Yeah what happens is because we have no term limits these Senators stay in office for 100 years and amass huge amounts of insider info, its an incredibly debased system at this point.
"Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government"
by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsi...
If you want democratically elected representatives to be able to gain power over the machinery of government, then you should advocate for longer terms, without limits. If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.
Senate terms are 6 years, not 2.
We’re talking about the suggestion “if every Senator were elected for 15 years...
Which, yes, was an odd suggestion in this thread for the reason you point out, sure.
We'd be right back where we are now - people server 30+ years, so entrenched in serving their own good and not the public good.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
With 15 year terms, that can't happen on any reasonable timetable, either. If you maintained the three-class system, you’d have 1/3 of the Senate elected every five years. If you kept roughly equal sets every two years you'd have 2/15 (13-14 out of 100) every 2 years.
The proposal was for Senators specifically. This is clearly different, but it's not clear what it is. So, is your proposal:
(1) to abolish the Senate, and do this in the House, or (2) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate, maintains equal representation (540 not being divisible by 50 makes this problematic), (3) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate without equal representation, or (4) to do this to the House, but retain the Senate as is, or (5) something else?
Note that #3 and arguably #1 are outside the power of even a Constitutional Amendment, since the power to amend the Constitution explicitly does not extend to removing equal representation of states in the Senate.
> Of course, when one side has a large lead, it means they are safe for a few months
A 4 seat (<1%) lead is safe for 6 mmonths. A 16 seat (3%) lead is safe for 15 months. A margin the proportional size of that after the 2018 House election in the US would take losing every seat up for election for 3 years, 9 months to lose. These are small margins; a large lead is absolutely secure for lot longer than “a fee months”.
> The important thing to realize is that most of the current problems with
I’m fully behind that. Long legislative terms just is a very bad idea that is hyperfocused on one (overstated) problem and which makes (almost independent of what else you try to do alongside) most other problems worse.
You make it sound like that is a long time. In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.
But having a safe majority that is locked in for longer than 5 years can bring benefits. The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive. Therefore, we should want all real power to be in the hands of the long-term majority, not the current majority. Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.
I believe you are a software developer? So you should understand the concept that a signal can be derived from a noisy source, given enough time.
It is compared to the claim that “a large margin is safe for a few months”.
> In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.
Yes, but it assures that 100% of seats will be elected in 5 years, and that no majority is safe for longer than that and none takes more than a majority of the elections in that time to overturn.
> The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive
No, the evidence is that effectively representative, responsive democracies produce the best results for their people. The US mostly fails on effective representation, and the proposed change would compound that by making it also fail on responsiveness.
> Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.
Sure, maybe, that's why procedures that require long (e.g., multistage, with legally or practically mandatory delays) process for major changes arguably make sense.
But rendering any substantial majority effectively immune to change once established defeats the purpose of that. If the argument is correct at all, it is that big changes should come from legislative majorities that survive for an extended time because they represent a durable majority in the electorate.
But tbh, if I had the answers, I'd run for govt :-D
It bugs me that every representative we elect is expected to have their own plan other than to "represent". Fast talk and snappy speeches are cheap. Willingness to acquire deep understanding, be challenged, and even sometimes put your own convictions aside for your constituents, and the systems that exist to serve them? That's hard.
I'm an outsider! They yell, as they have private meetings for billions.
Pelosi has been in office for 18 terms... so how hasn't she been able to "fix the system"?
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15...
'Sokay, the architecture is fundamentally flawed, in part because it was designed when less was known about the pragmatics of representative democracy because of less extensive experience and no systematic research and analysis, but also because in some parts it was designed with bad purpose (notably, entrenching chattel slavery.)
Undermining the whole architecture ought to be the goal.
Some people dislike the idea of legislators serving long terms. I've always wondered why, exactly, we are comfortable with judges serving long terms, but not legislators.
What's really needed is an end to backwards plurality voting and monopolistic primaries - have one big runoff vote. Make voting for better candidates not be at odds with accepting the safe option. Of course no politician is going to support this, as marketing themselves as the lesser of two evils has become the entirety of their promotion.
