Tag: Congress

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national politics & policies representation

Senators, Old & New

term limits, Congress, Senate, House of Representatives

The make-up of the next U.S. Senate is taking shape. New committee chairs, for instance. While Senate Democrats do not have a rigid seniority system for choosing committee chairs, seniority is one factor considered and, realistically, the longer a congressman is on a committee the more likely he or she is to ascend to a position of leadership.

Plus, the Democrats don’t have term limits for committee chairs.

Which leads to an average age, so far, of not-quite-Seventy!

Well, that’s what ChatGPT projects. “Using January 3, 2027 — the scheduled opening day of the 120th Congress — as the common reference date, the 18-person working roster of projected Democratic committee and select-committee chairs has an average age of 69.8 years.” 

And boy, does the AI present a revealing chart, a few senators just popping out:

  • Patty Murray (Washington) for Appropriations, 76
  • Ron Wyden (Oregon) for Finance, 77
  • Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) for Banking, Housing, and Urban (not Indian) Affairs, 77

The youngest on the chair list is 53; the oldest — Bernie Sanders! — is 88.

Now these positions aren’t set in stone. They are in the process of development. These are merely projected names, the most likely names based on august Washington tradition — and the long list of oldsters still in power. 

But, in contrast, we do know for certain the average age of the eight Democratic U.S. Senators who won critical races in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. It’s 50 years old. 

Nearly two decades younger than the average age of those running the committees.

Seniority may be a good way to run a gerontocracy.

Term limits are a good way to change it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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incumbents representation

To Be a Rock and Not to Roll

John Kennedy, Mitch McConnell term limits, gerontocracy, Congress

Call him “The Rock.”

That’s what John Kennedy, Louisiana’s wittiest U.S. senator, dubbed Mitch McConnell, yesterday.

Why? From the Wall Street Journal’s write-up, it must be the Kentucky’s senator’s fortitude and resilience that qualify him as hard and stony. The 84-year-old lame duck solon was rolled into the Capitol after a three-month absence, and it appears that everyone was nice to the wheelchair-bound octogenarian.

“Time to get back to work,” he said.

“His words,” explains the Journal, “weren’t clearly enunciated and at times were hard to make out.” Which probably explains why his staff wouldn’t allow reporters to video-record the senator’s short remarks — less evidence to share on social media, audio alone possessing so much less viral cachet.

“McConnell’s absence, which was unusual but not unprecedented, again prompted questions about whether lawmakers with significant health issues should remain in office or step aside,” we are told. 

Sure. We talk about age limits, too. But term limits would generally rein such abuses in. The less time in office, the less likely one is to die in office.

Or suffer a stroke. Or experience a debilitating fall, as in the official story regarding McConnell.

Of course, neither term limits nor age limits directly deal with the illness issue. Which may be a good thing. Senator John Fetterman (D.-Penn.) suffered a stroke on the campaign trail, making his election later in 2022 seem . . . imprudent. He has since recovered impressively, going on to become one of the more independent voices in Washington.

Sure, McConnell should step . . . roll . . . aside. Let someone else do the job. But, as it is, he serves as a stark reminder of the gerontocracy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt national politics & policies

The Forty-Trillionth

public debt, Congress, Trump, war

When Grover Cleveland — arguably the United States’ last non-“progressive” president — won his second term after a one-term hiccup named Benjamin Harrison, list makers and ordinal number enthusiasts faced a challenge: was Cleveland to be called the union’s 22nd president, or the 22nd and 24th president?

The two-term presidents before him had all served their terms consecutively, but we spoke of each four-year term in office as the presidents’ respective first and second administrations. Historians and archivists chose the clunky 22nd/24th double listing for Cleveland, which brings us to the current president, formerly the 45th and now the 47th.

One presidency was just not enough for Donald Trump.

But what will he be remembered as? It is possible that his tombstone will have a forty-something on it, but the “th” may very well stand for “trillionth” — for under his watch the public debt of the federal government rolled over on Wednesday, past $40 trillion.

I remember when people held signs up emblazoned with “No Trillion Dollar Debt!” How “forty years ago” is that?

