Hacker News Reader

Comment by lax4ever | Hacker News Reader

I also don't think the system is broken. Yes, absolutely they should be voting against it. That is their prerogative, even duty, as elected members of a representative republic. However, for every vote there are going to be people who agree and people who disagree and both sides are accountable to the people who voted them in. The system is not broken when everyone does their job, regardless of the yay/nay count on a vote. The system breaks when those elected refuse to do the job that they were elected to do.

View on HN

They are doing their job. You just aren't looking at the big picture enough. If they show up so the procedural quorum is met, then they haven't done anything to keep what they are against from happening.

If anything, this should demonstrate that the winner takes all model of elections has driven us to a polarization where nuclear options are being deployed. This means packing either sides ball and going home is a better, more likely option than achieving any compromise.

This is the danger of diametrically opposed political tmrhetoric. If the majority of legislators are heavily polarized rather than swingable centrists, nothing will ever get done.

Two things I disagree with... this isn't the "nuclear option", and I'm not sure that this is connected with modern polarization.

The reason that these quorum rules are so old is because people have been evading quorum for decades or centuries. Just take Bob Packwood (D-OR) as an example... in February 1988, he was forcibly carried into the US Senate chamber by capitol police. Or look at Abraham Lincoln, who tried and failed to evade quorum in the Illinois senate in December 1840.

The nuclear option, IMO, is civil war. Which has happened and continues to happen across the world, at great cost to life. Absentee legislators... IMO, just bureaucracy in action. I will accept an inefficient or wasteful bureaucracy any day, if the alternatives are worse--and there are many plausible worse alternatives.

I use nuclear option in the sense that in a functioning legislature, strategic denial of quorum should be an unneeded arcanity. We are not in those times. I'd actually be curious to research how frequent the act is. Intuitively, one would hope it only happens in exceptional circumstances; but it's definitely something that with increasing frequency, we should be taking as an indicator of disunity and severe divisiveness. As a hypothetical legislator (on the majority side), this should be a signal to deescalate. Instead? All speed ahead is the traditional response.

You can argue it's normal; and preferable to actual blades and bombs violence. I argue that if you have a group shoving a stick in the spokes of Government that hard, the violence is well under way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com