As is want to happen every now and then, I got into a debate over the PACT Act with a high school classmate of mind on social media. I’m sure many of you have been following this story. I’ll leave a little video below to catch people up in case they have missed it. Suffice it to say, my conversation with the former classmate was brief because he simply parroted the same talking points as Ted Cruz and Pat Toomey. It was easy to dispense of.

The conversation quickly went to term limits. I find  this is a normal go to response when conservatives know they’ve lost an argument. They throw this out because they think it is something we can all get behind. They throw it out because they have a definite picture in their head of what that looks like. The see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. We obviously see different people.

I know this will be an area of disagreement amongst people on both sides. We have a perfectly good mechanism for limiting someone’s time in Washington or Austin. They are called elections. Serving in Washington for too long doesn’t cause the level of cruelty and mendacity that John Stewart is describing. Ted Cruz has not effectively changed fundamentally. Those that knew him back in the 1990s have said he’s a jackass. I’d assume Pat Toomey has been the same guy all along as well.

The specific mechanisms that keep someone like Cruz in office are the same mechanisms that got them there in the first place. Term limits don’t prevent assholes from representing you. It just means it has to be a different asshole after 10 or 20 years. Fixing the mechanisms is something the Democrats in Congress have tried to do but have been unsuccessful because the Senate is where good legislation goes to die.

We can get a lot of change if we simply have computers draw congressional districts instead of political parties. What has been created has been a gap where only jackasses and extremists can slide in. According to the chart in the link, the vast majority of races are decided by more than ten points. If you draw those districts out then a lot more of them are competitive. If they are competitive it is a lot easier to defeat jackasses and carnival barkers.

However, the biggest responsibility is on us. Republican voters don’t like Ted Cruz. They know he’s full of crap. So why do they keep voting for him? Maybe it is to own liberals, but I also suspect they don’t want to do the homework to catch him when he is obviously BSing them. This is simple. If you don’t like the job Greg Abbott has done then don’t vote for him. If you think Ted Cruz is a lying sack of excrement then don’t vote for him. It’s really just that simple.