The justification for, and a plan to replace the United States Congress in the 2008 Election cycle

By:  Jim Jacobs
(Written January 2008)

 The events of the past several weeks leading up to and including the Iowa and Nevada Caucuses and the New Hampshire, Michigan, and South Carolina Primaries have started to identify the candidates that will eventually become the nominees of their respective parties as the race to the White House winds its way through the next ten months to November 4, 2008 when the next president of the United States will be elected.  The past several months leading up to this point have identified an unmistakable current of energy that is surging through the national electorate that has finally caught the attention of a few of the candidates  who are vying to lead this nation for the next four or eight years. This surge has been brought about by the realization of a great many of our citizens that this country, once great, has become almost irrevocably broken.  There is an almost a last gasp plea to these candidates to get their heads outside of the beltway and try to grasp what is happening to this country.  This plea is a plea for change.  This is not just the latest fad, as well it might be relegated in the minds of our political parties, but rather this plea comes from the Howard Beales[1] of this country who are “mad as hell, and are not going to take it anymore”.

 Perhaps before we decide how we’re going to fix this country and actually bring change, we had better agree on at least a cursory damage assessment.

 How Bad Is It?

 The short answer is that it is always darkest just before it gets pitch black, and it’s about to fade to black. We are an incident or two away from anarchy and perhaps a stroke of a pen away from plunging into an economic depression that would make the Great Depression of the 1930s look like the good ole days. This is a country divided.  This is a country more divided than at anytime in our history. The people are divided, the political parties are divided, and the congress itself is divided.  One might say that this is just the political system under which America is governed, that there has always been disagreement across the aisles in our government, and that this is “the American Way".

If one looks merely on the surface there might be an element of truth to that.  But barely beneath the surface lies a cauldron of fear and tension from our feelings of insecurity, mistrust in our government and in our elected leaders, bias and mistrust in our media, both print and electronic, and a perceived erosion of our American way of life generated by open borders and a literal invasion of millions of illegal aliens who refuse to learn our language or obey our laws.

Within a reasonable attention span I will attempt to highlight some of the major ills facing our nation, place sufficient blame to identify a cause, and suggest a fix designed to give our next president at least a reasonable chance of righting a floundering Ship of State.

 Immigration

 The reported 12 million illegal immigrants in this country, which realistically is more like 20 million, are overcrowding our schools, our medical facilities, our welfare system, and our jails and prisons.  The latest estimate of the costs associated with this invasion has been put at a whopping $338 billion over the past year alone, and are explained away by our government as cheap labor that undertake jobs that our citizens refuse to do.  The fact is, these invaders are here at the behest of our congress.  They are here because every illegal immigrant represents a potential vote that might keep a member in congress from having to go out and find a real job.  They are here because congress will not enact meaningful laws to get them out, nor provide the resources to strengthen our borders to keep them out, nor even provide sanctions against the legal system that refuses to enforce laws already on the books, especially those laws prohibiting the designation and the establishment of so called sanctuary cities that harbor them.

Thirty three of our senators apparently want them here badly enough that they recently voted against making English  the official language of this country and then voted to give these illegal immigrants social security benefits, even though they have paid not one dime into the program. This is the same Social Security program that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) declared over ten years ago as insufficiently funded to accept the Baby Boomer generation that begins its retirement this month.  We will tell you later why the program is under-funded, and we will place that blame, as well.  This to appease this horde of illegal immigrants that eight out of ten citizens, including all legal immigrants feel is the number one problem challenging, not only this nation, but our way of life as we know it.

 Our Economy

 Our budget deficit has reached 13 trillion dollars.  One trillion dollars is one thousand billion dollars. Our congress spends one billion dollars every eight hours and 13 minutes, twenty four/seven. Ten years ago, our national debt was $3.0 trillion.  Easy come, easy go.  And….this is not even the bad news.

