Kennedy is not alone is being too sick to be able to represent the residents of his state in the Senate. Neither he or Robert Byrd of West Virginia have been in Washington very much recently, nor have they voted on much of anything. I'll bet that when the vote comes up for healthcare reforms, they'll wheel them both into the Senate chambers on gurneys in order for them to cast their votes. Somehow, I don't think that this is the kind of democratic representation that the founding fathers had in mind when they so brilliantly crafted the structure of our government.

There may actually be others in the House and Senate who are incapacitated in one way or another and unable to do their jobs as elected officials, but I just can't think of them. Yet, I'd bet if an election was held in Massachusetts and West Virginia tomorrow, both Kennedy and Byrd would be re-elected in landslides. It's the inattention of the public to this kind of thing or their blind voting for a particular party that results in this kind of thing happening. And it happens a lot--as I've reported here, 96% of the members of the House and Senate are re-elected when they run. Yet, after they're firmly encsconced in their comfortable and profitable Washington offices the public rails against them, as in the recent CNN poll. But then, a year or so before the next election, when all the special interest money cranks up the ad campaigns for their re-election, the public forgets and votes them in again.

Nope, in that Congress will never vote for term limits to prevent this type of stuff from continuing, the only choice is for the public to enforce it's own term limits by voting out the incumbents in each election.