A bunch of busybody elitists called the Committee on the Constitutional System has drafted a report calling for extending the term of members of the House of Representatives from two to four years. This change would require amending the U.S. Constitution, since the two-year term is constitutionally fixed.
Naturally, the Congressmen would like having to face the voters only every four years. This change might also be welcomed by the people who are asked every two years to contribute to Congressional campaigns and to volunteer to work in Congressional campaigns.
The Congressmen and the elitists may not be happy about the two-year term for House members, but it is an essential feature of the constitutional design created by the writers of our Constitution at the 1787 Convention whose Bicentennial we celebrate this year. James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, persuasively argued that “frequency of elections is the cornerstone … of free government.”
The reason for the short term for members of the House of Representatives is that all tax bills must originate in that body. The Founding Fathers knew that oppressive taxes, imposed by an unrestrained British Parliament, were the main cause of the American Revolution.
Tying the taxing power to frequent elections is one of our greatest guarantees of liberty. If we were to give up frequent elections for the House of Representatives, we might as well abandon all hope of ever reducing taxes and resign ourselves to a forever escalating tax burden.
The plan to lengthen the term of Congressmen is only the first phase of the Committee on the Constitutional System’s ambitious plan to achieve structural change in our form of government. The real reason this group wants to change the term of House members is not because elections for Congressmen are too frequent or too costly, but because the CCS wants to put the election of Congressmen into lock step with the election of the President.
The CCS wants to require all states to allow straight-ticket voting for all federal offices. The CCS sees this as a stepping stone to CCS’s more radical plan to have mandatory straight-ticket voting for the President, Vice President, and House members, plus possibly Senators, too.
These proposals are backdoor tactics to eliminate our Separation of Powers, which is the unique structure of government designed by our Founding Fathers at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. The Committee doesn’t like the Separation of Powers because it makes government more difficult for elitists to control.
Our Constitution’s framers divided all the power granted to the Federal Government into three branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial, each with its prescribed list of enumerated powers. As James Madison bluntly put it, the accumulation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the same hands is “the very definition of tyranny,” and the “preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct.”
The Separation of Powers principle mandates separate and distinct terms for each federal elective office: a four-year term for the President and Vice President, a six-year term for Senators, and a two-year term for members of the House of Representatives. These different terms of office and separate elections adapt representative government to the Separation of Powers principle, and are one of the important ways that the Founding Fathers created a design that preserved our freedom.
James Madison believed that this original institutional design created by the Constitution was the best way to achieve the twin goals of liberty and justice, and time has proved him correct. By “contriving the interior structure of the government” in a particular way, Madison argued, “its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.”
It’s hard to think of any proposed change which would do more to alienate the voters from the democratic process and impose unreasonable tax burdens on our citizens than lengthening the terms of the members of Congress who have the power to originate and impose taxes. Sorry, Congressman, every time you vote new taxes you’ll have to think about facing your constituents within two years.
