Word: biennials
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There are several good reasons for supporting a four-year House term. First, the biennial election makes campaigning almost a full-time activity for increasingly overworked Congressmen. In the face of more and more complex duties, most Representatives must also attend to constituents' business, answer their mail, write endless newsletters and press releases, and record messages for local radio and television stations...
...lengthening of the Congressional term of office will provoke reverberations of the old Jeffersonian belief that frequent elections are the best guarantee against tyranny. But in an age of mass communications and sophisticated means of sampling public opinion, annual or biennial elections are no longer necessary to determine the public will. The gentleman legislators of Jefferson's day could campaign at leisure between brief sessions; today's Congressmen have to steal time from heavy schedules in the capital to campaign strenuously in their districts...
...best thing about biennial Congressional elections is that the House stays responsive to changes in popular opinion on many subjects. It is not unreasonable to ask that the nation have an opportunity to reexamine some decisions every two years, and Congressional elections are the closest thing we have to a national referendum. This year, for example, the people will have some-albeit limited-opportunity to make themselves heard on the Vietnam war through Congressional elections. It is absurd to suggest that the floods of form letters which make up the bulk of Congressional mail adequately represent public opinion...
...than they have ever gotten before, and as the only group in the city not seriously hurt by the strike. Perhaps even more serious, the Mayor, by demonstrating how successful a strike can be, may have set a new pattern of relations with the TWU which will make a biennial strike a foregone conclusion. Unless the new Mayor learns how to make those nasty political deals pretty damn quick the City Council should get together and throw the bum out. Louis D. Beer...
...backed down, each time at the last minute. Quill and the city's Democratic mayors usually have worked out a cozy deal in advance, compromising between what Quill felt he needed and what the city felt it could afford. Nonetheless, Quill was always allowed to run through his biennial charade, dramatically announcing at the last moment a settlement that had actually been agreed on days earlier. Naturally, no one took too seriously Quill's blustering about a transit strike: people had heard that threat too often...