 Our current Comptroller General and head of the Government Accounting Office (GAO), David M. Walker, has become so alarmed at the cumulative amount of our entitlement program debt that he finally has taken his power-point dog and pony show on the road to the leadership of several individual states and other influential civic groups throughout the nation. This was somewhat of a “Hail Mary effort” after trying for months to get the attention of the only group that can actually do anything about it, the U.S. Congress.  They turned a deaf ear to his pleas for some type of reform before our most compelling entitlement programs; Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid totally sink in a massive sea of government red ink.  As recently as the early 1990s when the author personally had occasion to delve deeply into the matter, Social Security was in some danger of running out of money when the Baby Boomers started hitting the system, the first of whom will draw her first check in February of this year.  Congress was urged almost fifteen years ago to institute some sort of mid-course correction to bring these vital programs back into solvency, but it never came to pass. As originally established in the 1930s, Social Security was to maintain a trust fund throughout the life of the program, the surplus of which would be invested to generate the funds to perpetuate the program, insuring its solvency as long as necessary.  Somewhere between its inception and probably the 1980s, it’s almost impossible to establish just when, the congress discovered this enormous pool of money just sitting around generating interest, just as it was programmed to do. With no legal authority or precedent, congress re-appropriated this money into the general fund for use as sort of a personal piggy bank, primarily to bestow pork barrel projects on the folks back home and to fund other non-budgeted items. By the early 1990s the trust fund was empty, completely wiped out and replaced with trillions of dollars in congressional IOUs.  Guess who picks up congressional IOUs. Our children and grandchildren will have to pay it, because we already have a $13 trillion budget deficit that we can’t pay either. Is it any wonder that Secretary Paulson is upset with the congress?

 The United States Congress stole the entire Social Security Trust Fund.

 Okay, so we have a budget deficit that is already more than our children and grandchildren will ever be able to pay off in their lifetimes. Now the congress has just decided to add 20 million people who are here illegally to these entitlement roles, betting on the come that congress can find a way to grant amnesty to the illegals so that they may become citizens and, in their endearing gratitude for such preferential treatment at the expense of the real Americans, will vote to keep these “benefactors” in office.  Sound convoluted?  It is, and that’s what happens to many a politician after feeding for years at the public trough[2].  But there’s even more.

 The Shrinking Dollar

 Second in concern only to the threat of illegal immigration to the sanctity of this country and the insane cost of subsidizing this threat is the devaluation of the American dollar.  This treatise is not meant to be a dissection of the American economy nor is the author qualified to undertake such, but there are some things that must be said about why, for the first time in our lives our dollars are not in demand, and in fact are shunned on the world economy.  For starters, more companies than ever have been allowed to outsource more and more of their manufacturing offshore.  In most cases, this has been a matter of survival for many of the companies moving offshore.  But the root cause of having to go into survival mode comes back to runaway taxes, and the cost of medical care and other benefits for employees. The net result of undertaking such actions in order to hold down prices for the American consumers serves mainly to drive up our trade deficit, thereby weakening the dollar.  We have almost always had some amount of trade deficit, but nothing like we are experiencing today.  Couple this with the doubling of the price of oil in the past year and a tripling over the past three years in a country with a fuel-based economy only exacerbates the problem.   Even with our dependence on foreign oil, miraculously our domestic oil companies still report record earnings, thanks to generous subsidies and other favorable rulings by congress to these powerful special interest groups.  Congress has taken absolutely no action to mitigate this assault on the American economy,  and counts on ‘Big Oil’ as a favored special interest group and a constant source of campaign funding that keeps them in office.

 Probably everyone in this country knows someone who has been directly negatively affected by the housing bust. Certainly everyone who owns a home has lost a pile of money, at least on paper, in the past 18 months.  Some of this is a correction, resulting from a run-up of prices in the two years preceding, but a lot of it is also mysterious because the sale prices of many homes are lower than their actual replacement costs, not to mention what is owed to the banks on the homes.  Adding to this crisis is the accompanying mortgage meltdown that is causing a record number of foreclosures which in turn results in more properties being forced into the market at vastly reduced prices made possible by short-sales, a government subsidized scheme allowing banks to recoup losses suffered from making loans they should have not made in the first place. All this comes back on the consumers who got into trouble initially by trying to borrow their way out of debt, all of which is allowed, or even encouraged in one way or the other, by our government.  Nor is there much of a safety net under these ex-homeowners because they have no savings. They have no savings because the government provides little or no incentive to save, taxing interest on your savings, dividends on your investments, and profits you make on investing your after-tax dollars.  This needless and cumulative atrocity has been allowed to occur in the most heavily regulated sector of our economy, the banking industry, regulated by the United States Congress.  Who in the world is minding the store?

