Shutdown blues: Time.gov closure, Will's comments, and Bobblehead's proposal

Every so often I visit time.gov to synch my watch with the official US time. (Unlike my mom, who sets her clocks fifteen minutes fast, I prefer to be exact.) When I chose the website in my bookmarks today, I was greeted with the above screen and this message:

Due to a lapse in government funding, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is closed and most NIST and affiliated web sites are unavailable until further notice. We sincerely regret the inconvenience.

(The NIST, it should be noted, is embroiled in the NSA surveillance controversy because the NSA “may have planted a vulnerability in a widely used NIST-approved encryption algorithm to facilitate its spying activities.” Crazy stuff.)

So I guess my watch will remain inexact until Congress makes itself useful instead of repeating the tired old rhetoric we have heard for years.

Yesterday, NPR’s Morning Edition featured an interview with conservative columnist George F. Will. Regarding Congress’ current impasse, Will said:

This is the Madisonian scheme. Each institution shall be the jealous asserter of its prerogatives and try to maximize its power…. The Madisonian scheme is for the government to be hard to move. It's supposed to be. People look at Washington and say, oh gosh, this is so difficult. It's supposed to be difficult.

Later, when asked if there is risk that Congress’ decision-making will become mysterious and passions will overrule reason, per James Madison in the Federalist Papers (which I probably need to read since they are referenced a lot), Will said:

Sure. The word "leader" appears in the Federalist Papers 13 times. By lead they really meant incite, stir up, cause problems. The political problem, as Madison understood it, is at bottom a problem of passions. And the entire architecture of our government is an attempt to moderate through a deliberative process the passions that are endemic to popular government. So, when we see passions in play, we shouldn't be startled. That's the problem. We knew they're always in play. Rather we should say, how are we doing at moderating them?

Not very well, it seems. And though the public is quick to blame Congress for the ineptitude plaguing Capitol Hill, it is passing the buck. Every Senator and Representative has been chosen by a majority of their constituents to represent their interests in Washington. So it seems this is what we, collectively, have voted for: resolute pigheadedness.

I suppose Will has a point that the government is supposed to “be hard to move” as oppose to being completely fickle (which, I suppose, is a point blue Republicrats could make about their defense of Obamacare). But is it supposed to be this hard to move? Are legislators supposed to be this dense? At some point I assume reason would prevail, especially when one has been backed into a corner and things need to be taken care of. Apparently not.

Which is why I wholeheartedly support the amendment Bobblehead has proposed:

In the event of a government shutdown, all members of Congress, the President and the Vice-President shall forfeit one year's pay and benefits with no possibility of back pay. And moreover, if a government shutdown lasts longer than two weeks, new elections for both House and Senate will be triggered six weeks from the day the shutdown enters it [sic] second week and all parties must field new candidates for every seat.

Not bad. I was thinking about something similar, which apparently proves great minds think alike (wink, wink). I was, however, thinking along the lines of a balanced budget amendment that would trigger new elections, with incumbents disqualified for incompetence, if Congress had overspent or missed the budgeting deadline. As Bobblehead said, “I can think of no better way to motivate them to get shit done than by dangling their jobs in front of them.”

But would we still elect a dysfunctional Congress? Would the government become too fickle? I am not sure, but I think it would be worth experimenting.