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Comment by doctorshady | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit disappointing to see that aside from a few abstained votes, everybody just chose to vote along party lines. Do these people just rubber stamp a bill because there's a D or an R next to it? Even if it meant more nay votes for the bill, I really wish we had representatives that vote based on critical thought rather than what their friends were doing.

I mean, as long as I'm dreaming too, we should give assembly programming kits to first graders.

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Yes, and it's been getting worse. See the charts here: http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2015/04/24/poli...

I don't know that much about the inner workings of Congress, but I'm guessing that it might be because reps who vote against party lines won't get support for their own pet projects later on?

Maybe. Could be why some people chose to abstain rather than vote against the party.

It's also easy to run an attack ad saying "Rep. X voted to keep job-killing Obama regulations" without saying exactly what the regulation was so the potential voter never questions whether they might have wanted it in place.

That, and the Congressional GOP used up their political mana points on the failed Obamacare repeal.

First off, you're disappointed that one of the two primary political parties in the United States unambiguously agrees with you on this issue?

Six more flipped Republicans would have killed this bill, which would have meant this wouldn't happen. You have the ability to make a real difference here by calling your Representative and telling them how you expect them to vote.

But, instead, what I'm hearing is that you're throwing up your hands and saying 'party line votes!' Call next time. It'll make a difference.

One problem is that legislators need to make decisions on a wide range of domains. This leaves them subject to influence by expert lobbyists and party whips. Critical thought about an issue requires much more time and study than most people have except for their own specialization.

I assume you know how to pitch manure, program a computer, and cook a tasty meal. Yet tell me, how long would it take you to butcher a hog from carcass to grocery portions? Have you ever done so?

How long would it take you to plan an invasion of the scale of the landings at Inchon? Have you ever done so?

What about when calls come in from their constituents to tell them that a bill is bad? I called my representative, and I saw a considerable amount of people rallying others to do the same.

The solution to this problem isn't to forsake specialization. It is to admit that specialization exists and for legislators to specialize in synthesizing the arguments of both lobbyists and their constituents and to be aggressively transparent about them. This requires a lot of work though -- a legislator would have to write a lot of posts that sounded like "and today I met with Yan Zhu from the EFF. She argued that secure encryption was vital to America's ability to reduce the cost of communication in healthcare by enabling trust in ... I was skeptical because X, and Y etc". The barriers to this happening are:

- Constituents don't generally follow their congresspeople. Nobody is subbbed to /r/HoR12thdistrictofCA.

- Legislators don't have the time to do such updates because they spend a lot of it fundraising.

- Being honest about how they evaluate arguments would leave legislators open to the scorn of people who think the government officials should never have misconceptions or make errors of reasoning.

They're not voting on that many issues. This is their job, they're supposed to study and try to understand the issues.

And really, this isn't that hard of an issue, I could probably ask my gramma "should AT&T be able to sell your browsing history to advertisers" and she would say no.

The question you're asking your grandma isn't the issue they're concerned about. The quesiton they're asking themselves is if I go against my party, how is this going to affect my re-election. That's why we have party line votes like this. They don't give two shits about the people they're representing, they only care about maintaining office.

> One problem is that legislators need to make decisions on a wide range of domains.

Maybe we should reduce that range of issues by cutting down the amount of regulation that the government is responsible for maintaining.

That's what they just did.

The Republicans have a majority. This lets them do things that fit with the ideological center and/or other priorities of their party. So we will have lots of party line votes in the next couple years.

(They could have let the rule go into effect and then drafted legislation to clarify and unify the regulation of internet privacy. This might have been annoying for ISPs. So what.)

More or less.

You might have a few R's (Amash?) that will pull the Libertarian card saying that free market should resolve this one it's own...choosing to ignore reality...the monopoly (just about) every American faces when it comes to choice for an ISP.

And obviously all the D's will vote yes as the rules were created and established in a Dem FCC / Presidency.

Despite party, it is sad to see quotes like Blackburn's carry any weight on any periodical outside of the puzzle section containing a where's waldo-esq spot the BS.

Here is the actual roll call for anyone curious, I had trouble finding it...maybe because the vote was so recent?: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2017/roll200.xml

That's the roll call vote, the actual vote is here: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2017/roll202.xml

Turns out echo chambers aren't just for internet recluses.

Who knew.

> Do these people just rubber stamp a bill because there's a D or an R next to it?

Pretty much, yes. It's fucking depressing.

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