 One last shot before moving on.  With the most unfavorable set of ingredients looming over our economy since just prior to the Great Depression in the 1930s,  in December  congress sent President Bush a Christmas present in the form of a $516 billion omnibus spending bill as part of the FY 2008 budget.  Of course, this bill was three months late, having been due in September as required by the Constitution.  Hidden in the bill were 8993 special interest earmarks, commonly referred to as “pork barrel projects”,  worth $22 billion, or almost 5% of the total and earmarked for the discretionary use of Members of Congress for pet projects in the home districts[3].  Even more flagrant, Senator Mary Landrieu (D) of Louisiana recently asked congress to approve $250 Billion to rebuild New Orleans.  If you are lucky enough to own one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans you may be about to receive $1,329,787 to rebuild your home.  And the beat goes on.

 The Muslim War

. Congress calls this the “War On Terror “and refuses to acknowledge that there is any connection between it and with what is going on in Iraq.   Actually, the “War On Terror” is just one more of the never ending products of Political Correctness, which itself is a concerted effort put forth by the congress and the media to try and convince the rest of us that it is possible to pick up a turd by the clean end. To fight this war, congress took all of our federal law enforcement agencies, who don’t like each other in the first place, and heretofore had never been able to work together, and created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the largest, most expensive, and least productive government agency in the history of our country.  After spending hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, DHS came up with primarily an orange and yellow code that lets us know when it is safe to go outside and then determined, as Lee Iaococa succintly puts it in his new book,  that it is safe to fly on airplanes again if we take off our shoes and pour out our shampoo.

There are almost two billion Muslims in the world.  Muslims are dedicated to ridding the world of all infidels.  Infidels are essentially anyone who is not a Muslim.  The Muslims have infiltrated and all but taken over France, Germany, and Denmark.  Great Britain and the remainder of Europe are also on their list and fading fast.  If we fail to convince the Muslims that they don’t want any more of the United States while facing them in the Middle East, then we will have to engage them on our own soil.  The Muslims are unlike any enemy we have ever faced before.  Not only are they not afraid of dying, they actually want to die, because they then become martyred, which triggers a whole list of entitlements that are beyond the scope of this treatise….or of any rational imagination.  The point is that congress has miserably failed to recognize not only the threat posed by these godless people, but also the fact that these insurgents are not members of a standing army representing any sovereign nation. In order for our military to combat them effectively it becomes necessary to deviate from the bounds of the Geneva Convention from time to time.  Congress cannot seem to grasp this concept in their unwanted and unwarranted attempts to micro-manage the war and to second guess our military leaders  This inflexibility renders the current congress totally incompatible with the ongoing security of this country, and this is part of the “change” that our modern day and enlightened Howard Beales are demanding of this election cycle.

 Now What?   

 In just skimming the surface of the number one problem facing our nation, we have determined that our immigration policies threaten the very core of the American system of values by injecting a multi-culturalism into our society.  In the entire history of the world, such mixing of cultures in a sovereign nation has always resulted in the decline and fall of that nation.  Everything connected with this immigration meltdown is patently illegal and is burdened by an unacceptable and unaffordable cost that accompanies it.  The United States Congress is the root cause of this untenable situation because they have steadfastly failed to take any action to rid the nation of this plague.  Quite to the contrary, they have actually encouraged the influx of these people and then have aided and abetted them once they are here.

 In the case of our economy, we have pointed out that our budget deficit is almost five times higher than it was a decade ago at $13.0 trillion dollars.  Under our system of government, the president cannot spend money; only the congress can spend money.  Accordingly, only the congress can limit spending, a road much less traveled by our congress.  Furthermore, not only has congress vastly overspent their budgets year after year, they also managed to spend all of the money that they stole from the Social Security Trust Fund, mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren.  Nor do they heed the alarm that our entitlement debt is in danger of imploding, even though it may already be past the point of no return. Finally, the mighty American dollar has tumbled to a value of only two-thirds of the Euro, and some countries will no longer even accept our dollar from American tourists.  No action whatsoever has been taken by congress in the last decade to insure that such an unthinkable thing could happen to the once world’s strongest economy.  As this is being written, the United States is in danger of officially losing our triple A credit rating in the world economy

 The shrinking dollar has also dashed the great American dream of owning ones own home as millions of homes are tumbling into foreclosure and home ownership is pushed further out of reach of first-time homebuyers because congress has failed miserably in their responsibility toward fiscal security.  Their answer to this is to earmark 8,993 illegal pet projects for special interests and personal benefactors back home, effectively thumbing their noses at the American people.

