What if the voters are mean to President Obama, the ghostly presence on the ballots across the nation, today?
Such a rebuke, if it happens, could have been prevented by a mere change to our Constitution. A Duke University professor and a junior at the same university have come forward with a suggestion: amend the Constitution to cancel the midterm elections.
In fact, the oped by David Schanzer and student Jay Sullivan in the New York Times bore the provocative headline “Cancel the Midterms.” The art features one of those annoying “I Voted” buttons—only it says, “It feels like I’m always voting." Voting is dragsville, no?
There was a time in our history when we engaged in this petty pastime of voting less frequently. Indeed, Tim Cavanaugh at NRO calls the Duke duo's piece “a passionate call to return the former (and future?) British colonies in America to a more kingly state.” Cavanaugh praises the impeccable logic of the philosophe and his student:
The title of the piece is just clickbait for a piece about an election that has Democrats trembling, but Schanzer and Sullivan have a proposal that’s more inane than simply canceling Tuesday’s vote. They want to eliminate the gross injustice of having members of Congress justify their jobs every two years. “There was a time,” they write, “when midterm elections made sense — at our nation’s founding, the Constitution represented a new form of republican government, and it was important for at least one body of Congress to be closely accountable to the people. But especially at a time when Americans’ confidence in the ability of their government to address pressing concerns is at a record low, two-year House terms no longer make any sense.”
Leave aside the lame and unspecific claim that humanity has evolved in some fundamental way in a mere 200 years. (You get no credit for guessing that “hyper-accountability” has been called into being by a magical threesome of buzzwords: “Twitter,” “video cameras,” and “24-hour cable news.”) Instead, parse the logic a little: Schanzer and Sullivan are saying that because voters don’t have enough confidence in their government, they should be given even less control over it.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal also comments on the piece. But he focuses even more on the human dimension: hey, midterms can hurt a politician’s feelings!
“Candidates, advocacy groups and shadowy ‘super PACs’ will have spent more than $1 billion to air more than two million ads to influence the election,” Sullivan and the professor note. Keynesians might approve of the economic stimulus, but the Duke duo deplore it as a failed marketing effort: “Less than 40 percent of the electorate will bother to vote.”
“There was a time when midterm elections made sense,” they concede, and they don’t mean 2006 but “at our nation’s founding.” Then, “it was important for at least one body of Congress to be closely accountable to the people.” But things are different now: “Especially at a time when Americans’ confidence in the ability of their government to address pressing concerns is at a record low, two-year House terms no longer make any sense.”
Surely you can relate. Suppose your boss loses confidence in you. The last thing you’d want is for him to hold you accountable! Well, politicians are people, too. They don’t like being judged any more than you do. Thus the inexorable conclusion: “We should get rid of federal midterm elections entirely.”
After all:
It’s not Obama’s fault the midterms are going badly; it’s the midterms’ fault his presidency is going badly.
The Duke duo have certainly gotten a lot of attention. But I think their opinion would have had more credibility if they had published it in 2006, when George W. Bush was facing a midterm embarrassment.