Redesigning the United States Government from the ground up - What would a "sensible" government structure look like for America?

Great Debates
141

I’ve read the whole thread and I haven’t seen one of biggest causes of disfunction. One party tries to make it as hard as possible for the “wrong” people to vote. Not so much the question of IDs, but having decided to require IDs, make it as hard as possible to get one. Gun licence, great, student ID, no. An office nowhere near the inner city and open only between 9 and 5 (or less).

Remember when the Turtle said that the #1 purpose of his senate was to ensure that Obama was a 1 term president. Not to solve problems, but to create them to blame the president.

The first thing I would do is eliminate the Electoral College. It never worked as planned. The original intent was for #1 to be president and #2 be VP. That worked only with Adams and Jefferson and then totally failed with Jefferson and Burr.

I think one of the biggest problems today is the result of the primary system. It really got going in the 70s and the political divide has gotten steadily worse since then. Basically only the more extreme partisans vote in primaries. I would replace it by jungle elections with ranked choice. First past the post is a recipe for getting the more extreme candidates. You can see this in Alaska where Lisa Murkowski, the most centrist candidate, can get elected, although she wouldn’t win under either party.

Several states have redistricting commissions that have managed to avoid gerrymandering and that, repeated all over and required by law, would be a vast improvement.

And the Senate, feh. Turn it into an advisory body that can be overruled by the House. If Harris wins and the Senate is turned, we are likely to see as situation where none of her cabinet appointments can be confirmed.

142

If that has been the case this past term, how would that have worked out for Biden?

That’s not really a problem with the system per se, but is an outcome of the two party system. That’s a problem driven by one party losing power at the ballot box, so stretching for ways to retain it. It’s demographic hacking, which I guess could be considered a separate tool than gerrymandering.

What is a jungle election? Typo?

I like the idea of killing primaries, but those are nominally an internal selection process required because of single cadidate per party for the main election. We need some means to allow greater flexibility - more options in the main election. Non-party regional ranked choice options?

Yes, because the norms are broken. Instead of voting on merits of qualifications over ideologies, the obstructionists in power are corrupting the intent of the system. Ill-intended people will break nonrobust systems. I would be open to reform ideas that would make the system more robust. Doing away with the Senate doesn’t do that IMO.

With Party division at a high point and integrity at a low, right now we are screwed. Do away with the Senate and the House would just impeach every appointment.

143

This is a common term that refers to a primary where everybody is on everyone’s ticket regardless of party affiliation, and if nobody has an absolute majority, the top two advance to the general election.

~Max

144

Alaska has the top four advancing from its jungle primary which seems to lead to valid final results. Although there was an argument to be made in '22 that ranked choice voting ended up eliminating the candidate who was most widely acceptable (Nick Begich, NOT Sarah Palin). Still, the system produced the moderate and capable Mary Peltola.

I believe the increasing numbers of unaffiliated voters will force major changes to traditional primary systems in the years to come. And that’s a good thing.

145

I’d love to see a fourth branch of government: the Earth Healers.

This branch would be comprised of one elected scientist from each state, serving a 5-year term. Their mission? To enact and veto laws with the sole purpose of healing America—and ideally, influencing other nations—from the harmful effects of our actions on the environment, whether it’s climate change, nuclear testing, deforestation, or other ecological threats.

Why? Because I believe that unless we empower qualified Earth scientists with real authority to make and enforce decisions, the negative impact of human activities on our environment will continue to escalate, pushing us—and countless animal species—toward extinction.

It’s time we put the planet’s health at the forefront, with the experts leading the charge.

146

Technocrats? Really?

Isn’t there a better way to address the fundamental problem of Americans not caring about science?

~Max

147

Wait, is this a second legislature parallel to Congress? How would that work?
Some Congressional oversight organization? They have veto power over bills signed by both houses? What? An advisory panel within Congress?

The only one that makes any sense is an advisory group, in which case

A) I would not characterize that in any way as a fourth branch;

B) I don’t see why they should be elected, or selected as 1 from each state.

Thing is, there used to be an advisory group in Congress about science. The Republicans eliminated it.

148

Remember when the Republicans were pushing for “evidence-based regulations”, as a means to reduce excessive gov’t red tape?