 Perhaps even the greatest crime perpetrated on the American people is the refusal of our congress to even acknowledge that we are at war with the Muslim nation even as they kill our soldiers in the Middle East, hijack our aircraft and fly them into our buildings, behead our tourists and journalists overseas, and demand that Allah be granted parity with God under our credo of “One Nation Under God”.

 What now, with our nation becoming reunited at the grassroots level by demanding “change” and with our presidential candidates from both parties promising “change” and with the only vehicle that can deliver “change” being the sitting congress, who steadfastly refuse to render any change whatsoever?   They are so hopelessly mired in their own partisanship that they were unable to even eliminate the insidious Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) on our income that every single Member of both chambers agrees should be abolished.  How can we ever get this bunch to “change” and consider Term Limits that would swing the congress back toward a “citizen government” as envisioned by out Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution when they’ve built such a cushy life for themselves?  How can we ever get them to “change” and consider Campaign Finance Reform when they need the “anything goes” mentality that generates the obscene funding required to keep sweeping them back into office every two, or six years, and which allows them to maintain a 93% re-election rate?  Incidentally, this re-election statistic includes such political stalwarts as the “honorable” William Jefferson, congressman from Louisiana, who was caught with $90,000 in bribe money stashed in his freezer in his Washington, D.C. home, and the “honorable” Larry Craig, the senator from Idaho of recent toe-tapping fame.  Finally, how can we ever convince congress that we are serious about their continuing transgressions when we keep sending them back to Washington year after year with an 11% approval rating?

 The answer is, we can’t.  These people work for us.  If this country has any chance of surviving the untenable situation in which this country has been placed by the Congress of the United States of America, we must show them that we are mad as hell, and we are going to fire every one of them!   

 HOW CAN WE DO THIS?

 One of America’s most treacherous enemies may have answered this best.  The Japanese Admiral who led the attack against Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto  said immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that almost ended World War II before it even got started, “ I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve”. 

 Well, this sleeping giant, the American people, are now fully awake to the antics of this congress, and, boy are we pissed!  We are also born with an inalienable right that is more powerful than any sword to do something about it.  Yet it is something that the Congress of the United States would simply have us hand over to any foreign national that might wander across our border wrapped in his own flag and demanding we give him equal rights.  Ensconced in this inalienable right is something that will be played out in every city, county and state in our nation during the next ten months.  Uniquely wielded, it can be very powerful

 It is the VOTE!

 Most of us slept through Civics in high school.  It is questionable if the subject is even still being taught since room in the curricula had to be made to teach every other language under the sun so we can understand all the complaining illegals.  The following is a short refresher.

 There are 435 congressional districts (CDs) in the United States.  Each one is headed by an elected official, a United States Congressman, who is a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  These individuals are elected, or in the case of our overly exclusive system, re-elected every two years.  Many of them are opposed, but the list of contested races becomes fewer every year because it generally takes at least a million dollars to be competitive in a congressional race.  The incumbent almost always has at least this much money in their campaign account because sitting congressmen spend far more time raising money than they do legislating. It is also far easier for a sitting congressman to raise money than it is for a challenger, even a well qualified aspirant.  This is because people who contribute heavily to congressional campaigns, they are called ‘fat cats”, like to give their money to the candidate they think most likely to win.  With a re-election rate in the congress of 93% or so, even including attrition such as dying in office, becoming senile and retiring, or worse, not retiring, or going to jail, it’s a pretty sure bet that the incumbent always wins because the playing field is far from level.  On the other hand, a challenger to a seat must either fund his or her campaign themselves, of raise the money from family or friends, which is tough because their initial thought is that you have lost your mind, or solicit contributions from acquaintances or political junkies who pity you.  Believe me, I have been there, done this.  Oh, yes, this job that requires at least a million dollar buy-in pays about $170,000 a year, and requires a lot of overnight travel.  Some hotly contested races such as an open seat between two well known candidates, as in war heroes, sports notables, celebrities, or porn stars easily go into the tens of millions of dollars, funded usually along party lines by party “fat cats” and Political Action Committees (PACs).  Senate campaigns follow the same basic principles, but there are only two senators from each state and they are allowed to serve a term of six years instead of two.  The challengers to senate races are usually better known and generally possess a strong political resume and they have usually been carefully recruited to run by the Republican or Democrat party.  The reason the senate terms are three times as long is because they must raise at least ten times as much money to make a creditable bid.  A senate campaign can cost $100 million[4] .

