In American society, seniority has often been an important factor deciding who gets what. Especially in society’s highest circles, those who have stayed the longest tend to get the best treatment, the benefit of the doubt, the corner office, the final word.
The U.S. Congress is no exception.
Currently, there are no term limits for members of Congress. Anyone with enough tenacity and purchasing power can quite literally occupy a seat from the day of their election until they leave this mortal earth.
Two members of Congress did exactly that in the past year: Ted Kennedy and John Murtha. Both were respective powerhouses of their realms in Congress, and both held their respective seats until the day they died.
While their legacies loom large over Congressional policy of the past half-century, the real matter is not of the merit of their impact, but the sheer monumentality of it. Kennedy and Murtha were titans of Congress, in ways both good and bad, and everything in between.
But should they have been given such an opportunity? Is a democratic republic really living up to its name when two supposed equals among the rest of the 533 members of Congress hold so much more sway than their colleagues?
The line between democratic republic and oligarchy can be a blurry one.
According to The Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr., incumbent members of Congress have a re-election rate of over 90 percent. This means that at least 90 percent of Congress have enjoyed the trappings of power at least once before.
This also means many other Americans still have not.
For every time a member of Congress, be they great or incompetent, is re-elected, another American, another human being with a different point of view, is denied the opportunity. Even men such as Murtha and Kennedy, competent shapers of public policy, have willingly denied fellow Americans a spot at the table of state.
Whether those barred could have done a better job or a worse one, will remain an unexplored and unknowable possibility. We will never know ... but inherent in that, we have lost what could have been: the inclusion of a new voice in the highest levels of government.
That does not sound particularly democratic to me.
I am not aged enough to comment beyond the relatively recent past. But I do know this: Seniority, or experience in general, does not make a person more enlightened. Life experience does not entail life wisdom, and leadership experience — however ample, however entrenched — does not entail wise leadership.
Despite assumptions, the two are not inherently related.
What should scare Americans is not that their Congress is over 90 percent reruns, but that less than 10 percent is original programming.
Oligarchs are not welcome at alexander.petrusek@asu.edu
