Do the lobbyists have some incredibly legitimate insider information they share with the senators? Do they just throw cash/donations at them?
“Bipartisan support“ is, since we are well out of the pre-1990s realignment period, mostly a sign of low political salience, an issue that doesn't have much relevance to voting behavior to most of the public. Breadth (%) of support or opposition is far less important than depth (impact on voting, volunteering, and donating behavior), and this is an issue where the depth of support in the general public is near 0, where the depth of opposition from entrenched industry interests is high.
See what Alaska did recently for an example of how to fix this
Personally, I see political parties as potentially important to a well-functioning democracy. The main problem I think is lack of competition. I would love to see at least a third party, maybe half a dozen or more, emerge in the United States. Obviously people have been trying to make that happen for decades, without success. I wonder what type of solutions there are to increase the number of viable parties? The one that seems most plausible to me is ranked choice voting, for one of the many minor variations of the idea. Are there other things?
No, it's not. California has eliminated primaries in the usual sense (what is called a “primary”, outside of Presidential nominations, in California is the first round of a two-round majority-runoff general election where you aren't allowed to win outright on the first ballot even with a clear majority), and yet here we are talking about the effect in California, so partisan primaries can not be the issue. We’ve ruled that out by not having them.
The issue is FPTP single-member district legislative elections, which supports partisan duopoly and narrows the meaningful space of political debate toward a single high-salience axis and issues where splits align well with that axis, marginalizing all other issues. This has been somewhat extensively studied in comparative study of modern representative democratic systems, see, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.
This is much less true than it seems superficially; its true that the state-level government is dominated by Democrats (including many offices that are nominally nonpartisan), but important local government offices, particularly Sheriffs–which are also nominally nonpartisan–are dominated by Republicans. This was particularly significant during the height of the COVID pandemic, because enforcement of public health orders is, under the State Constitution and laws, almost entirely entrusted to county Sheriffs, and every single county Sheriff in the State publicly announced one form or another of non-enforcement.
Which is not what I said, Sheriffs were an example, not an exhaustive list of exceptions.
> 95% percent of the government is not law enforcement.
That’s strange, because law enforcement, corrections, and criminal legal system is about 10% of California’s budget.
> And all the prosecutors are dems
No, they aren’t. Like all local offices, it’s a formally nonpartisan office, but its fairly common for Republicans or (especially in Dem-leaning areas), “independents” who were Republicans before running for the office and whose stances on policy issues are indistinguishable from Republicans to be DA’s, though DA’s are less consistently hard-right than Sheriffs.
Name any three blue counties with Republican county sheriffs.
That's part of why it's been so common to pass as a state-level initiative. If you actually get it to a popular vote, it'll pass because people are at least lightly in favor, but legislatures are slow to pass it themselves because it has little impact on their re-election chances.
While it is technically still federally prohibited, and there is some danger of reach-back prosecutions if policy changes, since 2014 state law has effectively controlled because of the enforcement restrictions in the Rohrbacher-Farr Amendment, which has been continuously renewed as part of funding bills, and is a substantive federal action.
My naive take on this would be to have poll questions like:
> Are you in favor of consumers' right to repair? ...How strong is your position? (1–5)
Of course this is vulnerable to strategic answering, where people just slam on ‘5’ for each question. Like how star ratings are inflated on Amazon.
My next strategy would be pairwise contests. So:
> Alice supports right-to-repair (RTR) and raising property taxes. Bob is opposed to RTR and wants to lower property taxes. Who would you vote for?
> Carol supports RTR and applying the death penalty to a wider range of felonies. David opposes RTR and wants to eliminate capital punishment altogether. Who would you vote for?
But too much of that and you'd start to lose people. How many questions can you pose before you're only getting answers from serial poll-takers?
Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs at the very corporations they benefited while in office.
They don't have to be outright bribed while in office (though it's not unknown for that to happen), but they know they'll be handsomely rewarded once they leave.
That's not to mention them or their family members investing in companies they know will benefit from their actions while in office.
Becoming a politician is a bit like becoming a musician: Spend the best years of your life 'putting your time in' with a 98% chance you'll never make it big. Only the 2% that made it big get offered those $500k/year sinecures.
If you're already in the powerful 2% you've probably already compromised on your principles many times to get there, so the $500k/year for compromising them a little more is practically free money.
If you're entering politics, though? As you've only got a 2% chance of making the $500k, the expected value is only $10k. Not much of a motivation.
> then why are so few people interested in becoming politicians?
Obviously because they can't afford to because they actually have to work.
Uh... what? There's a shortage of politicians nowhere, lol.
The US system steers naturally towards two parties that both advance corporate interests, and that's what's happening now.
I really should've saved that story because I can't find it anywhere now.
Basically, on the streets, most people supported him. In reality, people weren't enough. If they even mattered. Turned out you had to align yourself with one of the four major parties or you had zero chance at gaining traction in any county that mattered. Funnily enough, the "easy" counties would be even harder - low population, low income, lack of education, low voter turnout, always voting for populists/authoritarians.
The major parties have the power and the money and there was no way they'd ever let a newcomer just barge in without being vetted first. The majority of new parties were absorbed into the big ones.
This is a joke, I don't know what's to be done about it and I'm sure that's the case in other countries, too. Only good thing is politicians stay out of private business as they're starting to realize the richer the private population becomes, the richer they will be.
And even then, they fail at making a better environment for small businesses, instead choosing to focus on big companies, especially foreign ones. Let them come, buy up everything for cheap and use the population as cheap labor forever. Why would the government care?
> Products should be designed to have their lifespan extended by regular maintenance and repair.
> Design: Integrate Design for Repair principles into eco-design product design practices.
