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Comment by CyanLite4 | Hacker News Reader

Congress has a 20% approval rating, polled weekly for over the past decade. Yet we vote every two years for the same folks who give us the same results. The problem isn’t them. It’s us.

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Why does US Congress approval rating matter? If I considered my congressperson 100/100 and everyone else 0/100, the House would get an overall rating of around zero.

Obviously since I can't elect members of the House of Representatives from other districts, I could totally approve of my congressperson and senator and it still not be my fault for the other guys in power.

I'd say the problem is one of competition. "We" cannot choose better legislators unless better legislators come forward for selection, but the incumbents - and by that I mean parties elected or not - have so much money and machinery behind them that to turf them out would be nigh on impossible.

The problem is that each “we” is pulling to benefit themselves at all costs.

Hence giant military fighter jet contracts that span multiple congressmen’s districts around the country, and while being terrible for the future of the country, is untouchable politically as not a single person will vote against their economic interests.

Exactly. It's hard to have collective reform without there being a collective.

I was going to say the same. Lawmakers are elected officials. They're incentivized to do what gets them votes. And voters are concerned with the complexity of laws. Perhaps what we need is better education to create more informed voters. But if lawmakers are in charge of that, too, I'm not super hopeful.

voters say they want that, but do they ever monitor the complexity of any particular bill and vote differently next time strictly because of it?

Doing this is very difficult and exhausting.

Several years ago I signed up to follow 3 politicians I cared about using this site https://www.govtrack.us/. Give it a try, and I think you'll see the deluge of laws, bills, and opinions is too much for a mere mortal mind with a 9-5.

I think this is why we talk about congresspersons' army of staffers and interns. You would not want a single person trying to deal with the complexity of all this information they need to have an informed opinion on in order to vote for/against.

I misspoke. It's more likely that the vast majority of voters don't care about this issue, and in fact aren't even aware of it.

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