That’s at least partially true, but that’s not what I was saying in this particular case. We do need to get to a place where we trust them and, in some respects that will mean trusting them more - like going back to the voice vote or making donor contributions secret to everyone (including the candidates).
But you get trustworthy candidates by building a system that weeds out untrustworthy ones. Today, we don’t have that. At the moment, the system mostly selects for people who know what to say to get people to vote for them, and how to fail to deliver that while blaming the other team.
And, to be fair, sometimes they fail to deliver because the promise was just not a good idea to begin with. For example, Republicans fail to deliver a wall across the the entire border of Mexico and Democrats just magically never seem to propose an Amendment to revoke the Second Amendment nor to give everyone UHC.
In general, we shouldn’t be able to determine if someone is doing what they said that they would do - part of electing someone that you trust is to trust them. But right now we double-check them and, while it is certainly true that the Republicans are more dishonest, and it can certainly be said that it’s not obvious what the right answer is to resolve the issues with democracy, there are some things that are wrong that are obvious.
A representative, by title, is a person whose entire job description is to put your interests ahead of his own. With that being true, there’s no way that they can serve their office with faith and support gerrymandering. The whole purpose of gerrymandering is to gain power against you. Any person in office who lives in a country that allows gerrymandering and isn’t out there, first thing in the morning and last thing before they go to bed fighting to stop it - as a person under the job title of “representative” - is as fit for the their office as a fireman who likes to roast some marshmallows before deciding whether to put out the house fire.
Not investing in stocks is, certainly, more fiddly and I don’t feel like it’s unreasonable that no one ever noticed that it was questionable until now. But it is still fairly straightforward that legislators shouldn’t have any conflicts of interest impacting their legal decisions - just as a judge shouldn’t have any conflicts of interest in a case that they’re deciding. Whether the solution is a ban on holding stocks - versus something like sitting out votes that you’ve been marked as “conflicted” on, by a neutral third party - I don’t care too much but if the whole discussion is shelved by the party leaders then you really shouldn’t be re-electing those leaders.
These are fairly clear signals of untrustworthiness. It’s like if you’re reviewing a school for your kid and the dean makes a joke about sexually abusing children, while giving the tour. It’s an immediate and strong signal to go somewhere else.
If there’s no amendment to block gerrymandering, and there aren’t legislators out in the streets, on their knees, begging the public to throw people out of office who are trying to block it - then you should be voting all of the current people out. And no, that doesn’t mean electing Republicans. It means writing in names, leaving votes blank, and so on.
We all need to be amazingly amazingly strict until we get back to a good place. You need to be as skeptical of your own guys as you are of the other team’s.
If they do the right thing and block gerrymandering and they offer real, plausible fixes for the election system - to make it produce more trustworthy politicians - then great. But if they’re just finger-pointing at the other side then you should simply continue to kick them out and rotate the roster until someone is willing to shore up the system.