And I have seen Right to Repair efforts that demanded repairable devices, even if that meant more bulk or more cost, or other tradeoffs.
Framework and similar efforts have demonstrated that it's possible to build a repairable device that people actually like, without compromising too much on other factors. But until those substantial engineering efforts had been put in, this seemed like a fundamental tradeoff between two sets of somewhat-incompatible properties consumers may want, and should be able to choose between. (It's still a tradeoff insofar as devices providing repairability don't provide all the features available from other devices.)
It looks like the reason for this mismatch in opinions is because repair.org is not associated with Rossmann. To me, their existence is going to hurt the chances of right to repair, because people will point to their goals as a reason to not consider the part/version of right to repair that should be much less controversial (in a relative sense. any regulations are controversial just due to being regulations)
It’s not surprising it’s a dead bill. That leaves a nice opportunity for TSMC to capture a bunch of Apple’s margin without having had to do any of the chip R&D.
In any case this is a theoretical point, it's usually some stupid little chip on the motherboard that got wet and rusty, not the CPU. Or the screen broke. Or the battery is too old.
On the other hand, the regular people complain about the topic in pubs and coffee shops and online and at the dinner table, and might fill out a petition or a pre-made letter. They might even send a personalized email or physical letter (too often poorly worded and badly formatted with no evidentiary backing), or leave voice mails with a staffer. They won't do this very often, but feel that they have strength in numbers. Spoiler: receiving the same misspelled email from 5000 people doesn't make the legislator (or their staff) think "oh wow a lot of people are really upset by this", it just to spam/trash cans.
Financial contribution ("bribes") and fancy dinners or gifts are usually the boogeyman when it comes to blaming lobbyists, but those are tangential and not as common as most people think. The biggest factor for a successful lobbyist is the research, presentation, and persistence.
My experience is quite different and comes from doing grass roots lobbying at the state and Federal level. Grass-roots lobbying is just where regular citizens go do the lobbying instead of paid professionals. If you ever get a chance to get involved in this kind of lobbying, it will change how you think about government, and you'll be pleasantly surprised to see you can actually make a difference. You'll also find out that being a legislator at any level is an almost impossible job.
Lobbyists (yes, they are individuals, but usually have an organization and staff behind them) are paid to show up and "help" legislators. This ranges from providing information all the way up to writing bills. Often bills are initially written by lobbyists (the joke is that most laws are written by staff interns and lobbyists). The reason lobbyists are effective is simple: legislators all the way up to the US Senate don't have time to do the work needed to write laws, debate them, pass them, campaign, go to parades and graduations and communicate with constituents... so they work with lobbyists, who are well paid to have time. Yes, professional lobbyists always have an ulterior motive, and always have time, because their paycheck depends on it.
I do some grass roots lobbying in Indiana. When we can't get a bill to the floor, it usually comes down to this:
1. The public might support the bill, but voters aren't willing to vote across the aisle over the issue behind the bill. So, the politician can kill the bill without fear.
2. There's a technical problem with the bill that would make it a bad law. Sometimes, this is sabotage, but most often, it is discovered late in the process and the bill dies in committee until next session.
3. The law would change the staus quo in some way that is harmful to the close supporters of legislators. This is less about money, and more about relationships.
The answer to all of the above is simple: get more public support, and even work to unseat legislators that are opposed to your issue. State legislators usually don't have a strong grip on their seats (some do), so they can be unseated, often in primary elections.
The Appropriations committee (AKA Ways and Means in the US House) is where lobbyists spend their money. Anything that costs money has to go through this, and everything costs money.
The argument that this bill cost money was based on the potential impact on the courts as legal actions would be files to enforce the new warranty rights.
Rather than trying to influence every potentially concerned member of legislature, better to spend 100x on the people who control the purse.
The outcome of that is that most bills are written by lobbyists and most state reps vote how the lobbyists tell them to, because they lobbyists are the ones making the deals with the other lobbyists, instead of the long time representatives being in leadership.
Each system has its pros and cons, but one of the main cons of term limits is that lobbyists are in control.
Sponsors have lobbyist support and the bills themselves may be written by them, for them, with any public benefit a side effect. As long as it “sounds good” other lawmakers feel forced to go along with.
This is why you'd want liquid democracy, arbitrary right of recall or something along those lines.
Thee party controls 31 of the 40 seats in the senate, and 60 of the 80 seats in the lower house.
They have had a majority since 1996.
Same one party rule situation exists in some very "red" states of course.
Unlike the rest of the country, California has "jungle primaries". So, you can wind up in the election with "Democrat vs Democrat". This prevents the "Barely win the primary and cruise to a safe general election."
In addition, California can put something like this up as a proposition and override the legislature.
However, both of these situations are likely to wind up with a LOT of entrenched money being thrown around in opposition to "right to repair". So, the supporters need to get their ducks in a row and demonstrate real support in the electorate for this.
> Same one party rule situation exists in some very "red" states of course.
I'm speaking in ignorance right now, but I am unaware of any red states that implement either jungle primaries or election propositions.
> The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
Even more of a stark difference once you look at differences in state laws.
Well, what does that tell you? Majority public opinion does not matter. Money does.
This is the result of the deliberate way in which clever malicious spindoctors manipulated political debate over the years in such a way so that what once was a pondered opinion became later akin to a religious affiliation. The bottom line is that an opinion can be changed while a religious belief cannot; it's the system's way to ensure that once a voter is captured it stays loyal forever.
In my personal opinion the "security lock" language of this bill is dangerously vague, and the benefits it offers in terms of third-party repair are worth almost nothing to me, so I opposed the bill.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ftc-report-shows-growing-i...
Politician support corporations, not the people. Wake the F up.