Furthermore, get rid of terms and have every single office on the ballot every single year, or better yet every quarter. This would make it much harder to spend overwhelmingly on campaigns (since the campaign would never end). It would also provide a stage for challengers to gain momentum organically rather than this long-iterated process where a challenger becomes viable in one cycle only to be forgotten the next time.
Sure, but long terms make the democratically elected representatives are less representative of the public will because of lack of immediate accountability.
What would be better is current terms, absence of term limits, and candidate-centered proportional—e.g., by single transferrable vote (STV)—elections in multimember districts (say, up to 5 member districts for the House, two-member for the Senate by putting those from the same state in the same class and electing them together), so that typically there is some choice at the general election within parties (e.g., a party with an incumbent but not all the seats available would usually be incentivized to run at least one more candidate to contest for a potential additional seat) and more viable parties, so that you have both accountability and representatives that are durable in office if they retain popular support.
> If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.
If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we get government even more detached from the popular will, both legislatively, executively (because of the Senates veto of top executive appointments), and in judicial selection.
And the reduced accountability would supercharge corruption, too.
Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will. The public does not understand the issues. The voters do not know what they want. Achen and Bartels also make the interesting argument that when there is more than one issue (more than one dimension) it becomes difficult to build a 51% coalition that also has 51% support on every issue, and where there are, say, 100 issues, it becomes almost mathematically impossible to build a 51% coalition that also holds the popular position on every issue. Put differently, to win elections, politicians must advocate for some deeply unpopular issues. This is the most important thing to understand if we are going to understand "Why elections do not bring about responsive government." (the subtitle of the book).
On the other issue, that the public is ignorant of most issues, remains a real concern.
If one takes that seriously, the solution is to abandon elections and the pretense of democracy entirely.
Arend Lijphart, on the other hand, has shown that there is a public will, people do know what they want, and that democratic systems with greater electoral proportionality deliver it to them better and make them happier with government.
That does not follow at all. The benefits of democracy have been well-documented -- as well documented as the fact that the voters don't understand the issues and do not know what they want. The evidence on both points is overwhelming. Those facts are not in contradiction to each other, rather, it is clear that the benefits of democracy do not come from the voters. The benefits must come from somewhere else:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
"Take, for instance, money. A small team of highly ethical individuals can generally trust one another to safeguard money in an appropriate way. Many small churches and family businesses are run this way, with loose controls over who can deposit or spend. However, as a company grows, the chance you'll hire an unethical individual also grows. At a certain scale it is almost certain that a worker will steal some money, if they have the chance to do so. So a company must impose rules about handling money, and there needs to be a process for paying bills, with someone authorized to write checks and use the company credit cards. This is the beginning of your financial bureaucracy, and the tight limit on who holds the authority to spend is the beginning of hierarchy in this area."
"Is this a bad thing? Again, you'll confuse yourself if you think about this in terms of good or bad. Just focus on your goals. What strengths do you want to build into your organization?"
"Nowadays, there is a widespread idea that bureaucracy makes an organization rigid. But consider the ways that a well-designed bureaucracy for money control can make your organization more flexible. If you decide to keep your money control bureaucracy small then you'll also need to keep your purchasing process simple, perhaps by centralizing all purchasing decisions in the hands of the CEO or CFO. That one individual then becomes a choke point that limits progress – nothing can get done until they find time to pay some bills and buy some necessary materials or services. And there is an obvious limit on how much the company can grow when the authority to pay a bill is so limited. But even when the money handling bureaucracy grows to three or four people, that’s still not enough to oversee complex spending patterns, so your company will still be forced to follow simple and inflexible rules. By contrast, what if you wanted to decentralize the power to make purchases? What if you wanted to empower each team with the ability to make whatever purchases they felt they needed, up to some reasonable limit? That would make your organization much more flexible, but it also makes it more difficult to track the money, and therefore it requires a larger bureaucracy for tracking each dollar. My point is, the larger bureaucracy can actually help enable some kinds of decentralized decision making, and thus improve the agility of the organization. A growing bureaucracy does not automatically equal growing inflexibility, rather, the whole point is to try to maintain flexibility at scale."