149

Wasn’t your post #62 exactly the society postulated by the Technocratic movement of the 1920s? IIRC, Thorstein Veblen suggested this.

This caught my attention.

I would be amazed if even half the population would have agreed with statement for more than a few years at a time, and less than maybe 20 years total.

But it was this statement that forced me into the thread.

My reading of history is quite different. The society of virulent partisanship and tendency toward authoritarianism that is the present that seemingly most people in this thread are trying to replace with a fairer, more egalitarian, and more pleasant one was deliberately, consciously, maliciously created by Nixon.

His plan was later dubbed the Southern Strategy. Advisor Kevin Phillips stated it succinctly.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

Once you get your breath back after reading that, think back to the actions of the Republican Party for the half-century after Nixon. You can see how they all stem from this basic premise. They managed to drag the country back to the post-Civil War Jim Crow era, undoing the Civil Rights Rights and the Voting Rights Act as the end of Reconstruction undid the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and contemporary Civil Rights Acts. The difference is that this time, the rest of the country could no longer simply ignore a South that was barely part of the country.

I like American Nations as a book explaining how the origins of the country led to the distinct populations we keep trying to explain away today. His bottom line is that the entire history of the country can be expressed as a war between Yankeedom and the Deep South, starting with the failed compromise that allowed the Constitution to be ratified.

I’m not sure it’s possible to remove a country’s history from its political system. America was never a whole but always a confederation of battling partisans, correlated with but not identical to states. Modern social media would seem to provide a borderless solution to idiosyncrasies of population location, but doesn’t yet a history of success to build on. What everybody is trying to cure is not innate. Surely the current system could stand some renovation, but the danger lies in making changes caused by current kinks and subversions. Few people are as prescient as Phillips or have the power to institute the changed world they are forecasting.

150

I’m not a political scientist or an expert in government structuring; I’m just brainstorming ways to give qualified scientists more influence in shaping policies and laws that could help mitigate the ongoing damage to our planet—damage that’s pushing us toward a man-made Holocene extinction event. This event could rival or even surpass the devastation of the K-T extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

While some progress is being made, it often feels insufficient and delayed. Politicians frequently prioritize short-term gains or the interests of their constituents over long-term planetary health. The hard truth is that we’re facing challenges that require tough, sometimes unpopular decisions—decisions that are often sidestepped in favor of more politically convenient options. My suggestion was an attempt to imagine a system where scientific expertise (folks like the late Carl Sagan) could directly guide those crucial decisions, ensuring that our environmental policies are grounded in the best available evidence rather than political agendas.

151

Who determines who is a qualified scientist? And can they pass laws that Congress can’t repeal, and the Supreme Court can’t review?

152

The voters from each state would vote for their Earth scientist (who would hopefully campaign with integrity). All environmental issues would be turfed to the Science Brigade. They would enjoy the same checks and balances of the other 3 branches.

153

There’s your problem right there. What about the scientists whose campaign is funded by oil companies?

And how do you define a qualified scientist ? Who gets to make that assessment to put the person’s name on the ballot?

154

That’s for others to figure out. Others who can figure out how to weed out candidates and donors with environmental conflicts of interest.

155

The Dope, obviously.

156

They’re doing such a great job with Congress.

Seriously, once you start electing people, you inject politics into what should be apolitical.

How do you separate “environmental issues” from social impacts, and financial issues, and international treaties, and every other topic? They are not exclusionary sets, but overlapping and interlaced issues.

Again, there used to be a Congressional scientific advisory panel composed of apolitical scientists chosen by scientists to advise the government on science issues. I’d reinstitute those over any form of elected science panel chosen by the voting public at large.

But I wouldn’t be adverse to more science knowledgeable candidates getting elected to regular Congress. Instead of gibberishheads like Lauren Boebert.

157

An advisory panel without enforcement power is like a compass without a map—valuable, but ultimately directionless if ignored. What we need is not just advice but action—a global “let’s do it” board with the authority to implement and enforce decisions. The reality is stark: it’s not “American” warming, it’s “global” warming, and it threatens every corner of our planet.

