Why Not Have a Randomly Selected Congress? | Hacker News Reader

Why Not Have a Randomly Selected Congress?

currentaffairs.org

It's an interesting idea but has the same flaw as term limits: the power would shift from the Congressperson to the staffers who are unknown, unaccountable, and sometimes even worse people.

When I worked for various agencies in DC, one of the first things I learned was who the power players and key people were in each of our Senators' & Congresspersons' offices. It is quite often not the Senator but the scheduler. Yes, the person who runs the Senator's calendar and determines who gets on it and who doesn't.

We found pretty quickly that this scheduler was - almost without exception - a single woman in her mid 20's. Therefore, whenever we knew that we would need access, we would do little things like bring flowers or chocolates "for the office" but make sure to leave them with her. When we found out about new restaurants or a show she'd like, we'd pass her the info. By the time we needed that meeting and gave her a call, we would get it every single time.. often the same day.

And yes, we worked with both parties and names you'd recognize.

* Am I proud about any of that? Nope but that is how the Hill works. And giving those people more powerful is an awful idea.

Why would a representative leave so much influence in the hands of a girl in her middle twenties who's dumb enough to doll out influence to bringers of chocolate?

All girls in their mid 20's are dumb. Thanks for the relevation. Also all the power they have is of scheduling. Not making laws.

I didn't say all girls in their mid 20's are dumb. It's been suggested in the post above that scheduling is where the power lies.

But are they aware they have this much power? I'd imagine someone in their mid 20's who is easily swayed by chocolate and restaurant suggestions doesn't understand the full gravity of what their position entails.

They may not necessarily be dumb, but it does sound like they're minimally naive.

I'd say them not being aware makes them dumb. Like how can you not have a clue in that position and chase chocolates. You're mid-twenties, fully grown, and dumb.

Manipulating people with favors is easy, even if they're very intelligent. The schedulers are likely not even giving favorable treatment consciously. The chocolate or whatever simply serves to build a positive association with the name of the person who will be calling to ask for a meeting later.

What's dumb about it? It's called greasing the wheel. You want to get the meeting over every other asshole who wants a meeting. Who gets the meeting, gets the laws.

The girl is dumb for playing loose with American legislation for fucking chocolates.

This whole phenomenon is over your head, isn't it?

It's not dumb at all. It's helping people who are polite and considerate to you.

If every interaction you have with someone is positive, when they ask for a small favor that is 100% part of your job anyway, of course you say yes.

the question seems reductive enough to be a nonsequitur.

Agencies? How long ago was this? Technically under the new lobbying rules she's not supposed to accept those flowers, or that chocolate. Certainly an opponent of your agency, or whatever, would be inclined to report this fact. The scheduler is nice, but get to know the Chief of Staff. It's one thing to get a meeting, anyone can get a meeting, but if you want to actually get something done it's better to get to know the Legislative Director or the Chief.

But would those "gatekeepers" still be a thing? Congresspeople are very busy today BECAUSE they are a career politicians, and with that, multi-year/decade lobbying of a politicians staffers pays off. After all, they need you to scratch their back every 4 years.

But if every 2-4 years the ENTIRE system is flipped like a compost heap, you would have a completely different staff, and a different NON-career politician who doesn't need your support for the next run for office. No amount of money will select me next turn-over (assuming it is a truly random selection).

As far as I can see, they advocate for a Randomly Selected Congress that still operates on a term basis (i.e. new members are randomly chosen at fixed time intervals, e.g. every two years).

An alternative approach that I've found quite interesting is to assemble a new Randomly Selected Congress for every single bill. The idea is that certain parties (e.g. government offices or public petitions with a sufficient amount of backers) gain the right to identify problems. For each problem thusly identified, a Randomly Selected Congress is formed, who can either vote that no action is required, or who can enact a bill with the intention of solving that problem.

The appeal is that every legislator will only be involved in exactly one law over their lifetime (maybe two or three, but the chance of one person being selected multiple times is excessively slim). So horse trades cannot work anymore, and every legislator knows that whatever they sign into law will be the single one impact they can ever have on the political system. Like: "This may only be a zoning law for small villages, and I don't care because I live in the city. But everyone will judge me by this law forever, so I better make sure it's the best fucking zoning law ever."

This sounds a lot like jury duty. I'm not sure what to make of that similarity.

It's also similar to the Slashdot moderation system.

Do we want the statistical average of us to create laws that stick around for years? If so, we need to raise the average significantly.

