The Lame Duck Session Needs To Go Away

The Lame Duck Session of a legislative body is the period after the election but before the new members are sworn in. This year's lame duck period is from November 6th 2018 and to January 3rd 2019. Almost two months will go by where Congress people, who were not re-elected, will get to vote. Congress does meet during this period and has done so since 1940.

The original reason we have a lame duck period is because our Constitution was written a long time ago. It took people a long time to come from Georgia or New Hampshire to arrive in DC or Philadelphia. Now that we have airplanes etc., the time period is no longer needed. As soon as a candidate has been certified, they could be sworn. Maybe the next day or the next week, if we want them to be present in DC.

Lame Duck Sessions, particularly, makes no sense on the state level. Clearly, newly elected officials don't need two months to get to their state capital to be sworn in.  Some states do it immediately (like Florida) and twelve others do it within the same year as the election (Alabama, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia). What is going on in Wisconsin and Michigan is unconscionable. If they did away with the Lame Duck, this wouldn't be happening.

Wisconsin voted for a Democratic Governor, Tony Evers, over incumbent Republican Scott Walker. Thanks to the magic of gerrymandering, they have had a unified Republican government since 2010 even though there are more registered Democrats who voted in that time. Now that they lost the state house, the Lame Duck Session in that state is voting on limiting the power of the governor. The new Democratic governor will have stricter limits on whom he can appoint to his administration and he will have stricter controls over his negotiation powers with the Federal government. They are also preventing him from pulling out of the lawsuit against the ACA (aka ObamaCare) which is a campaign promise he made. Republicans: circumventing the will of the voters across America.

Michigan is similar with a new Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer. The lame duck state legislature has been fast cutting her power making it difficult for her to appoint officials and for her to shutdown the controversial Line 5 Pipeline which she campaigned so hard against. The state senate is also putting up barriers for the new Democratic Secretary of State to enforce campaign finance reform. They are also gutting the minimum wage and required family leave act that they themselves enacted. Republicans: we wrap ourselves in the American flag when you are looking but wipe our asses with it when you are not.

Some good has come out of Lame Duck Sessions.This is probably because people have nothing to lose. They are leaving office so they can go out on the limb to vote for something that they may not if they were staying in office.  The Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 was passed by the 111th Congress in one of these sessions. But overall, the Lame Duck Sessions are bad and really should be eliminated on state and federal level.