Right- the gridlock we run into when both houses and the Presidency aren’t dominated by one party is a FEATURE, not a bug. If a piece of legislation can’t either get enough votes on its own merit, or can’t engender enough bipartisan support and horse trading to get passed, then it probably shouldn’t be passed in the first place.
I kind of think that along those lines, there need to be further stumbling blocks for when one party DOES control both houses and the Presidency. That’s the situation where really shitty legislation happens more often than not, as the other side doesn’t have any traction to really stop anything.
As for funding, I think that it should either be funded by the government, OR limited to the least amount that any candidate raised. That way, nobody’s helped by deep pockets, or if they are, they’re going to have to fund their competitors if they want to spend more.
I also like the idea of the Senate being elected by state legislatures again; in this age of social media and what amount to media-driven popularity contests, maybe having senators elected by a legislature will get us a more wise and deliberative body than we’ve been getting, and we’ll avoid Senator Logan Paul or some other disaster like that.
IMO this line of thinking is detrimental to effective governance, and is part of the reason the US is such a mess.
A lot of our government is designed to protect voters from themselves, but I think letting voters make mistakes, see that the thing they voted for was a mistake and correcting themselves is a really important aspect of democracy. In parliamentary democracies, if a governing party/coalition makes a mistake, they don’t get to blame the opposition for forcing them into a compromise position, they have to find a remedy or the voters will find a new party.
If protecting voters from themselves was actually possible long-term it might have more merit, but what happens with the US is that you can’t protect voters from themselves forever - they either get to exploit a crisis to make lasting change, or use courts to achieve their democratic goals, or just vote for a president who openly clashes with the legislature and leaves the courts to try to keep up with all of the battles often years after the fact. I think there are some improvements the US could make to tighten up some of the weaknesses that get exploited, but even the best possible split system will always have the problem that some committed faction will eventually get to implement the policy they want, and the system is now not prepared for policy to be implemented by the backdoor. All the institutional roadblocks intended to prevent a policy from being enacted legislatively now prevent the legislature from taking control and reverting the policy, and even if the executive branch does things that are outright illegal, trying to hold the executive branch accountable in a divided government is extremely complicated and won’t offer an obvious remedy to many of the unorthodox ways people will find to get their polices enacted. And the worst part is, if a policy is implemented without obvious legislative process, and it turns out to have negative effects or become unpopular, the voters don’t know who to vote out of office to fix it.
I also think that it’s very dangerous to assume that inaction is a safe option in most cases. Governments deal with crises all the time where there needs to be some remedy in the short term (coronavirus is an example), and they deal with circumstances that may change gradually but require the government to be dynamic and open to continuous evolution (for example updating regulations based on new financial instruments). If you could make a system where legislative gridlock could stop any possible policy change, what would happen is that you would completely miss the boat during a major crisis and for something that requires the government to respond to evolving circumstances over time, someone who has a vested interest in preventing that would always be able to throw a wrench in things and prevent the government from being able to catch up to reality.
It may have been an intentional feature but it’s become a problem.
We seem to have a government that’s no longer interested in governing the country. There’s no desire to work out compromises in order to enact a political agenda. There doesn’t even seem to be a political agenda.
We have politicians who will proudly brag about how they prevent their opponents from doing anything when they’re in office and how they shut down the government.
And we’re seeing the consequences right now. We need a functional government to deal with a major national crisis and we don’t have one; the people in office apparently don’t know how to run a functional government. We’re being defeated by a mindless virus. What would happen if we were fighting a war with another country?
The big problem is that about 10 years ago, a bill was passed to remove earmarks. This sounds like a good thing on the surface, in that it, in theory, should remove corruption and keep bills coherent and on track, etc…
In practice, it removed the political grease that kept the machine moving. Congressmen were no longer able to throw people bones for the sake of votes, etc… So if Congressman Bluestate needed some votes for his bill beforehand, he could have written in some of those infamous lines giving some amount of money for something totally unrelated to the bill, but that would ensure that other congressmen, probably from the other party, would vote for it.
