WI: US switches 4-Year House Terms in the late 60s

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Deleted member 109224

In President Johnson's 1966 State of the Union Address, he called for Members of Congress to swap to 4-year terms.

What if the US had made such a change?

What would have been more likely - House elections in the off year, or House elections concurrent with the Presidential election?
 
Concurrent with the presidential elections would be the biggest change. Once the block of conservative southern democrats started retiring, voters started returning non-administration majorities in the House in the next midterm election after electing a president, starting in 1994. The only exception was 2002. WIth four year concurrent terms, this stops happening, and I suspect the Democrats even hold the House narrowly in 1996 and 3012, when they lost it IOTL, though the national popular vote percentages to re-elect Clinton and Obama in those years were underwhelming.

If Senate terms are not changed, there are still "mid-term" elections since on non-presidential years, most state governors and legislatures will still face election, along with a third of the Senate. The presidential party might do worse in these Senate elections than IOTL. The presidential party did lose control of the Senate in the 1986, 1994, 2006, and 2014 elections and this still happens, so you still get non-administration control of the Senate in the last two years of Reagan's, GW Bush's, and Obama's administrations, and most of the Clinton administration and all of the GHW Bush administration. Democrats keep control of the House until 2000 instead of 1994.

I don't think non-concurrent (with the presidential election) turns would be adopted, but doing so would affect events less since starting in 1994, control of the House only turned over in the mid-term elections.

LBJ probably proposed the change so that Congressmen would spend more of their time on government and less on campaigning (more strictly, campaign fundraising), and I think that would happen and lead to some improvement in government overall.
 
Why not have two 'classes' of Congress Critters each being elected in alternate two year cycles, the way you have Senators divided into 3 classes with 1/3 elected every two years.
 

Deleted member 109224

LBJ probably proposed the change so that Congressmen would spend more of their time on government and less on campaigning (more strictly, campaign fundraising), and I think that would happen and lead to some improvement in government overall.

This was his reasoning.

Eisenhower also thought the same thing, but he didn't publicly call for an amendment.

Why not have two 'classes' of Congress Critters each being elected in alternate two year cycles, the way you have Senators divided into 3 classes with 1/3 elected every two years.

That'd also be a possibility.

Why didn't they go the whole hog with DC?

Two more Senators is a much bigger deal than 3 electoral votes. I don't think changing the length of House Terms rises to a partisan issue the way DC Statehood might, though.
 
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Why not have two 'classes' of Congress Critters each being elected in alternate two year cycles, the way you have Senators divided into 3 classes with 1/3 elected every two years.
Because congressmen get redistricted every 10 years with the census. Whereas Senators 1) stay constant at 2, and 2) represent the whole state.
Oh, sure, most censuses don't result in changes for many states, but I suspect that every one causes changes in some states.
 
In Argentina, half of the House of Representatives is in fact elected each cycle. Argentina is one of those countries that deliberately pattered their constitution after the US constitution. The Argentine practice is considered to be somewhat unique, but its perfectly doable.

Without looking it up, I'm not sure how they handle reapportionment. Argentina also has a federal system. But it could be handled by use of half-terms, in instances where the representative has to be added or subtracted from the class up two elections away from the census, in circumstances where this class already has fewer representatives than the class elected immediately after the census. Argentina uses proportional representation and multimember districts, so they don't have to make it work with single member districts. You could change the reapportionment formula so that each state with more than one congressman will always have an even number of congressmen, then each district elects two congressmen, each on alternate cycles.
 
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