The Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Image from http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0213720/ThinkQ/famous_places/capitol.htm
I don’t know who originally authored this, but I would be happy to give them credit if you know who they are. I wanted to make sure it got shared with as many people as possible.
It is time. If you agree, send it to 20 people. If you disagree, please do nothing. Thanks.
The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971…before computers, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.
Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land…all because of public pressure.
I’m asking each addressee to forward this page to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn I ask each of those to do likewise.
In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.
Congressional & Senate Reform Act of 2011
1. Term Limits.
12 years only, one of the possible options below..
A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms
2. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman & Senators collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.
3. Congress & Senate (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional & Senatorial retirement funds move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and the Congress & Senate participates with the American people.
4. Congress & Senate can purchase their own retirement plans, just as all Americans do.
5. Congress & Senate will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%. Their current rate of Pay will be lowered by 25% effective 11//11/11.
6. Congress & Senate loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people do.
7. Congress & Senate must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen & Senators are void effective 1/1/12.
The American people did not make these contracts with Congressmen. Congressmen & Senators made all these contracts for themselves.
Serving in Congress & Senate is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and go back to work.
You can also copy this contract for America and present it at Public Locations for people to sign. (Like a petition) Have future prospective Leaders sign also or agree to in public. Let’s clean up the act of these politicians in the past so that we have a future for our children. We voted these people into office not to squander our children’s future, but to improve it.
If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive this message. Maybe it is time.
THIS IS HOW YOU FIX THE SENATE & CONGRESS!!!!!
This sounds very reasonable; however, Congress will never pass it so the states will have to force it on the federal govt. Personally, I would like to add a no-confidence measure which would cause a new congressional election to prevent gridlock like we have now.
The author of this is my cousin so I will let her know this has gone viral! Love it!
Sounds reasonable!!! What do you think???
I don’t know if this fits in this bill or not, but it’s time–past time–to do away with the electoral college. Georgia had a county unit system until 1963, when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, saying it violated the’one man, one vote’ principle. The system? Each county had a certain number of votes according to population, and whichever candidate got the most votes in the county won all that county’s votes. (If a populous county had four unit votes, three scarcely populated counties could beat it.)Sound familiar? Promote ‘one man, one vote’.
I’m not really liking this. Some parts sound good in a populist ‘vote the bastards out’ kind of way, but the end result will probably be a series of elected officials who don’t know what they’re doing. Witness the way the tea party darlings have upended Congress for their own purposes – one of which is a balanced budget amendment. Once that passes, social programs will be out the window. Defense budget of course will go up.
Term limits could work but I do agree it has to be slightly longer. I also want to point out that a congressmen/woman senate official job is to serve American people first and party second. This shallow filibustering without providing a better idea OR wanting a certain democratically elected official to fail should be considered treasonous. At the very least that particular person should immediately removed from office and a vote of a replacement should take place as soon as possible.
Reading the so-called Tea Party agenda has now gotten me frightened. These people are NEO-FACISTS, compromising with them will lead to a repeat of Hitler type authoritarianism. Baynor (sp.?) is unwilling to compromise because he will lose HIS authority. Does the average American care if he loses his job ? ah no Obama has got to tell them to shove it. I suggest he call out the national guard to throw out all the lobbyists & lock the rest of them in until they pass a decent budget. Since they insist on behaving like unruly children; they need to be treated as such.
Actually, the tea party ARE fascists. And not just ANY kind of fascists, but the very worst, most dangerous kind, religiously motivated fascists. Most of the republican party, and virtually all of the tea party, belong to what’s generally known as “evangelical” churches. And though they use the same source material—the bible—as mainstream christianity, and claim to follow the same deity, their interpretation of that material is vastly different than what is taught in most churches. They believe that our secular democracy is evil, and are determined to overthrow not just this government, but our entire FORM of government, and replace it with a theocratic oligarchy with Pat Robertson or James Dobson at the head, and religious police to enforce their edicts. When one believes that their agenda has gawd’s blessing, any kind of atrocity or horror or destruction of the nation’s economy becomes holy if the end result is the destruction of an evil empire and ending it will bring about the “return” of a “christian nation.” Quotations because this never was a christian nation; in fact, the founders were quite clear about the separation of church and state. However, in their revisionist histories, which they teach in their home-schooling and religious colleges, like the one Michelle Bachmann attended, this is the case, and they can’t be persuaded differently. I believe that the tea party and it’s theocrats are by far the most dangerous thing to our nation that has come about since the civil war. They are actively seeking as much social unrest as possible, as they stand in the best position to pick up the pieces when everything falls apart. My personal belief is that they are committing treason, but they’ve managed to amass so much power, especially with their 24/7 propaganda network of faux noise, that it will be very difficult, short of martial law and mass arrests, to stop them from getting what they want. And what they want, of course, is total and complete power over the life and death of every American, with each given a choice to convert to their beliefs or face the type of consequences that the Germans came up with not that long ago.
Enacting the term limits might get more of the Tea Party in the government. We would have to deal with them and the public would get a taste of what they have to offer. Maybe the batch in there now will change the public’s minds.
numbers 1 and 3 are absurd. term limits are already built in; if someone does a bad job, vote them out: simple, no ? as for balanced budget amendment?; forget it. while balancing a budget is a good idea, emergencies, where one might have to temporarily operate in the red, or borrow money, cannot be legislated against. these are truly stupid premises.
earlier comment said, 1 & 3; should have said, 1 & 9, but now nine is gone. my error.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/28thamendment.asp
Term limits is one of the worst ideas ever foisted upon government. If legislators know they won’t be around, there’s little incentive to develop long-term solutions. California is in the shape it’s in partly because of term limits. Term limits transfers power from the elected to the bureacracy and special interest. If you want real change, enact public financing of elections and get more Americans to pay attention to what’s really happening in our country.