Also, this would put enormous power in the hands of lobbyists and bureaucrats; a demographic that is not exactly brimming with the diversity that this 'solution' attempts to put in place.

Lobbyists already have enormous power. I think one thing we've learned over the past 20 years is that career politicians are just as susceptible to bribes as everyone else.

Though I do agree, this concept is pointless beyond a thought experiment.

Under sortition individuals would serve a short term before returning to their original role, making them less susceptible to 'revolving door' type bribery and mutual back scratching.

It would also make sense to treat them like a jury - while you are working lobbyists would be asked not to meet with you.

Lobbyists /do/ serve a valuable function (theoretically); they offer expert advice.

Sequestering the ignorant and expecting good laws to come from that is ... optimistic.

And while serving a short term might cut out certain bribery there will be a lot more 'get while the getting is good' type bribery. Perhaps that's easier to catch? But there will be a lot more of it.

Not only that: the rest of us have our own stuff to do. How many people can put their life on pause long enough to learn everythhing they need to know to craft good laws?

I think sortition would work better if the legislators would first learn a bit about the issue they are assigned to (assuming the random selection is repeated for each individual law). It could be done as a short course where the instructors would also be selected by random from a pool of experts (people holding degrees in the field). Legislators could be tested to see if they have a grasp of the basic concepts. Only after that, they would deliberate and vote. This would make the process slower, but fortunately it can be parallelized on multiple unrelated issues. Each legislative group could act for a short period and disband.

> If so, we need to raise the average significantly.

Bingo.

The problem with good decision making here is not that it's too cognitively demanding, it's that there are perverse incentives.

Also, it is simply impossible for someone successful - like a politician - to understand the world view of those less well off.

So even if the mental abilities go down, the quality of decision making could easily go up - indeed it would be likely to.

James Fishkin is a Stanford professor who has pioneered this type of work. His approach gives decisions makers structured access to experts to help improve the quality of decision.

I think the solution is just to ban lobbying as it currently exists. I ran across an interesting argument about a month ago basically saying that, legally, there are things we can own but not sell, like a spleen, because the societal consequences of allowing people to sell their organs are so disastrous. They made the point that maybe you should similarly have the right to lobby your congressman but that you wouldn't have the right to sell that capability.

So no lobbying from EFF or Natural Resources Defense Council?

The EFF wouldn't need to lobby if Comcast/Google/etc. didn't lobby

How about the NSA? EFF needs to lobby.

I disagree. Laws like CFAA get passed because legislators want to look tough on crime. Not, IMHO, because corporations are lobbying for them.

No. Also, no lobbying from RIAA or Exxon.

imo, eff and nrdc (and the rest) should 'lobby' the public. not congress.

I think we can get more benefit just by making all lobbying communications public.

This is a much better idea. Make it a crime to conceal this information. You can't just ban lobbying unilaterally (or even just getting paid to lobby) because it's such a fundamental aspect of democracy. Whether you have elections or sortition, you need to have the right to lobby the government.

Defence contractors on matters of national security?

Advocates for refugees or political asylees?

I'm not saying I don't like your suggestion. I'm trying to find examples where the transparency might not be likely or a positive development. And then ask: how would you handle those cases? Specific carveouts? Time-delayed disclosures?

The societal consequences of an organ market might not be so bad: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/12/or...

Lawyers, salespeople, and lobbyists are all good things when used well. I'd be in support of more transparency, but lobbyists are working for causes you believe in and would not be if there weren't some method in place for organizations to speak with their political representation.

> Do we want the statistical average of us to create laws that stick around for years?

People are judged everyday by their "statistical average" with consequences that can stick around for many years (long jail terms) or be permanent (death sentences). While the criminal jury system is not perfect, it appears vastly more functional than Congress at present.

The article also mentions Aristotle, and he identified three dimensions of discourse: logos, ethos and pathos. While elected congressmen may be a little better at logic (it's not like they're all rocket scientists), they appear to be quite deficient in ethics and not similar enough to the average constituent to truly empathize. Losing a bit of logos for big increases in ethos and pathos seems like a pretty good deal to me.

> Also, this would put enormous power in the hands of lobbyists

Not really, their main weapon are campaign contributions.

The difference being that the justice system generally affects one person at a time. What Congress does affects 300 million to 7 billion.

The justice system is not just one jury.

Obviously. But each official decision by a particular randomly selected jury within the justice system that carries legal weight affects one person, usually.

Each official decision by Congress that carries legal weight affects millions to billions of people.

Which is exactly I said that before more succinctly for those that cared to think about it.

> Do we want the statistical average of us to create laws that stick around for years?

