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Comment by mijoharas | Hacker News Reader

As someone that doesn't have a strong understanding of american politics, can I check my understanding?

This means that a majority of senators voted to oppose the bill, (after it had been approved by the house). Is that correct?

Are there common websites where you can see exactly how individual senators vote on specific issues? (in the UK we have publicwhip.org.uk where you can search anything that you care about and see if your mp voted in a way you agree with).

What method do americans tend to use to check that their politicians are voting in their interest?

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"Dying in committee" means that the bill did not go to the entire California Senate for a vote, but that a majority of the committee to which the bill was assigned were unable to support the bill to move it onto the floor. It looks like the article links to the site that tracks bill status, but it appears that site does not record how a committee voted.

> it appears that site does not record how a committee voted

Do you know if that information will be public record in any way? If not, this seems like an awful lot of power in very few, non-accountable hands...

They're accountable in the sense that they're all up for reelection. You can show up and demand an explanation of the bill status and the role they played. If you don't like it you can vote for someone else.

In practice I suspect very few people care all that much. Some do, of course, but for most it won't be top of their priority list.

This is the real challenge of democracy. We think of it in terms of yeah no votes, but the real work is done by the people choosing from millions of options to put the final up-down choice in front of you. Nobody has yet found a good way to do collaboration on that scale.

> demand an explanation of the bill status and the role they played

That's just what I meant. Can you know which senator voted how within that committee? Otherwise it'd be easy for them to say "well I voted for it of course!"

It likely didn't come to a vote. They were probably still working on coming up with text to vote on.

It just hasn’t been updated yet. You’ll be able to see it when the update happens, here https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xht...

The Rules Committees from both chambers have required Roll Call votes, primarily so CADEM can punish its members who go off message.

The link is right in the article: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

It shows the history of the bill including votes. Each state does this differently, as well as the federal government. As for what happened to this bill, it never made it to a full senate vote, it died in a sub-committee, essentially.

Yes but the recent Senate Committee votes for this bill have yet to be published on the site.

If they vote against your interests you don't vote for them again and try to not get them re-elected. However, through writing their own rules, heavy campaigning and the two party system making a vote for your favorite team better than letting the other guy get in this in effect no longer works on either side. It requires a fairly unified effort to get someone out but the majority of voting attention is squarely captured on both sides leading to the same hackery voted in again and again.

It's one of the many reasons why I don't see changes in the American political system happening without real rebellion type actions but the pain isn't felt enough yet to make thinking like that completely palatable.

And not to mention the voting body of the united states is completely polarized and divided.

> leading to the same hackery voted in again and again.

Or being replaced by an isomorphic sock puppet.

> It's one of the many reasons why I don't see changes in the American political system happening without real rebellion type actions but the pain isn't felt enough yet to make thinking like that completely palatable.

Parties have changed in this country's history before without rebellion.

It will happen again. I imagine soon (25 years or less), even.

IIRC the last time that happened was in the 1850s, when the Whig party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States)) lost its significance and was replaced by the Republican party? That's more than 170 years ago, so I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to happen again...

The republican party just in the last 10 years changed from Reaganism to populism. Even if the name is the same their platform absolutely is not. When a party realizes their platform is a loser it'll change its tune.

I think fundamental elements of the system are broken such that we even landed on a two party system in the first place and it’s more of those types of changes I’d like to see. In terms of ideology Parties change all the time. Look at the transformation the GOP has had over the last 10 years even. That I’m not worried about, but issues like term limits to prevent the effective gerontocracy we have, ranked choice voting, stopping arbitrary district restructuring, effective representation by population and more are things that benefit both existing parties regardless of their current ideology and so they don’t stand to change.

I also go back and forth on the electoral college in the case of the president but I’m not quite at the point where I want it to disappear without having an alternative.

Are there common websites where you can see exactly how individual senators vote on specific issues?

From the article, where it is linked "SB 983", clicking that, and clicking the tab that says "Votes" will show who voted yay and nay for this bill[1]. There are many sites, yes, but you can also just get this directly from state legislatures.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xht...

This means that a majority of senators voted to oppose the bill, (after it had been approved by the house). Is that correct?

No, the bill did not get to a vote by the full CA senate. Senate committees deal with the bill before that and this one did not get through that hurdle on the way to becoming law.

https://www.senate.ca.gov/committees

Before a bill goes before the full Senate it gets debated/edited in a relevant committee, if the committee votes against the bill it never goes up for the full vote.

Does it mean that whoever selects (controls) the committee pretty much selects the fate of the bill ?

The committees are generally permanent, not instantiated per bill, and the senators on the committee doesn't change often (the majority party does get to have a majority membership in all the committees) but yeah, committee membership can be really powerful and gets used as a reward/threat by party leadership.

Not really. In CA, if h/a really wanted something, they could gut and amend an existing bill that did make it out of committee.

Or use the proposition system (public vote), but that system is just as captured, IMO.

sorry, what is h/a?

> What method do americans tend to use to check that their politicians are voting in their interest?

Sadly it's usually directly correlated with how much money you give them.

house.gov and senate.gov both have public tallies on bills.

https://clerk.house.gov/Votes https://www.senate.gov/legislative/votes_new.htm

Not for California bills

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