It is a reach to think that you believe the current United States Senate is doing TOO MUCH work?
Why not change election laws so that in order to gain office, you have to get 67% of the vote?
But when 66% decide for the entire 100%, it’s not tyranny? Have you asked the 33% ?
But you see, this is where you get into trouble.
I think a lot of people would agree with the actual problems. Where the disagreement comes is whether or not both sides will agree to view the problem as one the government should meddle in/fund.
No, I don’t think they are doing too much. I think they are doing what they want, and for who they want. There is very limited accountability in the current political climate.
I don’t think that you should need the 67% in order to do a good job but if you could garner 67% then you’d be a pretty popular schmo.
When you basically have only 2 options, anything further away from 50-50 is better, no?
So we could keep placing the same arbitrary restriction on any number picked.
What about the 25%, or the 10% or the 1%.
If 50-50 is the baseline, 66-44 is a whole lot better for the country as a whole than 52-48
The Senate basically requires a 60% vote to get anything of substance done, and it is in paralysis. Moving that threshold to 67% would mean zero would get done, because a small portion of the body could stop absolutely everything… which is pretty much the case today. Don’t you see that your proposal would make things worse?
If you’re going to say that it isn’t good for elected representatives to practice majority votes, why shouldn’t voters be held to the same standard?
So you’re OK with tyranny, we’re just arguing where to draw the line.
Sure, but your bipartisan agreement approach simply puts most of the power in the hands of those who feel the government should not be involved.
Only if the country is split 50-50.
I already admitted that in today’s political climate that nothing would get done.
So yes, I could see that more of nothing is possible.
I think that nothing getting done is sometimes better than ‘anything is better than nothing’. I also believe that if nothing continues to get done (and a good majority of people actually want it done) then replacements will be voted in to do the will of the people.
Along this vein, term limits may also help
The people voted in can be replaced therefore a supermajority may not be required for Congress. Now maybe for Presidential elections, maybe.
We just barely averted an economic disaster, which would not have happened since the House vote for the bill was less than 2/3rds. I think you need to reconsider the idea that doing nothing is preferable.
Conservatives used to say: let’s run government like a business. Granted, the intent was usually along the lines of, “Let’s burn down the buildings and collect the insurance money…” But if you want government to be as efficient as business, things have to get done. What company would survive for 10 minutes if they simply decided: “Hey, the Board of Directors can’t agree on anything… let’s just not decide at all! Or better yet, let’s keep doing exactly what we were doing last year, with no changes, because lord knows that nothing ever changes in this world! Recipe for success!”
Just remember: not doing anything is the opposite of efficiency.
We have the “newest” Congress in ages, with more than half of the House and Senate having been in their bodies for a relatively short period of time. And yet it seems clear that things are getting worse. The obvious question is why you would expect things to get better with additional politicians with less experience?
Things aren’t getting worse because of the “new”, they are getting worse because you have an entrenching of the people with the power (they aren’t the new guys)
Efficient government would be doing things well.
What exactly does the government do well? What don’t they do well? Maybe they should stay out of that stuff?
As i said, popular stuff with bipartisan support should be able to fly fairly easily.
The ACA and things like it, not a chance until and when you convince the other 15-20% you’ll need.
You’re just factually wrong. There’s more turnover now than there has been in decades. That means your whole premise is off.
I should illustrate: since the 2006 elections, 56 new senators have been elected, and 279 new representatives. That’s turnover at a similar rate to what you’d expect under term limits.
Nitpicking the nitpick: That 330 million includes people too young to vote. The actual number of people able to vote is smaller. (The total number of registered voters is only 169 million.)
We did ask them: we gave them the chance to vote. If they didn’t vote, then their answer was (in effect) “I don’t care.”
It isn’t tyranny when they, themselves, freely chose not to have their views taken into account.
Nitpicking the picked nit (…or something):
Under 18 are 23.5% of the population. So there are roughly 257 million people eligible to vote and there are only 169 million registered voters (of which in 2012 only 125 million voted).
Oh my lord. Recursive nitpicking. On the Dope. We’ll be here 'till the heat death of the Universe !
We did ask them: we gave them the chance to vote. If they didn’t vote, then their answer was (in effect) “I don’t care.”
It isn’t tyranny when they, themselves, freely chose not to have their views taken into account.
[/QUOTE]
No, I was talking about the 66% who vote “Yes” (on whatever) versus the 33% who vote “No”. **Kearsen **seems to think it is OK to subject 33% of voters to tyranny, but not OK to subject 49% of voters to tyranny. Seems arbitrary to me.
Did you really have somewhere else to be? 