There’s an old law of liberty: people out of power demand freedom, people in power demand more power. Trump sounded more libertarian when running for office, and he seems to conform to a very old corollary of the law: politicians running for office protest debt, politicians in office add to it.

FDR is the grand example, yet it is Trump who may come to be identified with it.

“The unprecedented [sic] $40 trillion figure highlights competing administration priorities,” declares The Seattle Times, “from boosting the defense spending that the U.S. relies on to carry out President Donald Trump’s almost-6-month-old Iran war to lowering the cost of gas and groceries.”

Isn’t this mere Trump-bashing? For while Trump may someday receive the blame, in truth it belongs to both parties and almost all politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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election law First Amendment rights incumbents insider corruption

El-Sayed vs. The Money

campaign finance reform, Congress, voting, elections, free speech, first Amendment

“Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All” — so runs the campaign slogan of Abdul El-Sayed, who last week won Michigan’s Democratic Party nomination for the open U.S. Senate seat now held by Democrat Gary Peters.

Dr. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018, later heading Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services for a few years. He calls himself a progressive, but a “capitalist” one, not a socialist. Yet, seeking a national office, his national fellow travelers are Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s own Rashida Talib and, last-but-not-least, the Democratic Socialists of America.

Today, let’s take the first phrase of his slogan: Money out of politics. 

Creating small legislative districts would go a long way toward making outsized campaign spending less effective. Of course, term limits would diminish the value to a special interest of “capturing” an elected official. And limit the threat of politicians forever shaking down interests, special or not. 

But that’s not the game plan of Abdul and progressives and, for many years now, congressional Democrats. 

Instead, they want to re-write the First Amendment, reversing it from “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech” to Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money insofar as it relates to campaigning. 

So far, Congress has legislated a Byzantine regulatory regime that serves only to make politics more expensive. The public benefit? Corruption diminished at all? Anyone? 

Allowing career politicians to dictate who can raise or spend money (even in the incumbents’ very own election campaigns) and without regard to whether it silences voices — how is that progress?

If you want to tear down the whole idea of America, this version of getting “money out of politics” is one big rip.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies term limits

Terminal Representation

term limits, age limits, Congress

Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has been absent from Congress, hospitalized for weeks — first with no comment on his medical condition, still with very little information divulged. 

There should be an ethic in public service that when one is incapacitated, one hands the trust given back to the public to fill anew.* Sadly, this tradition has fallen victim to . . . take your pick: incumbency, partisanship, lack of electoral competition, Cicero’s times/mores.

History’s third-oldest U.S. Congress “boasts” 23 members of the House and Senate now eighty years old or older. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, the senior Iowa Senator, is the oldest at 92.

This aging of our decision makers has set up a seniority system of sorts. Hardly healthy. 

No wonder polls show overwhelming public support for age limits. 

Though I, too, would vote for, say, an 80-year age limit, if given the chance . . . age is not really the problem. I know people in their eighties who could well serve in Congress. 

For a time. 

The better answer is good old-fashioned term limits, which garner even greater public support. 

Mitch McConnell entered the U.S. Senate at age 42. He then spent the next 42 years in Washington, the longest serving senator in Kentucky history. 

The six older U.S. Senators — Durbin (IL), Grassley (IA), King (ME), McConnell (KY), Risch (ID), Sanders (VT) — average 33 years in Congress, while the 17 octogenarian House members average 28 years. Only Rep. Jim Baird of Indiana has been there less than a decade, first elected at age 73.

“We don’t think senility is really the problem,” says U.S. Term Limits CEO Nick Tomboulides. “We think incumbency is the problem, and senility is the symptom.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Part of the politics with Sen. McConnell is partisan: he is a Republican but the governor who would appoint his replacement for the rest of 2026 is a Democrat. 

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deficits and debt national politics & policies too much government

Spending All the Way to the Abyss

Entire categories of federal spending shouldn’t exist.

Now, it would be easy to eliminate budget deficits and to begin to make big and regular dents in the national debt, were it not for one teensy-weensy problem. Just hand me the budget (in electronic form, please) and a red pencil and I’ll hack away at the billions and billions. And trillions.