 But…. What If?   

 What if the playing field could be drastically and fairly leveled?  What if a non-incumbent, less well-known, but qualified and motivated candidate could throw a hat in the ring and not be intimidated by needing to raise a million or more dollars?.  What if this qualified aspirant only needed to raise the filing fee, a few thousand dollars, and free up some time to run in and survive a primary election?  What if this primary winner could be assured of the support and the vote of thousands of Howard Beales living in his congressional district who were mad as hell, and who weren’t going to take it anymore, and who were committed to voting for anyone other than the incumbent?

 What if your opponent had only an 11% approval rating?

 Could this candidate win?  America’s future might depend on it.

 This is Why We Must Act

 If you have been paying attention to the first four primary contests of the 2008 Election Cycle unfolding over the past three weeks, you have seen an incredible thing taking place.  You have seen an entire country that has been split down the middle by the war in Iraq, by the frightening and foreboding economy, by the threat of our way of life by the increasing breach in our borders, and by the uncertainty and frustration borne by fear.  You have seen this fear manifested in the plea for “change” by the voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina but also validated by a rampaging wave calling for that change that spanned the country almost overnight.  The first candidates who were quick enough to catch that wave did well in the first four primaries.  By South Carolina, all of the candidates were aboard and ready to embrace this plea because “change” is the only game in town for the 2008 Election.  But it is much more than that.

 Change might well be the only hope for this country!

 By now the reader may have noticed that there has been no mention in this treatise of political preferences, individual presidential candidates, or partisan blame for the woes that have befallen this country and that are threatening to consume it.  The blame has been placed exactly where the guilt leads, upon the ubiquitous congress.   

 On this day following the South Carolina primary election, every presidential candidate who is still alive in this quest to lead this country is apprehensive about one thing.  Each knows absolutely that the grail they seek, and that they must deliver is a thing called “change”.  However, they each also know with equal certainty that they cannot deliver it.  They know better than anyone that they cannot change the United States Congress as we know it, and as it has become.  The fact is that in our political system, if something must be changed, congress, not the president, must change it.

 It is as the farmer out in Iowa said to his wife after fishing their youngest son of eight children out of the hole under the outhouse after he had fallen through, “Ma, I think it’ll be easier to start a new one than to clean this one up”.

 We must give our new president, whoever it might be, a valid shot at “change”.  Moreover, we’ve got to give this country a shot at “change”, because if we fail to act right now,  this country may well slip past the point of no return where it will be beyond the will of the people, no matter how united, to turn it around.  We cannot clean this congress up.  We’ve got to give our new president a new congress.By a new congress, I don't mean the shift of a few Members from one party to the other in order to swing the 'leadership".  I mean an entirely new congress from whom we, the voters, can extract the promise of Term Limits within the first 100 days of swear-in, meaningful campaign reform within six months, and a myriad of other desirable and reform oriented ideas that we can enforce by holding their return for a second term in the palm of our hands, and within the reach of the voting machine lever.  We have  just ten months in which to do it...

 HERE IS PRECISELY WHAT WE MUST DO

 First, we must sell the idea that the ONLY way to bring about meaningful change in this country is to, ideally, elect an entirely new congress[5].   Secondly, we must rely totally on the internet to get this message out there and keep it out there.  We must rely on the bloggers to insure that every voter in this country knows what is coming down and why this is necessary for the future of our country.  Then we must get enough voters to buy into it to pull it off.  The basic premise is very simple. 