Getting rid of earmarks stopped all that. So now there’s no motivation for congressmen to reach across the aisle and cooperate with each other; it’s now a steel-cage deathmatch to see who can actually control Congress via the existing mechanisms and in the longer term, who can ensure that they control Congress by hook or crook via the electorate.
The Republican seem to have figured this out first, or are at least willing to go after it full-bore. There’s no benefit for them to do anything bipartisan, unless it’s SO dire that both sides realize it needs to be done and cooperate because it’s in everyone’s best interests.
Back to my original contention… if a bill back in the earmark days couldn’t actually get passed, then it meant that it was probably a fairly shit piece of legislation and shouldn’t have been passed. Nowadays, bipartisan cooperation and compromise doesn’t buy either side anything, so the GOP at least, doesn’t do it.
Hmm, a “People’s House” would be an interesting replacement for the Senate. Especially if it had powers equal to the elected House. In theory, it could write bills for passage, hold votes among its members (which would be everybody with an internet connection) and veto bills from the elected House. I suspect that only the most emotion-laden issues would generate much participation, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Good parliamentary systems don’t need earmarking and it’s another reason to support them instead. Earmarking gives us a lot of the pork barrel projects that aren’t justified by the common welfare. A big no.
True, but that’s the thing: you only need a statistical sampling of interested citizens. For example, I may not even care about the FBI funding bill so I (as a citizen) won’t debate or vote on it. But others are interested in FBI funding, so they participate. Next, a health care bill- that’s a topic I AM interested I, so I participate and vote. And my kid might be a political junkie, so she participates and votes on as many bills as she can, including the FBI and Health bills.
I have stated that for years. Anything the government is for should need a 2/3rds vote, at least. This would absolutely require working together on important legislation beneficial to all (or a lot more than current)
My only question on it was whether that was a predicted outcome of those who pushed against “pork barrel politics” so hard. If they knew that it would end bipartisan cooperation and increase toxicity in politics.
Earmarks only made up a tiny fraction of the budget, and usually meant that representatives could funnel money to where it was needed most. In return for supporting a bill that promoted some overall social good, a representative could also bring some money home to their own district to provide needed jobs, services, or infrastructure.
People did use to campaign on what they had done for their district, how they got that bridge built, or that school funded, or even jobs they created by pushing for contracts to companies in their district.
Now that they can’t do that, they can only campaign on ideological issues, and how they stopped the opposing party from enacting legislation. Reaching across the aisle in bi-partisanship now means that you will be primaried by someone campaigning on refusing to work with the other party.
I think you are using hyperbole again, but I don’t think that what you posted has any measure of truth in it (or based on any realistic reading of what I wrote)
We barely managed to fund the government the last few times that omnibus budgets come up for a vote.
The last shutdown lasted over a month before it managed to get enough votes to open back up.
And the reason that we keep doing continuing resolutions, rather than actually making any real changes to the budget is because there are not the votes to do so.
If we raise the bar to a 2/3rds majority, nothing would pass, and there would be no government funding for any of the agencies and programs that it runs.
In the current government you are correct, nothing would pass but that is simply because it is ALL political in nature and the current government only panders to their supporters. I can imagine a system that doesn’t just pander to supporters but to the entire populace that it has been elected to represent.
If there was a measure before Congress that allowed 75% or more of the entire populace something that was needed and it DIDN’T pass, there would be a clean sweep of newly elected officials the next vote and it would eventually pass anyway.
The reason this doesn’t happen currently is because every piece of legislation that is proposed harms some and helps some others but never enough to garner the type of support needed for large legislation.
Like healthcare for all, it could have, should have, involved a larger chunk of the population, it would have cost more but it would also have had a lot more support to help push it through.
While I think the debate has drifted slightly from creating new structures of government, this is the POTT and I only wish that I could articulate my own arguments as well.
Inertia is inherently dangerous in and of itself. While conservative voters need huge lengths of time to convince themselves of the need for change, real people are getting fucked over in the interim. And to get unfucked, they not only have to win majorities in government, they have to convince some number of the minority representatives, too. It’s a stacked deck and it’s no way to run a government.
