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Draining the swamp involves term limiting the unelected

by Minden Press-Herald

To the Editor:

People say, “What we need (for more responsible government) is term limits,” meaning term limits for elective public office-holders. I disagree.

More effective for reining in the power, greed and growth of government would be term limits for government bureaucrats, especially federal government bureaucrats. Washington, D.C. is a magnet for the most powerful, most vicious, and longest reigning (not necessarily serving) administers.

Unelected government officers overtly or covertly thumb their noses at voter-chosen Congresses thinking, “You, Congressman, are up for reelection in two or six years. I will be here till I retire in twenty to forty years because I’m civil service. You can’t fire me. You can’t demote me or move me.”

Some, such as IRS administrator Lois Lerner, used the fearsome IRS to harass law-abiding, concerned TEA Party and other activist conservatives and halted their participation in electoral politics. When her hand was called, Lerner basically told Congressional investigators to stick their investigation in their ears.

She wouldn’t tell them anything, said she hadn’t done anything illegal and Republicans let her get by with “taking the Fifth” which is only available to people who might be charged with a crime. Then she retired and sits comfortably drawing her full fat civil service pension.

The swamp must be drained. Washington, D.C. bureaucrats should be permanently rotated out of Washington after six years employment there. They should never be reassigned to Washington.

They should be scattered around the country where the citizens live that they claim authority over. Send them to nice places such as Omaha, Jackson, Lubbock, Fresno, Grand Junction, Fargo or other far-away places. Their phone calls, texts, emails, and tweets to D C should be defaulted to spam. Lobbyists and Congressional spenders should be banned from establishing social relationships with those bureaucrats.

No Congressman should be allowed to lobby for ten years after leaving office.

Whole departments should be moved from Washington to regions of the country where the bulk of their oversight is supposed to be focused.

Send the Department of Agriculture to Iowa. Send the Interior Department to Wyoming. Move the Justice Department to Missouri. The EPA to Adak, Alaska. The worthless Departments of Education and Energy should be abolished as President Reagan advocated years ago. The only federal government departments that should be headquartered in or near Washington are State, Defense and Homeland Security. Treasury could be sent to New York. Commerce to Nashville. You get the drift.

Every Executive branch department has fifty or more subsidiary agencies and enormous staffs all clustered around Washington. This is unhealthy for the nation.

Eight of the highest income places in the United States are clustered around Washington, D.C. That fact alone calls for regularly draining the D.C. swamp. The ring around Washington draws mobs of highly paid government bureaucrat and lobbyist leeches that are trying to suck all the blood they can out of the federal government cash-cow which the rest of us are feeding, largely against our wills.

Before those leeches completely suck all the life-blood out of our beloved country they must be neutered and sent to far-away places where they can’t reproduce their kind and destroy us.

To be continued.

Gerald Holland
Springhill, LA

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