This cannot be good for either side. Do we want to live in a system where if you hadn't been paying attention to the news for 1 week, we might have kicked >100,000 people out of the country?
Is this ADD-style, whoever yells the loudest, social and political system working well for anyone? How do we get past this?
If we end up in a situation where neither branch can respond quickly and effectively, that may be worse than what we have now.
Disagree. The political deadlock of the legislative branch is by design. Only things that are truly broadly supported should pass through the legislature.
The overreach of the executive branch is a response to complete and utter inaction by the states to reign in the federal government.
That isn't to say there isn't "overreach".
now we are just out of solutions and too divided to get further patches in
It's not really the Senate's fault. Opposition parties almost never vote with government parties in any democratic legislature, so you shouldn't expect them to in the US.
The real problem is the outdated system that is set up to (1) only allow two major parties to exist, so a European-style coalition government isn't possible, and (2) require both major parties to agree in order to pass any legislation.
Reform the entire election system:
- 4 year term length for House elections instead of 2 so that representatives can get stuff done instead of having to spend every second year in election campaigns
- reform campaign financing to a government funded model like in Germany (and entirely ban PACs) so that the influence of big money on government is eliminated
- if possible, get rid of the Presidential election by the population and have the President elected by Congress to prevent the situation of having a President without his own legislative majority
- get rid of FPTP and introduce proportional voting to reduce polarization and create more diversity in politics
- get rid of voter suppression and gerrymandering, make Sunday a voting day (or alternatively, a federal holiday), enforce universal mail-in voting across states
Four year cycles for the house would mean we would have no way of changing course for four full years (other than impeachment, and we've seen how ineffective of a check that is if the president's party controls the Senate)
As a guy with inattentive-subtype ADHD, I've long suspected there are fairly strong curb-cut benefits[1] to re-structuring organizations to work better for ADHDers. Might this be true of American political life? Initial suspicions:
1. Reduce the interface-complexity of government. Improve encapsulation. This may mean that government does _more_ in certain domains. I moved from the US to the UK in 2016 and the impact that a cross-cutting interface simplification like the NHS's "free at point of care" has just astounding. Income taxes over here are also much more clear, even if you are running a 1-person small business but especially if you are just an employee. I think is worth paying some higher monetary taxes if government can impose a lower tax on Working Memory.
For more on the idea of "Interface Complexity", see A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.
2. Improve baseline health outcomes with some more wholistic (yet still evidence-based) interventions. A broad swath of Americans are stressed and often sleep-deprived. This is not conducive to thoughtful decision-making. Or epistemically-sound interpretation of information.
3. Improve access to mental health care. A whole bunch of Americans are descended from people who...
A. were so excited by the prospect of extravagant wealth that they would abandon their community and kinship group to live and work among strangers.
B. belonged to physically (sometimes sexually) abusive households for multiple generations until 1865. And then they got married to people who grew up in abusive households. (some of my own family history)
C. escaped from abusive & traumatic situations and traveled across an ocean to a land of strangers.
D. were so willing to break with social norms (or join social-norm-breaking subcultures) that they would abandon most of their possessions and travel across an ocean to a land of strangers.
E. were so fearful about the prospect of a government, regional, or neighborhood conspiracy that they decided to move across an ocean -- before there was sufficient evidence for most people around them to try to flee!
4. Reduce the social norms that promote catastrophizing. Currently, those who seek a return to specificity, clarity, or ask "is this reflected by the observable facts" in political discussions are often told they are pedantic, privileged, or tone-policing. We need a culturally-accepted way to return to a calm, measured way of thinking about policy -- not because policy is some intellectual game that doesn't matter. The stakes are genuinely life-or-death, because the stakes are life-or-death and that requires a calm mind with an eye seeking a clear understanding of a possibly-horrifying reality. It is good to be willing to say whatever will return to clarity and fact-focus with conviction and counter those who shame people for saying it.
5. Reduce the incentives to nuisance alarms in the news. Not sure how to do this.
6. Improve the number and quality of resources available for people of many professions to learn honest rhetoric and in particular to learn the how to clearly describe the "why" of their profession's policy recommendations. "Start with why" is the interpersonal version of well-regulated dopamine signals.
[1] https://medium.com/@mosaicofminds/the-curb-cut-effect-how-ma...
I interpreted this as mostly driven by the nativism of Trump et al.
[1] https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/fedgov.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._executive_branch_...
That list is "executive branch officials who have been described by the media as a czar of some kind", not anything official or affecting the duties of that person in any particular way.