An excerpt from:
"Don't make a fetish of having flat organization"
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/dont-make-a-fetish-of-havin...
Term limits won't get us there. We need to go in the other direction.
Working for a long time on a given problem may make one competent, but it doesn't make one good.
Electing Senators for life is essentially what we have now, and that seems to be working spectacularly.
- No federal employee making in excess of 2x (3x?) poverty level may remain on the job for more than 8 years. Possible exemptions: senators + enlisted military personnel. (Need more turnover at the top of officer corps anyway)
- No appointee federal bureaucrat may remain on the job for more than 8 years
- Any appointed bureaucrat or elected official, will have a fixed 79% and 99% tax bracket on any income in excess of the high watermark of the average income in the 5 years preceding their appointment or election.
There. Fixed it. Want to serve?
Do it for duty Not for money.
In my opinion it's not a solution but it is another way to limit the amount of this kind of trading.
Through the 80s and 90s, I recall politicians and talking heads using the phrase "...even the appearance of impropriety". I'm tempted to conclude there's something telling about the way this quaint phrase seems to have disappeared.
EDIT: not saying term limits are the answer, just that I can see the relationship suggested.
I do agree that politicians aren't even trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Their response seems to be that in the absence of absolute proof of impropriety then any appearance of it is ok.
The Democrats held the House of Representatives for something like 40 years straight until 1994. You had famous scandals involving entrenched Democratic Congressmen. In 1994 Republicans made term limits a rallying point and they took over the House. Both parties have since jostled for control of the House. But when Republicans had the power they did not impose term limits. It’s just a rallying point and will do nothing to stop corruption. There may be good reasons for term limits but anti-corruption isn’t one of them.
I like to think people's terms limit would be reached before they get jaded and cynical.. At the very least, it would reduce the number of years (and hence the total amount of money) lobbyists, etc. would be focused on them. Someone that might think $100K in lobbyist money isn't worth the risk of repercussions, might think $1M (over time) is.
I think at the worst, we'd be right where we are now...
Plus with term limits, at least we'd be rid of them, instead of having them perpetually come back...
However, the litmus test would probably be if we actually get term limits.. After all, if they're that corrupt, they won't vote against their own interests.
instead of 100 senators, let's have 100 per state [0]. instead of 1 representative per 750,000, let's go back to the original 1 per 30,000, giving us 11,000 representatives. let's have 99 supreme court justices, rather than 9. let's elect all the cabinet positions directly and separately. instead of multi-year terms, let's vote every single year for each representative office, and make election day a mandatory-paid holiday for everyone (to give folks time to research and consider their votes). let's convert many more administrative positions to elected offices. repeal citizen's united, which flooded political campaigns with unlimited amounts of corporate money (giving the wealthy even more disproportionate voice on top of their already disproportionate voice).
it's be messy at times, but we don't get good civics and good governance without the people being given more time and space to think about governance in depth.
[0]: alternatively, we could divide up states into smaller entities, which would be even better for decentralizing power (and limiting corruption), but that's much harder to do.
This is precisely why individual states can stand up to the federal government -- people in California could make policies that devastate Maryland, for example. Not because they want to, but because they lack context --- even reasonable authority.
I'm ambivalent on term limits for House members like Pelosi, though. They are representatives for the people of the States, and as such the people they represent have the right and ability to kick them out, or not. There is also the argument that would you rather have a dog that knows where the bones are buried, or a dog that digs up the whole yard?
That said, members of Congress should have severe restrictions on investing for themselves and their immediate family. They either need to police it themselves, or there needs to be some kind of law that covers it. Not that that is going to happen, as we have the ultimate in foxes guarding the henhouse in our government these days, but it would make for a powerful populist position if anybody had the courage to push it.
That might be tolerable, right after we reduce the powers of the Senate to those of the British House of Lords, which it's original theory of representation is as outdated and inconsistent with representative democracy as, and transfer it's para-executive functions to the House.
Pelosi is a Representative, so none of those things are true here.
Give the voters the ability to pick more than two options.
However, there are some states that don’t pay their legislators at all and that comes with its own problems.