 On November 4, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents must all agree to vote for only the candidate who is not the incumbent in all 435 House of Representative races and 33 Senate races throughout the entire country.  This means that Republicans might be required to vote for Democrats, and Democrats might be required to vote for Republicans. This may be a little easier on Independents because they don’t necessarily have a political affiliation; however, the Independent vote is extremely critical to the success of this plan for that same reason.  There will be a lot of hard-core party members who will not buy into this plan at all.  There is a cadre of politically astute citizens in every county and congressional district in the country who work hard to support their respective party.  Each party has a virtual army of like-minded partisan citizens who serve as precinct captains and who hold fundraisers, and who attend state presidential conventions and, if they are well enough connected politically,show up as delegates and alternate delegates to their respective party’s national convention every four years, all on their own nickel, I might add.  I know about these tireless believers because I am one of these tireless believers.  I have worked the precincts and the polls at election time, I have attended the state and national conventions, I have run for national office under my party’s banner, I have worked in the trenches during the infamous hanging chad hand count in Florida following the 2000 General Election, and I have never voted for a candidate from the opposition party in over fifty years.  Nor will I cross the line on November 4^th in the presidential race.  I will vote for my party’s nomination for president, and I will work on their behalf throughout the election cycle, just as I am working to support my choice in my state’s primary election, and who might not necessarily be my party’s nominee for the office of president.

 That doesn’t matter. We are demanding change.  All of the presidential candidates have promised to give us change.  I haven’t heard one voice from our congress promising that they will give us the change we demand, and frankly should I hear such a voice I would not believe it, such is their dismal 11% record for even attempting to change the direction in which our country is heading.  That is what this movement is all about.  If only 25% of the party members from each party agree to cross party lines for the good of the country in the congressional races only, those votes and the votes of the independent voters will in all likelihood be sufficient to get the job done. 

 Third Party voters, such as the Reform Party also have a special role in this plan, perhaps even the most difficult role.  It will be very tempting for the third parties to run their own candidates in some of the races.  Injecting a third candidate would give an incumbent a better chance of retaining that seat, and it would lessen the chance of making the kind of meaningful impact on the entire effort.  Most readers should agree that if the best that a two-party system can produce is a congress with an 11% approval rating,  then the time might be about right to seriously entertain a third party in our political process.  If there is indeed a “pony in there somewhere” it might have a third party’s name on it.  Just so that the “pony” does not turn out to be of the "one trick” variety, it is appropriate to touch on a few other nuances of this potential movement.

 It is suggested that if this plan is even mildly successful it will be repeated in subsequent election cycles until there is sufficient purging of the long-standing congressional membership that a third party would be more viable, or even welcomed.   It is also a distinct possibility that some of the newest members, especially of the House, might be inclined to change their party affiliation to the newly established Third Party, even sooner rather than later. This possibility would be greatly enhanced with a Third Party looked upon as a coalition builder, rather that as a “spoiler”, as has often been the case under the current status quo.

 Finally, it is speculated that, other than the sitting Members of Congress, the other biggest opponents of this plan would be the two primary parties themselves.  These entities, or more likely the county executive committees who oversee all 435 congressional districts, might be reluctant to recruit, or sponsor new candidates in an attempt to limit non-incumbent candidates. That would seem very shortsighted, but strange things happen in politics.  It is rather speculated that if this movement gains traction throughout the country, these executive committees will strive even harder to field a challenger for every single race just to stay even.  This movement might just turn out to be the best game in town.

 Time will tell.  This document will enter the cyber-world, and time is very compressed in this new world, perhaps as much as word of mouth to the tenth power.  I predicted in a book I wrote ten years ago[6] that the internet would make it possible to run a political campaign from the comfort of ones own home without ever even getting dressed except to attend a candidate forum every now and then.  Little did I know.

 Is it possible that bloggers, given as simple, or as complex a concept as “change” can compete quite effectively with the power of the national media for the attention of Americans thirsty for the elusive product know as “truth”.  My contribution has been to merely recognize that change is at hand, identify the obstacle that must be overcome to grasp it, and define the mechanics of pulling it off.  It comes down to “how bad do you want it”?

 Jim Jacobs

South Florida

All Rights Reserved January 2008