It's not just the voted-out congressmen who are lame ducks - It's Joe Lieberman and Christopher Shays too

This week, Congress begins its “lame duck” session before the new Democratic majority takes over in January. Where does the term “lame duck” come from? And what does it mean for Fairfield County?

To us moderns raised on a steady diet of Seinfeld reruns, “high-finance” means bulls, bears, and people from Connecticut. Three hundred years ago in London, there was a third animal, as high-finance meant bulls, bears and lame ducks. Back then, there was no central area designated as a stock exchange, so brokers gathered in coffeeshops on Exchange Alley to trade their holdings. The Starbucks of the era was Jonathan’s Coffee House. When it came time to settle up, which the brokers did once every three months, there was often the problem of the broker, or his client, who didn’t have the cash. What to do with such blaggards? Civilized Londoners banned them from Jonathan’s, though they were still allowed to act as brokers, in their own offices. We can only infer that the manner in which such lame ducks waddled out of the coffeeshop inspired the nickname.

The term would eventually come to apply to voted-out politicians going through the motions in their last days of power. These politicians had been banned from the metaphorical coffeeshop of elected office, and spent their last moments waddling. A lame duck can still quack angrily, but can’t do much about it.

Expect a lot of angry quacking this month, even if Fairfield County doesn’t have any lame-duck representation at the federal level. We managed to keep our incumbents in both the Senate (Joe Lieberman) and the House of Representatives (Chris Shays), even though the former lost own party’s primary and the latter was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq in an election when Democrats rolled to power on that issue.

The term “lame duck” has been narrowly, and perhaps unfairly applied to these particular politicians. A lame duck is a person who reneges on his promises, whether he was voted out of office for it or not. If an honorable politician kept his word but was voted out anyway, no self-respecting Jonathan’s coffee drinker would have considered him a lame duck. A lame-duck politician is any politician who breaks his contractual oath. Brokers and politicians promise high gains with no downside, but they aren’t banned until they fail to deliver. For a broker, it is the cash to buy the security. But what is it for a politician?

The most important promise every politician takes is an oath to uphold the Constitution. They pledge to put personal feelings aside on any issue if it violates the Constitution. They may not like terrorists having free speech or the right to due process, but they must uphold the Constitution. On the issue of gun ownership, they may not regulate it, restrict it, or infringe on it in any way. Yet virtually all of them do. And we let them get away with it.

We could take a lesson from those British coffee drinkers of three centuries ago. They tried banning bad people, like we tried voting them out of office. Nothing changed, either for them or for us. For every banned politician or broker, another unscrupulous one would take his place.

The Democrats won’t get us out of Iraq any sooner. Taxes and spending will go up. Our freedoms will keep getting eroded.

What did those brokers do? They bought a nearby building and called it New Jonathan’s, later renamed “the Stock Exchange,” and they began levying fines for violations. The political equivalent would be secession—but we don’t have that option. A portion of our country once tried to make a new America, and the result was the Civil War.

So what can we do? There’s no easy answer. We can only hope to vote better next time.

Ultimately we should look up for eagles, not down for ducks, for our candidates. Eagles are the symbol of our country and our Constitution. Eagles soar. Eagles are beautiful. If we ignore them, they’ll become endangered, and eventually disappear. And all we’ll be left with is a bunch of quacks in Washington.

phil@maymin.com
This article originally appeared in the Fairfield County Weekly on December 7, 2006