Making a House seat an inheritance

The Rahm Emanuel Rule is simply “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

This is why the first action in Washington at 9/11 was to create a Department of Homeland Security complete with a Cabinet secretary who is 18th in the line of succession for president.

Hmm. That seems like a disincentive to protect the lives of everyone ahead of him. FJB was smart enough to appoint as his Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was born in Cuba and is ineligible to be president.

The serious crisis now is the assassination attempt on President Trump. We are up to three known attempts and there may be five others. He put up plexiglass to shield him and got rid of his pager and walkie-talkie just to be safe.

Lifers in Congress want to use the fear of Trump’s assassination to turn a congressional seat into an inheritance.

Under the banner “Democracy in America,” the Jeff Bezos Post reported, “Imagine the unthinkable: a mass shooting of members of Congress that leaves a large swath of the county unrepresented and shifts the balance of political power in Washington.”

“In the current political environment, such an outbreak of violence is not as unthinkable as it used to be, according to a bipartisan collection of House members. The attempted assassination of members at a congressional baseball team practice in 2017, the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a dramatic spike in threats against members and, most recently, a possible second assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump highlight the need for Congress to ensure it can continue to govern in the aftermath of mass violence, they said.”

It is impossible to imagine the unthinkable because once you’ve imagined it, it becomes thinkable. But the phrase reflects the sloppy thinking behind this effort.

The Post said, “To address such a scenario, these four House members — two Republicans and two Democrats — are pushing an unlikely solution: a constitutional amendment that would allow members to be replaced quickly in the event of a mass-casualty event.

“In addition to ensuring uninterrupted representation for constituents, the amendment would discourage attempts to use violence to sway the balance of power in the House.”

So the problem according to the newspaper is that a bunch of congressmen die and the House speakership changes.

Congress says the only solution is to let incumbent congressmen pick their successor. Obviously, we cannot wait and hold funerals and let voters choose the replacement. No, no, no. We must allow the officeholder to pass the public office to his heir.

Two lifer Republican congressmen and two lifer Democrat ones got together “to ensure that Congress can continue its work if a large number of members are killed in a mass attack.”

The only mass attack on Congress came 70 years ago. Jacob Schulz wrote on January 20, 2021, “In 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists stormed the Capitol and shot five congressmen.”

He noted, “Amazingly no one died, but 35-year-old Michigan Rep. Alvin Bentley, who was shot in the chest, was never really the same.”

The nation survived without adding a constitutional amendment. Clinton later gave the terrorists clemency.

But somehow — magically — this is a crisis that we must fix immediately, immediately, immediately.

The Post story said, “Their proposed constitutional amendment would require each member of the House to submit the names of at least five individuals from his or her political party to their state’s governor. In the event of that representative’s death, the governor would choose a name from the list within 10 days, and the House speaker would be required to seat them immediately.”

Ah.

Therein lies the real story. If a congressman dies in office, he would pick his heir.

I call this the Dingelling of Congress. In 1932, voters in suburban Detroit elected John Dingell to the House. He held the seat until passing it on to his son, John Jr., who was elected in 1954. The son hung on to it until 2014 when his second wife, Debbie, won election.

Really, America, we should not be playing with our Dingellings.

We should be electing people who really represent us to Congress. But we don’t. We treat the ballot on Election Day as a test of our name recognition. After arguing for years over who should be president, we then re-elect to our Congress at an astonishing 90% rate.

Most members stay as long as they please. Occasionally a congressman gets primaryed as happened in the case of Liz Cheney, but it is rare as a joke on late-night TV. How did voters in Wyoming come to know Liz Cheney in the first place? Why through her dad, Darth, a former congressman.

Oops, I meant Dick. He’s a Dick not a Darth.

This fear of an assassin flipping the House is so real that you know what they did when a Democrat tried to kill nine Republicans at baseball practice?

Congress went ahead with the ballgame as scheduled. Maybe they beefed up security a little. But the show must go on.

The newspaper story was a little groggy on the details.

The Post said, “40 constitutional amendments have been introduced since 1945, ‘and none of them have passed,’ Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), the chairwoman of the subcommittee, noted in her opening remarks. Bice said the track record helped explain why in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress opted instead to change federal law requiring a state hold a special election within 49 days in the event of an extraordinary circumstance where vacancies in the House chamber exceed 100 seats.”

But America has ratified six amendments since 1945, beginning with the 22nd Amendment that limits presidents to two terms.

Sadly, no congressional term limit amendment, no balanced budget amendment, and no flag protection amendment ever made it. But DC got three electoral votes in one of the recent amendments. There are our congressional priorities.

Congress already took care of the mass death of congressmen problem with that change in the law.

But to be on the safe side, maybe we should elect a vice congressman in case of emergency. A line of succession could then follow: chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, press secretary, side squeeze, children and so on.

But if Congress is so important that we must not go 24 hours without having every vacancy filled, then why aren’t they in session each and every day of the year?