I’m not following the argument in this post at all. Explain it to me as though I believed Trump was a godly being.
Probably because Trump had nothing to do with it at all?
Poor attempt at a joke on my part. Just assume that I’m stupid and spell out what you’re saying for me.
Basically, if we started over with our governmental structure almost exactly like it is now but the partisan pandering that is currently all the rage, and the baggage that comes along with it (divisiveness) then my idea works because the entire country wins when legislation gets passed. The public would see this due to the nature of benefits for most.
Basically this would also have the side effect of removing the nastier effects of money in our political system where the money is designed to help only a small subset of the people the official is supposed to represent.
And I know you aren’t stupid.
If you want to make this work as intended, I think there needs to be a way for a simple legislave majority to repeal previous legislation, and I think the best method would be to make it constitutional to pass legislation with explicit repeal cases that can be invoked by a simple majority without veto power later.
Otherwise what would happen is at some point or other there would be massive political will behind something, it would breeze through the 2/3 requirement and then years or decades later would start to have unintended side effects and become controversial. But as long as it still had somewhere around 45% support it would be nearly impossible to repeal and the net effect would be that any idea anyone had had in the past would be untouchable and the government would have an extremely tough time paring down past legislation that had become controversial or had unintended negative effects.
Exactly. We have to stop thinking that legislation is permanent and that the status quo is better than change unless change has overwhelming support.
Not to change the subject but it occurs to me that no one has yet addressed how parties should select their candidates and the effectiveness of primaries versus not. Those are pretty big processes that I think are being handled pretty poorly these days.
That is a good reason to have it as you say.
The unintended consequence from that means that legislation is again likely to be able to be swayed by money?
Currently there is big money on both sides of the aisle.
Come to think of it, if we just found a system where we remove the money, we’d be golden.
I think any system that relies on a primary process won’t work. I’d prefer proportional representation, and under a system like proportional representation, ranked choice or single transferable vote where the big tent parties can’t crush opposition. Under that system it doesn’t matter if they have primaries or if party insiders choose candidates in smoke-filled rooms because voters can actually vote green or libertarian or whoever if the more major party goes against their wishes.
If you have FPTP and you force people to choose between two major parties or throw their vote away, no process is going to work. Ideally I would prefer to make it as democratic as possible and enshrine into law that every state has a real primary, but then you have to figure out what to do with party registration. If anyone can just join a party with no obstacles, strategically voting in the primaries could get out of hand, but if you let parties have control over who gets to vote in their primaries, they can effectively stifle a portion of voters who would support them.
I mean any unintended consequence. Let’s say that 2/3 of the legislature earnestly believes nationwide rent control is a good idea and it has overwhelming public support. So they put it into law, but years down the road it results in much less available housing for rent and you get a portion of people who are able to live in the cheaper housing, but others who are homeless or trapped in debt due to a mortgage. As long as enough people still want to keep rent control, the people negatively affected by it wouldn’t be able to get rid of it.
A system where it’s hard to add to the law but easier to take away isn’t my preferred system, but I think it is internally consistent, and the disagreements would probably be philosophical and hard to definitively argue either way.
I propose the opposite – all legislation is repealed and all government agencies rebuilt from the ground up every 30 years or so on a cycling basis unless a 2/3rds vote says the law is good or the agency is doing a good job.
Eta: I’m only half kidding. We should constantly be reexamining every one of our systems and adjusting it to fit the evolving world we live in.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of very good.
You will always have those who are at some level harmed by certain legislation. If that legislation helps 75 %, it is still very very good legislation.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing that strongly, but just to clarify the thing I’m specifically talking about is where the popularity of a policy goes down after being passed, so initially 70% or something support it, but later only 40% do, but that 40% is enough to make it a permanent fixture.
Well, with the 2/3rds needed to change or modify it, 40% is really close, so figure out what 6% want in exchange to make it still good for the 66% needed.
And you are right, not much disagreement, just discussion about how to make it work long term.
A common Conservative complaint is that the federal government is slow and unresponsive, claiming it is too bloated to function effectively. However they seem to do everything in their power to hamstring the government and ideologically support making the government slower and weaker. How this is supposed to fix the perceived problem of the federal government being unable to do anything is unclear.
I think a lot of it is a differing conception in the role of government. For example, a lot of people don’t think that pushing change is a primary job of government. In fact, you might even call them “conservative” in that they question changes to the status quo. And that’s a valuable role to play- questioning the need for change and resisting change unless it’s proven to be necessary would seem to be a vital thing to do.
I think that while the Founding Fathers were pretty liberal for their day, they built our governmental structure with impediments to getting legislation passed quickly without a very pressing need. And to some degree, the structure forced (prior to the removal of earmarks) debate and compromise in order to get stuff that wasn’t utterly, immediately vital accomplished. I mean, we saw both houses of Congress get their shit together and pass the various stimulus bills with the pandemic this past spring. That’s proof that it can happen. But they’ll be at a standoff with things that are less critical for the nation.
I still think it’s a good thing that we have all these impediments to getting legislation passed. Yes, it causes a lot of horse trading and heated political rhetoric, but in the end, it puts a brake on unnecessary spending and basically requires a certain amount of compromise to get stuff done, at least in theory.
I still maintain that the removal of earmarks broke the system, and a lot of the GOP behavior is a response to that. Whether or not it was intentional, I don’t know. My suspicion is that it was a wholly and completely unintentional side effect, but that the GOP figured it out first and has been more ruthless in applying their new tactics.
Texas has something similar. Not with legislation, but state agencies. There’s a “sunset commission” that periodically evaluates state agency for relevance, financial probity and competence and whatever else, and recommends to keep or shit-can the agency, except for a few required by the state constitution. They’ve sunsetted quite a few agencies in their 40 odd years of existence. So far, it seems to work quite well.
I would imagine something similar on a Federal level would be a good thing.
I assume that, in iiandyiiii’s described scenario, the sitting president would remain president until a new president is selected. If the public always votes to reject the drawn-from-lottery candidate, then the sitting president remains there indefinitely until there finally is a new guy.
If we were to start with a new government, I’d eliminate the presidency and replace it with a parliamentary government in which the head of parliament is essentially the executive. Termed elections would be a thing of the past. We could have a clause saying that at least one election shall take place every X number of years but I’d rather we adopt the no-confidence system. We vote when a majority of parliament says they’re fed up with the status quo.
Likely because they disagree with what the legitimate functions of the federal government should be and how that gets implemented. It is both bloated and slow, whether or not it has to be is as yet not proven.
It doesn’t work as well as you’d think. The employees in the sunset agencies are usually simply placed elsewhere.
Granted labor of s single agency isn’t all that much in the total of things but it can add up I am sure.