You misspelled, “by having hereditary peers who would not have to campaign.” It’s hard to break in as a citizen pol.
Take the money out. Public campaign financing, no free lunches. Hell half the time they spend is fund raising. It not only makes them vulnerable but keeps them from doing their jobs. Make it so lobbyists have no financial hooks.
Who decides who gets money to run a campaign then?
No. Without term limits, you’re going to kiss the ass of your biggest donors, and the good of the country becomes irrelevant. Put another way, “What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA” becomes the controlling philosophy…as we have now.
I see a lot in this thread about how lazy the voters are for not doing more homework. Let’s get real. People can’t get a good picture of who is running for office most of the time because both parties (or all parties) have machines working for them to dig up dirt and paint the other candidate in a bad light. If people did more homework, the machines themselves would just get better at what they were doing, and we’d end up in the same place, not really knowing who it was we were voting for.
I hate the idea of career politicians milking us dry as well, but blaming the average citizen, when most of them are going to vote for the party who supports thier ideology no matter what, is still just tossing blame on someone else.
Turn that around: The whole idea of responsible government (a term from British-style parliamentary government, but the reasoning also applies to the American context) is that everything elected officials do is based on the knowledge that they are responsible for it, that is, that they can be turned out of power if their performance proves unsatisfactory to the electorate. But if you have no prospect of remaining in power anyway, then where’s the responsibility?
It might be an interesting idea to set up a Citizens Congress that would act purely as an advisory body. Viewpoints that aren’t mainstream enough to be represented in Congress could be discussed on a national stage.
If a citizen legislator wants to wholeheartedly debate marijuana legalization, for example, he wouldn’t be afraid to bring up the subject like an elected politician would. Even if the citizens congress vote is purely symbolic, it allows taboo topics to be brought out into the open.
It could expand the Overton Window a bit.
I’ve toyed with the idea of a whole set of Advisory Congresses, the function of which would be to present petitions and resolutions to the U.S. Congress, which would not have to respond but would have to listen, i.e., all such resolutions would have to be read out on the floor of each house at an actual session with a quorum present. There could be a congress chosen annually by a national lottery of all registered voters, like jury duty; and another set of congresses, also by lot but broken down by income category; and a congress of men and a congress of women; and a set of congresses broken down by age group; and so on. Their function being purely advisory, the question of whether any group so represented has any constitutional or other theoretical right of collective representation is not important; it would just be a way of looking at things from all angles regularly and making sure no concern goes unvoiced.
Although I don’t have any particular fondness for career politicians, I fear “citizen legislatures” would be far far worse.
First, Oakminster’s point about expressing an idea on paper being a fundamental skill everyone should have aside, it’s not the expression of the idea that’s important. It’s the content. Look to the ballot initiative system in California as an example of the kinds of bills you get when your average citizen can propose bills. Or, Indiana looks like it’s going to pass a constitutional amendment capping property taxes despite the near indisputable fact that this is going to bankrupt local communities, damage the educational system and reduce the credit rating for the state. (While the measure was twice passed by the state legislature, it was done so after heavy lobbying by citizen groups and will be passed by a citizen referendum by a heavy margin when it comes up to vote)
As for the willingness of a citizen legislature to broach topics or suggest solutions more openly, well, I would argue that a major reason you don’t see this form professionals is because they know that tossing out half-baked ideas isn’t wise. If you don’t have at least a modest chance of actually seeing an idea implemented (which means you need a majority) or unless you’re acting as in an oppositional capacity, throwing out every idea that crosses your mind only clogs and slows down the process.
Being a legislature should be much more demanding than simply showing up sober and voting yea or nay. If the citizenry cannot be bothered to educate themselves about the career politicians they overwhelmingly re-elect, why should they be entrusted to actually write and pass bills with meaningful content when they are elected? You can’t understand a ten or fifteen point platform for a candidate, but you can be trusted to understand and vote (let alone draft) a bill modifying anything more complex than choosing a state bird?
I don’t like them, but I’ll take a career politician over a citizen any day.
Do you really think that all those ideas haven’t been considered already? Maybe they’ve chosen not to acknowledge particular suggestions, but at the same time the political reality might be that there are only a small subset of options with any likelihood of passage in a bill, so why bother wasting time considering the multitude of other options?