Yes. The alternative is to open the door for systemic abuse. Randomness ensures perfect balance between all social classes and it makes it difficult for special interests to lobby the legislators. Such a system can dispense with elections and reduce the power of big media trusts. I think common people selected to serve for a short term would have much more decency than career politicians.

> makes it difficult for special interests to lobby the legislators.

It makes it considerably easier for lobbyists to lobby legislators because it sets up an even greater information and power asymmetry than it does now. Lobbyists can stick around as long as they want, will know the pressure points in the legislative system, and will have the resources available to draft legislation that works in their favor. How many people who aren't lawyers could successfully review a law and be able to understand its impacts ten years down the road? Probably not too many, and I can guarantee that the loudest and most persuasive voices legislators hear during this process will be industry experts, not their constituents.

This is the same as it is now, except that career politicians at least know how the game is played.

On the other hand Congress passes laws with thousands of pages of text they never read. How does that work better than having enough people assigned to each section?

People don't need to actually write the text, just decide on the important points. They will have professional assistance and instruction. I think we could use the same random system to select professional assistance for legislators (by random selection of domain-specific graduates).

Neighborhood DC lobbyists here.. It's an idea worthy of study, but in practice it would be difficult to implement. First, the warm-up time for someone entering congress, to get them to the point where they do know what they're doing, is about six months. These are folks who want to be there, who have at least spent some time studying the issues, the process, and time on the campaign trail. A completely random, lay congress picked off the street would need about a year to get to that point. Those who have some advanced education, knowledge, or training in government, are going to quickly run right over them. Then there's the staff. You've got a randomly selected congress, but what about the staff? That's who really runs the place, and those with the best staffers are going to get up to speed the quickest. What about parties? Who is the Speaker? Who runs the committees? If it's a free-for-all with no one in a party, and no one able to unit a group to control, it's chaos. Even Britain, with its myriad of parties and voting blocs, has a lot of function built into their structure.

The level of knowledge of civics, current events, and history, not to mention the level of civic responsibility has done nothing but go down since this nation was founded. This idea might have been more tenable 200 or even 100 years ago.

The jury system is an entirely different problem space. There the decision is made based on a relatively narrow pool of information, and is in fact constrained to that pool of information and the personal experience of the individual jurors.

Congress is a whole other matter. There decisions must be informed based upon a vastly greater background of knowledge and, dare I say, wisdom. International affairs and history, broad understanding of current events, economics, knowledge of our system of law and jurisprudence. Do the individuals in congress all meet this standard? No. But the process of putting oneself and one's knowledge and experience forward to the voting public does act as a sort of filter to weed out people who have no understanding or ability to govern.

Or teach people to become leaders who can govern. What does it take to have a specialized field of studies to prepare people? The more the qualified experts compete each other in getting elected, the better.

That is precisely what an aristocratic elite (or any semi-permanent elite subgroup) is supposed to do. What seems to have changed in America is that the elites no longer grow up learning that "we are better, and therefore, it is our job to run things correctly for our heirs (and the plebes too I guess, as long as they keep their place)".

While this is distasteful attitude on the surface, one thing it does do is make sure that at least a few of the elites grow up with a sense of nobles oblige and fosters a longer-term outlook. There are, of course, a host of disadvantages. So while I welcome the dismantlement of such attitudes among the elite, the problem is that nothing has risen to take its place. We sadly seem to be becoming more and more a "what's in it for me" society.

I would much rather see all bills and amendments put under a public version control where everyone could see who is adding what in real-time.

This transparency would really help out democracy in my opinion.

I've been on a sortition kick for some time now and am a big proponent, but simply choosing congressmen at random would never work. I believe that with subcommittees and some sort of filtering mechanism, it could work very well. The filtering mechanism is the trickiest part though. So far I haven't come up with anything better than a qualification exam, which has some obvious flaws.

The way I see it working is like this: You have a central committee that is like the legislature, but they don't draft bills. They only debate them and vote on them. This committee is made up of at least 40% unfiltered complete randoms. The term could be anywhere from 6 months to 4 years; the position being non-compulsory and well compensated. The central committee also selects someone to serve as the head of state, who will act kind of like the SoS and be commander in chief of the military. This person could be replaced with a vote of no confidence like a PM.

The actual legislation would be written by filtered subcommittees. For example, you could have an infrastructure committee that has two lawyers, 2-4 engineers, two economists and two social scientists. These would be selected at random from a pool of people who have passed some sort of qualification exam. The exam would be very difficult, but people would be highly encouraged to take it to maximize the size of the pools. Of course study materials and services should also be provided by the state to make sure that everyone has approximately equal access.