We’ve been aware of this looming crisis for decades. Carl Sagan’s 1985 Senate hearing wasn’t just a warning; it was a clarion call, clear and terrifying. Sagan captured the attention of those senators, yet here we are, nearly 40 years later, grappling with even more severe consequences: rising global temperatures, shrinking polar ice, escalating sea levels, mass biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, rampant wildfires, worsening droughts, and surging heat-related illnesses.

The question we must confront is this: What’s the end game? Are we waiting for Earth to revert to its Hadean Eon state—a hostile, uninhabitable planet? The time for half-measures and ignored advice is over. We need decisive, enforceable global action to prevent this existential threat from becoming our grim reality.

Do you really want to live in a world without cats?

158

I’m not familiar with Thorstein Veblen or the Technocratic movement of the 1920s. I thought the term referred to a system where experts such as scientists and engineers hold power, on the basis of their expertise, rather than popularly elected representatives. Particularly I associate it with totalitarian social engineering, from Science Fiction like A Brave New World.

~Max

159

From what I’ve read about the Technocratic movement and Veblen, they want to throw out the price system. I don’t.

~Max

160

I’m not about to wade through the sewer of Technocracy again, and the better articles are hidden behind paywalls. From a quick glance, what I was thinking of was a system of energy credits. Unfortunately, all the simple explanations are from modern revisions of technocracy. The thinking has been modified many times over a century.

The crux all boils down to the Laws of Thermodynamics they teach you in high school.

All physical work (including human processes like manual labor, electrical lights, aircraft and natural processes like weather, photosynthesis, even living and breathing) requires energy. On planet Earth, nearly all of this is radiated–and originates–from the Sun (with a negligible amount produced by thermal vents in the ocean). This energy (which can be measured in units of erg, Joules, kilowatt-hours, calories, etc.) allows plants to grow, allows weather and the hydrological cycle to cycle, and essentially created all fossil fuels buried underneath the ground millions of years ago. All sources of energy, whether it be from sunlight or from gasoline, can be measured to an exact number by scientific-minded personnel and machinery.

Due to the law of physics, energy units–unlike monetary units (or “Debt tokens”) like the U.S. dollar, the peso, stocks, bonds, etc.–do not fluctuate in “value” due to speculation, inflation, etc. (i.e., by the law of physics, one calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius, and this will always be the case as long as the universe remains).

Therefore, since every physical process on Earth utilizes energy (i.e., making goods, hauling cargo, running nuclear power plants) which can be constantly measured and does not fluctuate in “value” unlike money, Technocracy Inc. states the monetary unit should be replaced by energy credit. Each adult citizen will receive an equal allotment of the total energy produced by the Continent of North America every two years which they can then spend on goods or services using something that will probably come in the form of a credit card.

A recently updated, skimmed-down version of the core text The Study Course was produced in 2007 called the “Technological Continental Design”. https://www.technocracyinc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Study-Course-1-1.pdf. It’s easy to read and will probably explain your questions a lot better than I can. You can find the exact definition for “energy credit” on Page 70.

If you go to that link, you’ll find this.

Technocracy proposes to replace money — that, in all its
various forms such as coin, currency, bank drafts, checks, et
cetera, is a medium of exchange – with a nonfluctuating
medium of distribution. Instead of having an elastic type of
“value” as at present, goods in a Technate would possess a
measurable energy input and would be distributed on that
basis. The total cost of all goods and services produced would
be the total amount of energy used in their production. The
total purchasing power is a certification of the total net energy
consumed; the income of the individual in a Technate is arrived
at by dividing the total adult population into the total
certification of consumed energy. The cost of any one unit of
production, as for instance a pair of shoes, would be the total
energy required to produce all shoes, divided by the total
number of pairs of shoes; this would give the cost of an
individual pair of shoes. This cost would be expressed in some
such scientific term of physical measurement as ergs.

The paper is originally from 1975 and shows it. People still have landlines owned by the telephone company who charges big bubks for long-distance calls. However, I’m sure the thinking hasn’t changed much in a half-century.

Oh, the line “This caught my attention” was supposed to go with the quote of GordonG’s. Not that your quote didn’t catch my attention. Just wanted to clarify my intentions.