THE TWENTIETH AMENDMENT WAS SUPPOSED TO DO AWAY WITH THE "LAME DUCK" CONGRESS: SO WHY HAVE WE SPENT THE LAST DAYS OF 2010 WATCHING ONE?

"A very undesirable legislative condition." That is how the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, gathering in 1932, referred to the period after a bi-annual election and before the swearing in of the new Congress. The committee was describing reasons why the nation should adopt what turned out to be the twentieth amendment to the Constitution. This is the amendment which moved the beginning of the elected terms of federal offices to January from the original March date following the year of election. As the committee explained, the March date had been established in the 18th century when legislators needed a few months to close their home town affairs and move by horse-drawn coach to Washington. Such a long-drawn out period had no purpose in a faster world. But there was another reason for changing it: as Sen. George Norris, of Nebraska (pictured left), later one of those whom Sen. John F. Kennedy featured in his "Profiles in Courage," claimed, the lame duck session encouraged a kind of political fraud in which the Congress which had just been repudiated came back to meet, now absent any political mandate.