Relevance? Lawyer is a profession, and doctor is another profession, and politician is yet another profession. Each has its essential skill-set.
Lawyer is the profession probably most relevant to that of politician because politicians are responsible for, among other things, making laws*; but, in any case, nowhere is being a lawyer a legal or constitutional prerequisite for serving any elected office but that of judge; and non-lawyer legislators can always refer questions of legal analysis or drafting to attorneys on staff.
- And lawyers are at any rate indispensable to the drafting of legislation, because lawyers are masters of legal parlance and are more thoroughly aware than anyone else of how ill-conceived it is to draft a law in what a layman would consider “plain English” instead of “legalese” – because “plain English” so defined always turns out to be hopelessly ambiguous when a court or a bureaucrat has to try to apply it in a specific case. But that’s another debate.
Anyone not giving California an F today must have been paid off by a legislator. We have a massive deficit and are cutting the hell out of schools and other programs, are always late with it, and have abdicated deciding controversial issues to the initiative process, where the citizens show how well false advertising works.
I think this survey is either old or has massive grade inflation.
I think the basic drive for citizen legislators is that every bozo has an opinion on every issue, and don’t you go telling Joe Yahoo that his opinion is uneducated and not worth squat. 200 years ago probably every educated man could do a reasonable job, now, a lot of things politicians vote on are highly technical. Look at how the yahoos object to a bill revamping the entire health care system as being too long. If it is longer than an article in People, someone is trying to pull something over on them.
One good thing about a politician expecting to stay around a long time is that he knows if he votes on something stupid today, he may have to deal with the consequences in five years. If you know you’ll be termed out, you can vote for the quick fix solution.
Finally, who are the citizen politicians well known today? Sarah Palin. Jim Bunning. QED.
I find it amusing that, in the US:
(1) There is this populist notion that all career politicians are corrupt, and should be replaced by non-corrupt non-politicians, and
(2) The voters keep on voting in career politicians, regardless of how corrupt they are.
How is that the voters’ fault? The voters keep on voting in officeholders, from among the choices presented them on the ballot. That’s all they can do. The voters cannot strictly speaking “draft” just anybody they would like to see in office. The ballot is limited, first of all, to candidates who want to be on the ballot (a decision Oakminster expressly considers disqualifying :rolleyes:), and have made some significant effort to get there; and, within that group, to candidates who have jumped through certain hoops to prove they are worth taking seriously. The former is simply an essential element of democratic government and cannot be changed. The latter involves some ballot-access laws that effectivly freeze out third-party candidates, e.g., making them gather petition signatures where major-party nominees need not; but, far more importantly in most cases, the wealth primary. If you want more non-career politicians in office, the first thing we need to do is to make running for office a whole lot cheaper, i.e., campaign-finance reform.
Sorry, my mistake, that was Airman Doors, USAF, post #6. (I am sure Oakminster is far too wise to agree even halfheartedly with such a flatly ridiculous statement, and will be along shortly to tell us so. ;))
True, but when presented with third-party choices they mostly ignore them. In the 2008 presidential election, there were at least 3 choices: two United States senators, and a third choice, who has never held political office, and has been accused of many things, but not of being corrupt. Why did so few vote for the non-corrupt non-politician?
Throughout this thread, with all this moaning about the arrogance and vanity of pols, everybody please keep this very important point in mind:
A humble politician is as useless as a cowardly soldier.
Everything of value ever accomplished in politics was accomplished by persons who believed they had the right vision for what was best for society and they were the ones to push it through; that is no job for the humble. Our Founding Fathers might have been fine and courteous gentlemen, but humble they were not. And, yes, all that applies not one whit less to pure obstructionists and libertarians and the Party of “No.”
And the initiative process is more evidence that no, running a modern government is NOT something that just anyone can do. It requires expertise and knowledge that most people don’t have. A “citizen legislature” would just be taking the same problems the initiative process has, and putting them in the statehouse. You’d have people who don’t understand the issues or the system, being puppet-mastered by the career political types who DO understand. You need to have someone with enough political knowledge to know is he or she is being lied to, and is a particular person is trustworthy or not, whether or not something is workable or not, whether or not something is constitutional or not, how to hammer together a political consensus or compromise - the sorts of knowledge and skills that require a long time to acquire.
If you looked at my citation, your question would have been answered.