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Health & Fitness

Mild, Thoroughly Unoriginal, but Decent Changes that We Could Make to Our Electoral System

           We've monkeyed with it before.  The uninformed American voter, also known as the American voter, may think that we’ve had a static system for elections in America and it’s been around for hundreds of years and nothing ever changed, and all was well…until Obamacare came along and totally ruined everything.  (Seriously, who gets to be on the death panels?)  That’s, of course, not true, not at all.  It’s a sugar-free Pixy Stix size lie.  The system has always been in flux.  It’s supposed to be.  That’s half the point. 

                Given that, we can screw with it some more.  So, let’s do that.  But how, you ask?  Here are two suggestions.  Write in and suggest some more.  I’ll put them in next week’s blog.

1---Knock the presidency down to three-year terms.  Americans have short term memories.  Remember the names of any Hall & Oates songs?  No.  Well, that’s my point.  We always get sick of a two-term president somewhere around his sixth year.  Even the ones we love.  We clearly voted for him twice (or, at the very least, were cool with his stealing a couple of elections).  We put his name in our yards, on our cars’ bumpers and on tee-shirts and buttons.  We argued about his merits in bars, offices and at holiday dinner tables.  Even still, we get sick of him around year six.  Maybe it’s the lack of drama, lame-duck, no politics left for him angle.  Maybe not.  Whatever the reason, if we knocked one year off each term, we’d be able to usher him off in style, with fewer gray hairs, fewer bar fights, and fewer opportunities for him to screw up the country. 

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2---Make Congress more like Nascar.  If you think about it, congressional sponsorship isn’t as different from race car sponsorship as we all like to think.  If we were to make congressmen and senators wear pinstriped suits with giant slogans bearing the names of the companies who funded their last election, it would at least make the “Citizens United” ruling funny, and not in the macabre looking-forward-to-the-Apocalypse way that it is now.  The people and businesses (who, in the eyes of the courts, are people, superheroes actually) who own congressmen should get to design a fireproof one-piece jumpsuit, even if it’s made by Brooks Brothers.

                 So, those are two small suggestions.  Somebody out there must be the reincarnation of James Madison…or Button Gwinnett.        

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