The past week ought to be the best argument for ending lame-duck sessions of Congress.

Lame-duck sessions occur when Congress meets after a general election has taken place. The members voting on lifetime federal judges, nominees to “independent” commissions, and spending your tax dollars are not the ones you elected. They are the people who were either defeated or didn’t run.

Congress has been in session roughly five weeks since the election. That Congress includes 11 senators who will be out of office January 3 (the date the new Congress meets).

Why are eleven people not reelected making far-reaching decisions about the country?

Once upon a time, our congressional schedule made sense. When Congress was full of temporary citizen legislators, they came to Washington in the winter because that was after farm and harvest season.

The trip to Washington took time. It might have been by horse, stagecoach, or later, train. So, once you got to D.C., you stayed put because it was hard getting and leaving there.

That is no longer true.

The typical member of Congress, even from the Far West, is back in his state every week. The typical Senate schedule for this Congress has been to assemble on Monday night, cram everything (committee hearings, oversight, meetings, policy planning, debate, votes) into Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoon, and be on the road to National or Dulles Airports for flights back home no later than mid-Thursday afternoon. Hanging around till Friday was considered banned by the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

If members can come back and forth to Washington every week, there is no need for lame-duck Congresses.

In parliamentary democracies, when a new government is chosen by a new majority taking control of a chamber, the new chamber quickly assembles. The old chamber never comes back.

“Ah, but we are not a parliamentary democracy!” True -- but it doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from them… or ask whether the provisions of our Constitution that delay a new Congress assembling until January 3 are outmoded and need change.

We’ve changed them before. For most of U.S. history, the President waited until March 4 to be sworn in. In the 1930s, we realized that no longer made sense, so inauguration was advanced to January 20.

Presidential inaugurations can’t be made faster without tampering with constitutionally established dates for Electoral College votes, which would open up a whole other can of worms. But there is no reason -- other than the constitutionally set date -- that would otherwise prevent Congress from meeting earlier.

Pushing up the date for assembling a new Congress has two great features:

It ends the influence of a vestigial body that has been superseded by the people’s choice, which really protects democracy; and

It would pressure states to finish electoral counts quickly, rather than having Election Day pre-season, Election Day, and post-season count playoffs. If we required the new Congress to meet, say, within two weeks of Election Day, states would have to wrap up their counts or risk being unrepresented. That’d be a major incentive.

Imagine if these rules were in force today. Instead of Chuck Schumer holding budget bills hostage to his “take-it-or-leave-it-one-size-fits-all-Christmas-tree-pork-roll,” you’d have Republicans controlling the Senate agenda. They’d be able to focus attention on the obstructionist tactics of Democrats who never wanted the fetid swamp of the original continuing resolution exposed to the light of day because they’d have had to defend the indefensible.

Republicans are fools if they think that they can simply issue rules or, at best, legislate a few things and America will be permanently changed. Permanent change requires structural reform to eliminate the enablers of dysfunction. In this case, it means we need a constitutional amendment to set a new way of convening Congress. But, if we fear trying to build the consensus for such a change, we will be condemned to the kind of backroom legislating we’re watching now. America can do better.

Image: AT via Magic Studio