Should Convicted Felons Be Allowed to Serve in Congress?
By Jessica Hillyard - Nov 19th, 2008 at 10:52 amI was baffled when I first learned that Sen. Ted Stevens, the newly defeated seven-term incumbent Senator from Alaska, could continue to serve in the U.S. Senate after failing to report more than $250,000 worth of personal gifts. No matter how you slice it, he was connected to some shady folks with dirty hands, he lied, and he was proven in a court of law to have broken the law.
It is utterly shocking to me that there is no overarching rule preventing criminals from serving in Congress. Now, some might argue that I shouldn’t be surprised, considering the offenses of certain individuals in the executive branch, but as it stands, law-breakers tend not to last very long when working in confidence with the leader of the free world (whether these leaders themselves are law-breakers is another matter entirely).
Both chambers of Congress have their own ways of going about punishing their members, but there are really no barriers to preventing someone with a besmirched record from serving in Congress. Perhaps the Founding Fathers and congressional leaders have always assumed that voters would not elect to high office someone with a criminal record. But as we know, even the clearest of facts can get fuzzy when presented to voters in a less-than-subjective way.
Absent the common sense of voters, Congress should really take an introspective moment and determine concretely whether it is at all beneficial to the service of the country to count criminals among our elected leaders. Is i too much to ask that those who disregard the law in a serious way be prohibited from the helping craft the law of the land?
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