It's not an ideal system, and there are some flaws, but I believe it would work very well. Having committees of experts crafting legislation would limit the influence of lobbyists. You could also potentially have some sort of petition system to keep effective leaders around for a second term.

This is such and outstanding idea and I would love to see it implemented for some seats in the UK House of Lords - a low risk way to trial it.

Get some information on the internal democracy of the Bahai faith. They have candidateless elections - essentially you vote for any member of the faith you personally think is very capable and the ones who have the most votes is elected. And to avoid any cult of person, you elect councils of 9 people that have to decide with absolute majority about their topics. This Bahai system is almost impossible to game - in case you do bad as an elected person, they will not vote for you the next time. This system also is multilevel: the elected persons of a city do the same candidateless approach on the national level, then those elected in all countries come together and vote for the international "House of Justice" as they call it, which is located in Haifa, Israel. This election process serves really as the perfect sieve for bad people.

You have a clear definition for "bad people" as part of your religion. Whether or not that process works, adding a rigid morality does not improve simple plurality voting for most populations.

I don't say copy this religion, but its processes.

I m interested by this topics and I recommend a book by David van Reybrouck that speaks about this topic: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/18/against-electi...

I think the way we produce new legislation and control the government is not satisfactory as it is. My favorite approach would be to have a sortition (based on a quota method maybe) then some intensive training (law, constitution ... ) before the one term and after that training of the member of the assembly that go back to the civil life.

I think there would need to be some minimal filter on those who would govern. Age, for one, but maybe also a high school diploma or equivalent and a "citizenship test" that everyone would have to pass to graduate high school.

In many countries you just need to write-read to be able to run for a gov position.

America has a not so great history with written tests used as anti-democratic weapons.

China has something like this: bureaucrats have to pass the civil service exam, which is like a souped up IQ/SAT style test. The former president, Hu Jintao, apparently had a photographic memory. Make of that what you will.

I would like this, but the anti-SAT / whiteboarding group would complain about a system like this to no end.

And to be fair, there is a huge potential for a system like this to be abused or to codify massive inequality in representation across racial / socio-economic lines. So complaints would definitely not be without merit. Usually additional barriers to participate in government only end up hurting those who are most marginalized already, even if they are supposedly well-intentioned. So while a system like this might sound good to your typical hacker news browser, consider that a system like this would also mostly exclude poor and uneducated people from government even more than they are already

Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to come up with a solution to one problem that doesn't create a new one. I guess I am kind of imagining a system of mandarins. Perhaps the requirement is that you attend public school, where passing the course is required for graduation. And so you cut out HS dropouts but you also cut out private and charter school kids.

We could also bring back ostracism (not from society, but from government, at least). We wouldn't be able to select our representatives, but we would be able to rule out those we definitely don't want.

This is how democracy was orginally designed in ancient Athen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

IMO, a randomly selected congress hands power to the executive, or God forbid the government bureaucracy (aka "civil servants"). Whichever one, they will become the only ones who know what the hell is going on.

If a law gets passed they don't like, they will simply drag their feet until they can get next random congress to change it. Assuming they listen to the congress at all.

Obviously I have no idea whether this will be better than the current system or not. However, I'm completely left cold by most of the the argumentation in the article.

For example, it complains that 40% of Congress are lawyers, effectively arguing that it's better to have substantially fewer people making laws who are trained in law. Why? because people don't like lawyers.

Also, it complains that 50% of Congress are millionaires so reducing the number of millionaires will remove the influence of lobbyists. Presumably because it's only millionaires who are influenced by marketing and free money?

The one good argument that I can see is that it definitely means that there's no money spent on campaign financing as there are no campaigns. Obviously the suggestion that that money will then be spent on soft and fluffy causes is just silly but at least the original argument makes sense.

Maybe it's just me. A big part of my day to day is understanding the consequences of the decisions I make and mitigating for them. So I get particularly irritated by arguments that only have pro columns. But if one does just make pro arguments they really ought to be better than this.

I don't see the advantage of such a system over some form of direct democracy.

A right to call for a referendum puts the final say always to the people.

So policymakers will need to ask themselves "Can this law pass a popular vote?" instead of "Will this law increase or decrease the probability of my reelection?"

The advantage is this: A randomly selected jury has the time to carefully consider a bill for days at a time, whereas any particular member of the voting public cannot be expected to devote more than an hour or so considering it.

