry.....did you say something??

Wipe up all that slobber on your chin.

 

[Sallow]

Hell...he'd forget which part and what time.

Perry's a bonafide idiot.

 

[tinydancer]

I went to coles notes aka wiki and for those that are saying Perry is a moron and should read the constitution, it clearly states that Congress is only mandated to meet once a year beginning on January 3rd.

Interesting that some actually want their representatives to be in Washington 24/7. I respectfully disagree.

I agree with the Swiss model that states that the longer they stay with their constituents, the better they are able to represent who elected them. Too many representatives in both the House and the Senate have become lifers and are completely disconnected from the people because they live inside the Beltway.

 

[old navy]

The fools spend more time trying to keep their job (campaigning) than they spend actually doing their job. No budget, no solutions to jobs crisis, home values are still falling, the economy sucks, and the list of lack of accomplishments goes on and on.

I find it interesting how wealthy most of the members of congress are. Lots of them went to Washington without money. How does that happen?

 

[SAT]

That's exactly what our forebears wanted for us. All this committee seniority and other things that tie a congressman or senator to more than one term is a device they invented and has nothing to do with the original constitution. Face it...the electoral college was set up for the same reason. When the only transportation they had was horses and carriages a 200-500 mile trip was a substantial undertaking. The originals assumed that a good patriot would leave his home or local business and travel to Washington and serve one term. That's the first correction we should demand...term limits. Lot's of luck. Don't hold your breath.

I think our fore bearers wanted us to live our own lives and stop this insane founder worship. You admit that the founders lived in radically different times, and you want to change the government to suit a time that we don't live in?

 

[Cammmpbell]

I don't care about their wages....they can keep them, they just wouldn't spend as much money and the taxpayer would have more of their own money.

That's an entirely unfounded thing to say. The truth is that the Congress can barely get the work done when working full time. If they became part time, they'd still be arguing about the budget for 2006.

Dude.....they would stick to the important issues and not make up so many such as making "In God We Trust" our official motto. I could go on and on with the trivial crap.

Yeah...that and naming buildings and bridges.

 

[WillowTree]

One of the better ideas any politician's ever come up with. The less they're all in session the less mischief they can get into on our behalf. Sounds like Rick would bring a little Texas to the cesspool that is D.C.

It's a HORRIBLE idea. We pay these people six figure salaries in taxpayer money. I demand they work a full time schedule for such pay. Congress is hardly capable of getting anything done as it is. Cutting back their hours isn't going to make anything better. Do we have a budget yet?

He said. cut their hours in half. cut their budgets in half, and cut their salaries in half.. that's just brilliant. although personally I'd cut their salaries to zero til they came up with a balanced budget.

 

[Luissa]

Article One and I believe in sections 1 thru 6

It is great empty gesture, but Perry is a moron and needs to read the Constitution.
A few of his proposals are unconstitutional, and would also mean changing the Constitution.

It's a HORRIBLE idea. We pay these people six figure salaries in taxpayer money. I demand they work a full time schedule for such pay. Congress is hardly capable of getting anything done as it is. Cutting back their hours isn't going to make anything better. Do we have a budget yet?

I personally like how he says we should cut their pay if they don't have a budget. Him and Cain really need to read the Constitution.

Can I ask where in the constitution does it dictate the schedule and pay for the legislative branch?

 

[Leweman]

They aren't part time now?

 

[Luissa]

Funny thing, if a liberal had suggested changing the constitution the right wing would have seizure. Willow's head would probably pop.

 

[Luissa]

It all comes down to perry making promises he can't keep. He cant do anything to their pay, and he sure as hell wont ever change how long the term is for The Supremes.

 

[Greenbeard]

I can't think of a better way to increase executive power than to slash funding for Congressional staff and send Congress home. Maybe Perry isn't as dumb as he looks.

"Congressional procedure," Life magazine was to note in 1945, is largely "the same as it was in 1789." As for the Senate's basic committee and staff structure, that had been established in 1890. During the intervening decades, government had grown enormously--in 1946 the national budget was three hundred times the size it had been in 1890--but the staffs of the Senate committees had grown hardly at all. To oversee that budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee staff consisted of eight persons, exactly one more than had been on that staff decades earlier. Not only were they ridiculously small, the staffs of Senate committees had little of the technical expertise necessary to understand a government which had become infinitely more complicated and technical. The salaries of congressional staff members were so low that Capitol Hill could not attract men and women of the caliber that were flocking to the executive branch.

A study done in 1942 concluded that only four of the seventy-six congressional committees had "expert staffs prepared professionally even to cross-examine experts of the executive branch." As for senators' personal staff, as late as 1941, a senator would be entitled to hire only six employees, and only one at a salary--$3,000--which might attract someone with qualifications above those of a clerk. So little importance was attached to staff that many senators didn't hire even the six to which they were entitled, and an astonishingly high proportion of the approximately 500 employees on senators' personal staffs and the 144 on the staff of the Senate committees were senators' relatives. The Founding Father envisioned Congress as a check on the executive. Congress couldn't make even a pretense of analyzing the measures the executive submitted for its approval.

During the decades since 1890, when the Senate had authorized a staff of three persons for its Foreign Relations Committee, the United States had become a global power, with interests in a hundred foreign countries. In 1939, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was still three: one full-time clerk who took dictation, typed and ran the stenotype machine, and two part-time clerks. As one observer put it, "There could be no adversary relationship between the two branches of government [in foreign relations] because most of the professional work had to be done in the Department of State." Anyone seeking an explanation of the Senate's willingness to allow the rise of the executive agreement, which freed it from the details of foreign policy, need look no further: the Senate simply had no staff adequate to handle the details of foreign policy. The adversary relationship--the relationship that had lain at the heart of the Framers' concept of the American government they thought they were creating--had become impossible in virtually all areas; even Senate Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick had to admit that "with occasional exceptions, Congress did little more than look into, slightly amend or block bills upon which it was called to act."

Unable to analyze legislation, Congress was equally unable to create it.

This was perhaps the most significant alteration in the power of the House and the Senate. The Framers of the Constitution had given Congress great power to make laws, vesting in it "all legislative powers," and during the early, simpler days of the Republic, Congress had jealously guarded that power; as late as 1908, the Senate had erupted in anger when the Secretary of the Interior presumed to send it a bill already drafted in final form. But by the 1930s, with government so much more complicated, bill-drafting had become a science. Knowledge of that science was in extremely short supply on Capitol Hill. There were plenty of legislative technicians with the necessary expertise at the great law firms in New York. There were plenty at the White House, and in the executive departments--the legislative section of the Agriculture Department alone had six hundred employees. In 1939, the Legislative Drafting Service that helped both houses of Congress consisted of eight employees. And of all the scores of major statutes passed during the New Deal, approximately two per year were created by Congress--because, as Tommy Corcoran explained, Congress simply lacked the "technical equipment to draft a big, modern statute."

--Master of the Senate, Robert Caro

 

[Avatar4321]

One of the better ideas any politician's ever come up with. The less they're all in session the less mischief they can get into on our behalf. Sounds like Rick would bring a little Texas to the cesspool that is D.C.

It's a HORRIBLE idea. We pay these people six figure salaries in taxpayer money. I demand they work a full time schedule for such pay. Congress is hardly capable of getting anything done as it is. Cutting back their hours isn't going to make anything better. Do we have a budget yet?

He's also calling for their pay to be cut.

And yes, cutting back time will make alot of things better. The less they meddle the better it is for everyone.