Your premise is flawed. Aside from a few egregious examples (Duke Cunningham, for instance) Congressmen aren’t bribed. They don’t get a payoff to do certain things. Yes, people give them money for re-election, but this money does not go into their pockets. Furthermore, people generally give money to candidates that share their political views. So-called “special interests” do not throw around money to “buy” votes. Almost all Congressmen and Senators have a certain ideology that generally determines their votes. If you are a liberal environmentalist, no amount of oil company money will influence you to vote for off-shore drilling. If you are an pro-gun conservative, the Brady Campaign could give you $1 million and it wouldn’t change your vote.
I know it’s more comforting to think that your ideas aren’t enacted because “special interests” give “bribes” to elected officials. Yes, it’s truly comforting to think that the only reason elected officials don’t agree with you is because they are corrupt. In the real world, though, people can disagree with you without being corrupt. That applies no less to our elected officials, no matter what lazy news reporting may imply.
Sometime we must have a separate discussion so you can elaborate on how Joe McCarthy was actually good for the nation, or how Bush waiving the bloody shirt of 9/11 in order to invade Iraq was also a good thing.
Well, the egregious examples are just the ones that have gotten caught. If it makes you feel better, the initial premise is just one benefit of my proposed system. Other benefits are voters being represented by their views, not merely the majority in their congressional district. And being able to switch representation faster than the election cycle. Are you saying those are bad ideas?
That’s how lobbyists work now, though, by mobilizing voters. Lobbying isn’t saying, “Vote this way on this bill and you’ll get a million dollars.” Lobbying is saying, “Vote this way on this bill, and the people who are part of my group (old people, gun owners, environmentalists, real estate salesmen, defense workers, whoever), will like you better and we’ll tell them to vote for you in the next election.”
You seem to think the two are the same. There is very little in the way of bribery and corruption in Congress. Lobbyists contributing to a re-election campaign are not engaged in either bribery or corruption. You seem to think that lobbyists routinely throw bags of cash at legislators in order to influence legislation. That’s not how it works. Even in the recent bribery cases, it wasn’t about major pieces of legislation. Those cases revolve around earmarks, which are a pretty insignificant part of the legislative process.
What Renob said. Everybody has a problem with bribes and corruption. That’s why it’s prosecuted. And, I don’t think your system would stop it. Your system wouldn’t even get money out of the system. If anything, it would make money more important. Under your system, if I want to be a successful Congressman, I don’t just have to convince my district that I’m worth supporting…the whole country is my district, now, and I have to convince America I’m worth supporting.
Also, how do elections work? Right now, I live in the Virginia 8th district. Every two years, there’s an election, and the person who gets the most votes in the district is elected. Under your system, how does someone get elected, if their voting power and salary is based on their national standing? Do they still have to get elected by their districts? What happens if you have a really contrarian district? By that, I mean to say, what if the country as a whole is liberal and this area is conservative, or vice versa? Or it’s something like a tobacco growing area or something like that, with smoking unpopular? If the district elects someone who shares their views, then he’s probably not going to have much voting power.
Here’s how elections work. You don’t have elections, you have enrollment.
Every registered voter can designate anyone as their representative. Representatives campaign nationally, and anyone living anywhere can enroll with any representative, and can change their representative whenever they like subject to some restrictions, like you can only change once every n months, or some such. You want to make the restriction such that people can change when they really want to, but won’t change based on a whim. Or maybe something like, you’ve got to submit two change requests, one one month, the other next month, if you can’t be bothered to submit the second change request a month later you don’t get changed. Anyway, details can be worked out.
Any Representative who enrolls x constituents gets the right to be seated in the House. Representatives who enroll fewer constituents might have some rights, but cannot vote or speak or be committee members and so forth. If a Representative enrolls 2x constituents they get two votes, 3x three votes, and so on. Any excess constituents that don’t make an integer multiple of x do not result in extra votes, they exist merely as a cushion to protect the Representative from losing their seat (or seats, if they have more than one) due to loss of constituents.
In this way, every Representative’s seat is up for review every month, and the makeup of the House can change on a moment’s notice as Representatives are unseated or seated.
The only downside to this method is that it eliminates secret ballots, because a Representative’s constituent list would have to be a matter of public record. But the advantage is that each and every constituent has a Representative that they support.
Hi Lemur, nice job on your post. I like your plan too, because the part about each constituent having a representative they support is what I was mostly after with my plan.
Of course, you’re solving the wrong problem (indeed, this “solution” would also make lobbyists more important), and I think the elimination of a secret ballot would be a far greater negative than not getting the guy you voted for. That and there would be, what?, five whole representatives for the entire US?