Obligatory Doge http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.html . I think it would work better as a means for electing the President though (as in Venice).

In my opinion. Instead of randomly selected congress, we should have a randomly selected electors. You select them randomly. They are sequestered like a jury for a few days. They listen to the candidates and at the end they chose one. Their power only lasts until they make a choice.

Maybe. Maaaayyyyybe this could work. Or it could spell the end of the world's largest economy as we know it.

I have in the past toyed with ideas like randomly selecting the Senate from a pool of outstanding civil service exam scores, or by instituting a third legislative house to be randomly selected, but in any case to do so is to jump headfirst into an uncertain pool of chaos.

The system set up by our founding fathers is, for the most part, a good system. A large republic was supposed to be impossible. It has lasted nearly 250 years. It has survived a bloody civil war (1864 marked the first national election conducted during a civil war in history). It has expanded liberties to abolish slavery and grant the vote for all citizens (with some exceptions).

Right now, the system has been hijacked and rigged by the rich and powerful. Change them, change their influence, by all means, but upending the system for the sake of "trying something new" or god forbid "drain the swamp," will be akin to using a sledgehammer for a problem that requires a screwdriver.

Funny you say that when your name is rm -rf /

It's getting bad when he's the conservative.

The author Ernest Callenbach made a very detailed proposal for just this back in the 80's, called "A Citizen Legislature": https://www.well.com/~mp/citleg.html

Not bad to think about this, but I think much smaller changes would have huge effects.

Thinks like approval or rank voting, for example.

I don't understand why these minor changes don't get implemented.

Or like the Canadian Senate, members need to be independent

How does that work? What does "Independent" mean in this context?

As no party affiliation

If your job is to create laws, then you must be an expert in that field. So the pool of candidates should be meritocratic in its nature, like a Law School degree and at least 10 years of experience plus 2 in public domains.

Then you can randomize.

Most countries in the world allow any bus driver to be a congressman and we know how great their understanding of laws and human rights are, none.

Bias towards those whose profession benefits from a growing abundance of laws?

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

If you are going to build a bridge are you going to hire an engineer or a cook? Now if you're going to create laws would you hire someone who has studied roman, germanic, sharia law since the times of Hammurabi, philosophy, sociology, politics and everything necessary to understand human interaction and association, or a bus driver?

We get the government we deserve, proportional to our level of ignorance.

There is a big difference between picking from a pool of politicians (crooks who climb the ladder by manipulation, backstabbing and deceit) and the best lawyers according to market forces and meritocracy then randomized.

If you ask the engineer whether to build the bridge, you might get a biased answer.

You need to balance it though. For example by adding economists and social scientists to the pool. You can't let one group have too much power.

The writing of laws can be left to staff, who may be lawyers, the impetus to have them written and passed need not be left solely to those who benefit from there being an abundance of them.

It doesn't take an Engineer to recognize that a bridge needs to be constructed.

Yeah, the last time I got on a bus the driver beat me and then killed me.

Law-drafting isn't the entire job of representation. Also, current performance, such as using legislation written by consortia of corporations with lobbying interests, doesn't speak highly for such specialization.

You might as well require representatives be CPAs, or MBAs, since budget allocation and oversight of spending is at least as important as making laws.

Absolutely, the executive needs CPAs and MBAs, the legislative needs lawyers, the judiciary needs judges and to be honest that's the only one where meritocracy permeates, just add a little randomization instead of handpicking, that's all.

That's not what I wrote. Elected representatives get away with not being accountants by hiring accountants to staff the CBO. Similarly lawyers could be hired for drafting unambiguous legislation based on position papers.

Why not have random jurors like we do in the UK?

The US does have random jurors, congress would be akin to houses of parliament.

eventually, congress should be ai (with human oversight).

Anyone agreeing with this should read The Next Revolution by ya boy Murray Bookchin. Libertarian Municipalism has the members of democratic citizen's assemblies of a town or city creating laws directly, and the representatives form a completely administrative role. By separating legislation and representation he even suggests that randomly selecting the delegates is completely reasonable.

How is a “popular mandate” measured if not by elections?

Because it leads to tyranny of the majority.

The original idea was congress would be intelligent people supporting decisions for the good of the nation. That doesn't work so well anymore now that the only decisions remaining are split between party lines.

>Limits the likelihood of Congress being dominated by rich white guys

>There is no downside to this

I guess that whoever wrote this piece didn't consider that it also increases the likelihood that some poor white guys whose political positions are way farther to the right from the author's own than Ted Cruz's positions are get into Congress.

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