If that would take too long, I’d enlist a team of like-minded spending cutters to help.

We’d be doing something like what the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, tried to do early in the second Trump administration. DOGE didn’t go or wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near far enough, though. We know this because the big picture of runaway government spending hasn’t changed.

That’s what would thwart me and my team too: lack of political will. Or too much political will pulling in the opposite direction. Too many constituencies for all the spending and too many politicians, both parties, catering to the constituencies.

That’s the teensy-weensy problem.

The current U.S. national debt is approaching $40 trillion. This year, the federal government has already borrowed $1.4 trillion. These seem like catastrophic amounts. But somehow the U.S. still teeters on the edge of fiscal doom, yet to fall in.

Maybe when we get to a trillion trillions in federal debt and when a billion dollars won’t buy a dozen eggs, then we will surely see real reform. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies partisanship

The AOC-Schiff Thesis

Congress, AOC, Adam Schiff, Eric Swallwell, controversy

I wonder how many others were amused, as I was last week, to hear Senator Adam Schiff praise members of his party for the ouster of his fellow Californian and Democrat, Rep. Eric Swallwell, from Congress.

The tale, as told on this website on Sunday, is that Swallwell — one of Schiff’s closest colleagues pushing the Russiagate gambit against the first Trump administration — was pressured to resign over the massive amount of complaints against him for sexual harassment and other unwanted sexual advances. There is even an accusation of rape. 

Also resigning was a Republican from Texas, Tony Gonzalez, for similar reasons.

Schiff — who claimed to be “sickened” and “aghast” at the accusations and what Swallwell “has done” — followed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in scorning the Republicans for postponing dealing with the Gonzalez problem. He accused the Republicans of not wanting to abandon Gonzalez because they wanted to continue to maintain their majority in the House.

But this works both ways. Sure, Republicans postponed pressuring the ousting of Gonzalez until Democrats likewise agreed to pressure Swallwell to resign. Both parties maintain the previous balance. This is politics. Not great high-mindedness. On either side.

Further, the big issue was Swallwell’s gubernatorial run — contributing to the splitting up of Democratic votes thereby threatening to allow two Republicans to appear on the run-off on Election Day in November in California’s screwy Top Two system. 

Finding an excuse to undermine Swallwell’s run was surely a big part of the magnanimous Democratic effort to remove him from Congress.

“You think you know someone, and it turns out you don’t,” said Schiff about Swallwell. “I didn’t socialize with Eric Swallwell, but I worked with him on the Judiciary Committee — I would never have imagined that he was capable of something like this.”

I think we know quite enough about Schiff and his partisanship, as we do so many in Congress. They are capable of anything.

Meanwhile, the vote to expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) — accused of expropriating FEMA funds to the tune of $5 million — has not exactly proven the AOC-Schiff thesis on swift Democratic self-policing. She’s still in Congress, though a vote may occur tomorrow, we’re told.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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#ThemToo Movement

Congress, transparency, sex scandal

No matter how partisan politics has become, there are a few issues that our politicians seem intent on supporting — or opposing — regardless of party.

Example? Consider how soundly the House scuttled the recent effort to bring transparency to taxpayer payoffs for representatives’ and senators’ sexual harassment, rapes, and other improprieties. 

Last Wednesday, 357 members of the House of Representatives voted to refer to a committee a resolution that would have forced the release of records related to sexual harassment claims against lawmakers. While that sounds innocuous, in this case it effectively killed the measure. That’s how Representative Thomas Massie (R-Tenn.) explained it, and that’s how it was reported in the news: everyone who voted to refer the resolution to committee knew they were sending it to die.

“Both parties colluded to protect predators,” lamented Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who had introduced the resolution. “They voted to keep sexual harassment records buried, and they did it together.”

How together? Well the 357 members who protected their comrades from the ire of their constituents included 175 Republicans and 182 Democrats. Remember that there are currently 218 Republicans serving in Congress and 213 Democrats (with three vacancies and no independent representation). Nine members did not vote, while one answered as merely “present.” 