Well, I’m not that concerned with reducing “lobbying”.
But I’m not sure why you think most people would sign up with one of a handful of super-representatives. What would be the advantage to the voter to do so? That super-representative isn’t going to represent your views very closely. Why would you give a super-rep one more vote that won’t track your beliefs, when you could give a minor representative one vote, and that representative will track your beliefs very closely?
I suppose an alternative is to allow any number of constituents to enroll for any representative, but not allow multiple votes. The only trouble then is that you’ve got weird preference enrollment going on. “Dennis Kucinich is my favorite representative, but he’s already got 123,000 extra constituents. Hmmm, I could go with Ted Kennedy, my second choice, but he’s got 347,000 extra.” Eventually you could settle on someone, but there’s not as much incentive to pick your favorite if extra votes won’t put your favorite over the edge.
Say we try to end up with a HoR that’s about the size it is now. We’ll fail. Most people can’t and won’t take the time to search out who fits them best out of around a thousand candidates (if not more); they’ll flip on the TV and vote for the person they like who’s getting lots of press. So yeah, you end up with a very small number of representatives. And, of course, very powerful lobbyists (which is what this thread was about.) Moreover, you still haven’t explained what problem there is with a person who you didn’t vote for acting as your representative (you know, being the minority in a democracy.) And once you’ve explained what the problem is, make sure you explain why there isn’t the same problem with having to obey laws that you don’t like.
ETA: this is a fairly minor objection by comparison, but your idea also fails to be workable. A Congressman could potentially* get enough votes, get on a plane to Washington, and have his votes fall to low again. Two year terms help insulate the legislature from extremism (six year terms even more so) and make it worthwhile to be a Congressman.
*In fact, one presumes it would happen often to those with just barely enough votes.
I suppose not, although I like the idea of truncating the tallies to render small-scale shenanegans moot. And you absolutely have to have a minumum number before you allow a representative to be seated, otherwise you’ll have thousands of people squabbling over the floor. It just seems elegant to round off to the nearest x.
Well, this system eliminates the very powerful lobbyists in the sense that those lobbyists become Representatives themselves, rather than lobbying Representatives. So rather than the NRA lobbying congress, the NRA tries to enroll as many people as possible to support the NRA representative. Constituencies would be organized explicitly by interest group, rather than geography, except to the extent that shared geography can also be a shared interest group.
So I would imagine you wouldn’t have people sitting down and trying to figure out who to enroll with, rather interest groups would actively seek out voters and try to enroll them behind their candidates.
…except it isn’t actually in the interest of the United States to have a HoR composed entirely of one-trick ponies, nor are most voters willing to have an opinion about only one topic. Hence, lobby groups would act on the electorate much as they always have. The only difference: the party system would largely crumble, as it would be completely impossible to make sure the right number of votes went to the right number of candidates; how do you endorse four hundred people at once, all to the exact same voter base? Frankly, best case scenario is that political parties survive by choosing to pander to geographical regions, all with about the same population…
(Otherwise, they disappear, and the only organized group left that can sway voters is, you guessed it, lobbyists.)
We can even agree on the rules for computerized voting, this opens the door for fiasco.
And frankly, I don’t want people changing their minds between elections. That’s why we have representational democracy, to avoid the whims of the people.
I’m not pro-corporatist, I’m pro-“looking at every side of an issue.” You asked me to find cites that the general populace is “anti-corparatist”, so I don’t know how to do that beyond citing stuff or giving examples of stuff that sounds pro- to the average person.
As I said, my issue with anti-lobbyist measures is that it gets rid of the only method that small interests have to fight back against an uninfomed public who could be hostile to anything on any given day for any given reason, regardless of whether it flies in the face of all logic or practicalities.
Now, if we assume that a politician is essentially the winner of a popularity contest and not necessarily all that knowledgeable of economics, science, nor history, and that moreover his sole source of being able to support his family is by making his constituency happy–then what safeguard do I have to believe that he will give much consideration to anything beyond precisely what the majority of his constituency asks for? That sounds like a very easy method for ensuring a case of the blind leading the blind.
And as I said, I certainly don’t think that bribery is the best method to tempt a politician’s nose towards taking into consideration issues outside of popular opinion, but at the moment it is the only one. An alternative to the lobbying system I would wholeheartedly get behind. But I’m going to be very against something which is entirely try to get rid of something because it’s “anti-democratic” or allows Big Business or other special interests to fight back without any consideration for why it might be necessarily to allow for such. Certainly the founding fathers thought it was necessary (though they relied on the professionalism of representatives rather than lobbying to assure this, admittedly. Personally, I’m not so trusting.)