The difficulty in doing so is a big part of the problem. As per AOC's comments on twitter yesterday, at 2PM Members of Congress got 5000 pages of bill dropped on their desk with a vote call at 4PM.
The whole thing needs to be much more transparent.
We should outlaw bills like these.
They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc.
Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.
This is just politispeak for quid-pro-quo. If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
And what I'm saying is this never happens in America. Politics is a team sport and voters just blame the other team. We've just had the worst pandemic in living memory and the worst economic contraction in a generation and nearly every Senator won re-election despite months of inaction.
Yes, compromise and quid-pro-quo are the same thing. So what?
> If conglomerate bills are outlawed then maybe we can vote on issues instead of on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched.
You are voting on issues either way, and, cynically, voting on whether everyone's back is sufficiently scratched, either way. A single subject rule, such as is in place in the California legislature and several other state legislatures, simply reduces scope within which compromise can occur (or, alternatively, just makes the legislative compromises more complex and opaque as mechanisms are found to obey the technical requirements of the rule while evading its substantive intent, such as building in contingencies in one bill that are triggered by the passage or not of another bill.)
Quid-pro-quo isn't the problem, being able to trade-off across issues is a good thing.
The problem is legislators serving powerful narrow interests rather than the broad public interest, but narrowing the permitted scope of individual enactments doesn't do anything to help that.
It can be a good thing sometimes. But it can be also used for "do the thing you'd otherwise never agree to for your thing to pass" which is more of an ultimatum. Or even, "yeah, and add an aircraft carrier to that" to block some effort completely. (I think that was a recent relief bill, but can't find the link now)
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces...
The title of this post is: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming
Are you sure? Why are we passing completely new laws in our yearly budget bill? What does streaming laws have to do with paying forestry service janitors?
Maybe we wouldn't have a government shutdown emergency every year if our representatives didn't try to shoehorn their pet laws and their <strike>customers'</strike>lobbyists' favorite regulations in at the same time.
I don’t know why the behavior would exist otherwise..
The supreme power of the leadership more a symptom of the 50/50 political split, which empowers the party machinery. The legislative leadership weren’t household names at most points in time.
In my state the senators are democratically elected, is that not the case in yours? Or is your statement lamenting the fact that the country gives representation to states as distinct entities?
One of its nadir points in terms of accomplishments was preventing anti-lynching legislation from having a floor vote for 40-50 years.
"Senator so and so refused to support the end of violence against babies!!" or other such nonsense.
There's two major reasons I see why that doesn't happen. First, a 'no' vote is still taking a position. It requires additional explanation to differentiate "no because I couldn't understand it in time" and "no because I think it's a bad idea." That's a fair bit of nuance, which these days is... well often difficult to accurately and easily convey to others.
The second reason is that it's not just a matter of one vote per issue. It's not one massively complex issue that requires 5k+ pages to fully flesh out. It's a bunch of different stuff all jammed together, and votes can only cover the entire thing. Some of those things are often simple enough, and some are very time critical. Do you want to hold up the time critical bits for the rest of it?
If you do, can you get constituents to understand why, and agree with your decision to hold things up? For every voter that you can't convince, your political opponents now have an easy in. Can you afford that?
This is very true, but why, in the year 2020, is it still true?
Why does it seem like we can argue only about object level matters, and almost no one [1] can see that the framework we run politics on top of is fundamentally flawed? Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it?
[1] A rare exception to this in my opinion is Jimmy Dore's initiative to force a floow vote on Medicare for All
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Medicare+for+All%22+%22ji...
What I like about this approach is that it kind of pulls the "invisibility cloak" off of political claims and rhetoric, exposing the truth that lies inside. It appears that he's going to lose this battle (a vote will not be held), but even so it has forced a new level of propaganda to be deployed into the memeplex on very short notice, making it much easier for the average Joe to see through it. I think this is a good strategy: take away control of the playing field, so politicians can't use pre-written and memorized rhetorical talking points to dismiss obvious desires like affordable healthcare, which has fairly bi-partisan support among voters.
https://www.newsweek.com/69-percent-americans-want-medicare-...
It doesn't really matter if M4A is not achieved (that's where we're at anyways) - the main strategic goal imho should be to bring awareness to the public mind of the notion that politicians are not being truthful (notice I am not saying they are lying) when they say that their goals and actions are to execute "the will of the people", or do what is "best" for the American population. Politics, as it is, is largely all theatre, although even the participants themselves may not actually be consciously aware of it.
"All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-...
> Would it maybe help if we were to consciously force ourselves to conceptualize society/humanity as a video game, that has parameters and behaviors, and the state of the system can be acted on, but our actions will only be effective if the game allows it?
For those interested in the first question, and the answer to why the second question is not the right way to go, check out Adam Curtis's most recent film, HyperNormalisation [0]
I think you're maybe misinterpreting his message - he describes our reality as if it is a video game that's been created for us to live in, which is my very point. Thinking of it this way allows one to see the system more clearly, and in turn manipulate it to one's own ends (and very easily, provided those embedded within it are unaware of the situation, which is very much the case).
If (even for the sake of discussion) one assumes this to be the case, then availing oneself of this very same technique (and do it better, leveraging superior thinking & magnitude of compute (via crowd-sourcing), lower requirements for stealth, etc) to fight back seems like a no-brainer to me.
Getting those who live within such a system to even consider this possibility on the other hand, this is not an easy task. I see no no-brainer way to go about this, other than just talking about it explicitly. I'm essentially proposing that we apply the very same systems analysis techniques that we would use at work to the very system we live within, but it seems this is a very non-intuitive idea.
I could even see clever presentations like a pie chart illustrating how much of a bill is actually related to the topic at hand. That would make a fantastic tool for an opposition member to use in order to illustrate the absurdities of these omnibus bills.
This looks like a case of Snopes trying to make Nancy Pelosi look good without justification. Their "important context" doesn't actually improve anything.
a) quite literally factual - she said those exact words b) semantically similar in and out of context - Even if you read the whole speech she gave, she still seems to be implying that you need to have the act passed so that you can see what it looks like when implemented. She gives a rough draft of important desired outcomes (many of which ended up being false), but the point of that one one sentence remains the same: to establish that the bill needs to be passed in order for it's real implications to be understood.
To be honest, I half agree with Pelosi here, but snopes is definitely trying to provide her with some unwarranted cover here.
Since most of the bill is presumably the same as earlier drafts, we’d be mostly just looking for red flags. Heck, in theory you could even run it through a diff tool!
It was hurried, yes. But hardly unusual.
More importantly though, you can’t reasonably budget more than a trillion dollars without some horse trading. AOC’s real problem is that she doesn’t trust her party leadership, and they don’t trust her. If she trusted her leadership there’s no need to complain before making her yes vote.
The complaint isn’t against a 5000 page law, it’s a 5000 page law with 2 hours to determine the vote. Regardless of party lines, whenever this happens we should rightfully hear complaints.
Why? If the relief is federal, which I understand to be the case, no state or local level relief, then why must there be horse trading? Do the international relief in another bill. Do the illegal streaming is a felony in another bill. Etc.
It's like creating a massive program around a god function with globals instead of setting up sane module boundaries based on data structures and their relationships. You're gonna have a bad time.
Choosing what industries, etc get relief is very political.