The uncooperative Republicans (willing to stab members of their own party in the back!) numbered thirty-eight, while recalcitrant Democrats (cruelly eager to shine sunlight on their fellow vampires!) numbered twenty-seven. 

While the House overwhelmingly voted to protect its members from transparency and their own voters, back on November 18, 2025, representatives voted 427-1 to demand the immediate release of all federal documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. 

Even more bipartisan. But that time it was for transparency.

Just not theirs.

This is key.

And this is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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defense & war tax policy U.S. Constitution

The Emergency Tariff Question

tariffs, Supreme Court, Congress, balance of power

As is often the case in Supreme Court decisions, in Learning Resources v. Trump it is the dissenters’ views that are most interesting. 

At issue? The president’s authority to impose tariffs, or alter them. Donald Trump — a life-long tariff proponent — took the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as an excuse to levy broad new duties on imports from multiple countries. That act delegated to the executive the power to use tariffs as emergency foreign policy measures.

On February 20, the majority on the court gave a decisive No to the President’s use of IEEPA to impose tariffs.*

I generally oppose Congress delegating powers to the executive branch and support free trade. But what does the Constitution actually say? Could dissenters Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito have a point?

Kavanaugh’s humungous written opinion claims that tariffs are a traditional, common, and lawful means of “regulat[ing] . . . importation” in foreign-policy crises; he says the majority’s narrow reading ignores text, history, precedent, and the special deference due the President in external affairs. “The text of IEEPA authorizes the President to regulate importation,” explains Kavanaugh, “and tariffs are a means of doing so.”

Thomas stresses that IEEPA’s emergency-declaration process provides political accountability, so judicial second-guessing is unwarranted. Further, he argues that from the Founding, “regulate importation” has always included duties; early Congresses and Presidents (Monroe, Jackson, etc.) routinely delegated and adjusted tariffs. While matters of rights cannot be delegated, Thomas argues that privileges can, and have, and that this has long been recognized in constitutional law.

The key question, as Kavanaugh advances, is the balance of power. “Congress retains the ultimate authority to clarify, amend, or repeal IEEPA,” he reasonably asserts, “if it believes the President’s exercise of emergency powers has gone too far.”

This issue became a federal court case because Congress is dysfunctional.

Which puts the issue back in our lap. Where voters can have some control. How? Through elections, pressure, or pushing . . . term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Other avenues may remain open. And Trump is jumping on them.

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general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

The Unstoppable Kill Switch

Congress, regulations, control, authoritarianism

Fifty-seven Republicans in Congress worked with the bulk of Democrats, and the President of These United States, to continue funding development of a “kill switch” on new cars. On Tuesday, the bill became law.

You may have thought that most new cars driving down the road could already be switched “off” remotely. After all, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed by former President Joe Biden, required the National Traffic Safety Administration to develop just such a technology for passenger cars. “The sweeping infrastructure law passed Congress with bipartisan support,” MSNBC pointed out last week.

But government isn’t fast, and the kill switch project “needed” more funding, which was included in the new $1.2 trillion spending package.

Still, a minority did try — unsuccessfully, alas — to put a halt to this “advanced impaired driving prevention technology.”

Calling the R&D “Orwellian,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) asked a relevant question: “When your car shuts down because it doesn’t approve of your driving, how will you appeal your roadside conviction?”

Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow Clyde Wayne Crews further explained: “The vehicle ‘kill-switch’ is precisely the kind of overreach that will empower regulatory agencies to manage behavior without votes by elected representatives in Congress or real accountability.”

Though Republican Massie had proposed an amendment to defund the kill switch, and a few Democrats joined him — Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, Lou Correa of California and Val Hoyle of Oregon — a Heinz 57 sauce of GOP representatives sided with the overwhelming bulk of Democrats to keeping the kill switch funding flowing.

Separate efforts to repeal Section 24220 outright, such as H.R. 1137 (the No Kill Switches in Cars Act), remain pending but likely paralyzed in committee.

The Leviathan rumbles along, no kill switch in development.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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