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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

The issue with randomly selected representation is that the support staff start to become the ones who effectively make the decisions.

This is the same issue with term limits (which to be clear, I'm in favor of, but we have to go in with our eyes open), which is that e.g. the congressional staffers gain power, especially if they persist across the end of the term limit.

In these kinds of cases, you almost need term limits for staff, which feels pretty cruel and arbitrary - "Thank you for making a career in public service but you are now legally barred from your chosen career"

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> This is the same issue with term limits (which to be clear, I'm in favor of, but we have to go in with our eyes open), which is that e.g. the congressional staffers gain power, especially if they persist across the end of the term limit.

Term limits are a bad hack trying to fix the problem that the status quo electoral system presents (1) too few meaningful choices, and (2) largely as a consequence of #1 and relatively stable local ideological mixes, features very strong incumbency preferences.

Fix the electoral system to resolve that (lots of ways to do that), and the broken idea of term limits stops being an attractive way to pretend that you are doing something without actually fixing the problems.

>the support staff start to become the ones who effectively make the decisions.

Yes, that's a variation of : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state

And if you try to place limits on staffers, then you’ll find even more legislation being drafted by lobbyists.

Outlaw lobbying/lobbyists. What's next?

This seems like an easy proposal, but I don't see many case studies of it being successfully implemented.

I can't really think of any "wholesale all lobbying forbidden", but at least for specific industries there are a couple. "WHO FCTC Article 5.3" which is about limiting the influence of tobacco companies is probably the first that comes to mind, and the most famous example. Singapore I think recently done some legislative changes around lobbying as well, but I'd confess to not knowing much about it, maybe someone here could fill out the blanks if they have the knowledge already.

Not possible in a country with freedom of speech protections

Maybe not possible in the specific country you're thinking about, with their specific implementation of "freedom of speech", but it's hardly the only one, and not all of them are incompatible with outlawing lobbying (if the US one even is, I dunno).

Simple. Don't protect it just like sharing nuclear secrets or CSAM isn't protected.

If you try to ban lobbying you will incidentally criminalize basically all political speech. White papers are a form of lobbying, providing testimony is a form of lobbying, running an ad campaign is lobbying, speaking with your congressional representative is lobbying.

It'd simply have to be carefully drafted policy rather than an internet comment.

So simple it's indescribable

This notion always puzzles me. It's not a complex idea.

Just like, say, banning GMO bananas. But such regulation is a whole text which may need to define or refer to definitions of "GMO" and "banana", specify what's banned, exemptions, enforcement authority, penalties, and so on. Maybe 10 pages of legalese. It requires time, expertise, research. But it's still just a ban on GMO bananas.

Or a programmed UI button to show a message. Simple. The specifics of the execution are a separate matter.

It's not "indescribable", but no one will describe it to you ad hoc and expecting it is silly.

What's "it"? Speaking in public?

Making strawmen. Your position of "policy is impossible to write" is inane.

Running a government and banning the representatives of your economy from talking to you is insanely stupid.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with lobbying, it is an essential part of the government and can not be legislated away, without crippling the entire country.

I have questions here, a lot of lobbying is done by:

a) trade organizations (we're all the onion farmers in Nebraska and want to make sure the Nebraska legislature doesn't pass laws that negatively impact us and promote laws that help us)

and

b) activist organizations (we're a coalition of organizations that protect water usage in the Mississippi delta and want to pass laws that promote conservation in those states)

Those groups often choose to retain professional lobbyists but will also send groups of interested parties to lobby who are not professional lobbyists.

Do you also ban trade organizations and activist organizations in this case? Do you carve out exceptions for them and just ban the "freelance" lobbyists? Most lobbying is meeting with legislators and talking with them about issues, educating them. How do you ban that without making legislators effectively useless (or if you're cynical, even more useless)?

Well, to be fair, I would also be in favor of banning lobbying entirely, which I recognize is also problematic - then you have laws being written based on sub rosa back room deals, since lobbying is to a certain degree "human relationships in the context of power dynamics" aka politics.

Banning lobbying would be effectively a ban on all political speech. Because that's what lobbying is: political speech. For example, yesterday I sent a bunch of letters to my elected politicians talking about the Rio Grande Plan[0]. That makes me a Rio Grande Plan lobbyist. Louis Rossmann spent several years traveling across-country to speak about right-to-repair[1] laws. That makes him a right-to-repair lobbyist.

What we actually are angry about is the presence of money in politics. American political campaigns burn money like nothing else, which is akin to being in a government meeting where everyone is shouting over one another, like to the point where people are bringing in loudspeakers and megaphones. If that example were a real situation, it would be entirely legal to go and have police officers take away the megaphones, and tell people to quiet down and take their turn.

But because money is involved, SCOTUS says that, no, shouting over everyone else with a big pile of cash is TOTALLY protected speech. Any money at all that is to effect political speech is inherently protected. And so we have campaign seasons that burn billions of dollars, and people who are basically not listened to, because all the anti-bribery law that was supposed to stop the election fundraising arms race got thrown out over a decade ago.

[0] A citizen-led plan to reactivate Salt Lake City's historic train station and reroute our regional rail service over to it.

[1] Laws that would make it easier to purchase repair parts for broken electronics and prohibit the use of digital locks to prevent the repair of said electronics.

Term limits seem fine, just make them a reasonable length. Say, three of their full six year terms for a Senator seems fine for example. Or maybe allow states to elect one senator to a fourth term (logically this will always be their senior senator) but never both and no fifth terms. [I'm assuming we'll allow, as for Presidents, an incomplete first term, for senators that might be by election to replace another out of sequence]

A freshman senator might be intimidated by an aide who knows DC like the back of their hand after forty years in the office back room, but when they're back for their second, let alone third term, that old hack doesn't know the first thing about the actual job, that aide isn't in those meetings hashing out a 2am compromise with the White House, and they're not in a town hall back home trying to explain to some fellow who has never left Kentucky why we need to spend so much money on a Navy they've never seen.

Another alternative, which existing American politicians will hate but too bad, is age limits. For example the UK's Supreme Court all have to retire by age 75. I can't imagine a lot of the oldest senators are effective legislators, they'd rather be in bed than get stuff done. So, age them out.

Great. Now we have inexperienced legislators, inexperienced aides, and experienced lobbyists. That's definitely going to be an improvement rather than an absolute catastrophe.

Term limits are like so many populist ideas: they sound great until you think at all about the consequences.

Effective government requires people with a long tenure. That's how you learn how the system operates, that's how you build the relationships that allow you to get things done, and that's how you build the reputation that allows you to get people to believe in what you say and accomplish things.

In my own defense, the kinds of term limits I'm talking about are much lengthier than most people start out wanting, I think. I would term limit senators at 5 terms, perhaps, and representatives at 12 or 15? I think the issue is not so much long tenures per se as losing relevance by spending an entire lifetime in one position in government.

Isn't that just reinventing aristocracy?

No. Elected officials have to be elected, which is a control and feedback mechanism.

Yeah, I feel like our form of representative democracy is the least bad option. At the very least, office-holders aren't entitled to their office beyond their term unless they're re-elected.

The fundamental problem is that governing is boring, complicated, and unfulfilling to most people. The most impactful elections to citizens' day-to-day lives (i.e., local offices, state legislatures, and primaries for those) have absolutely abysmal participation rates, even in states that bend over backwards with voter accessibility.

I think the point of contention the article and many people are identifying is that that control and feedback mechanism appears to be somewhat broken as evidenced by many elected officials achieving what amount to lifetime appointments that are only terminated by death or disability and even disability seems to be no obstacle in an increasing number of cases.

I'll take inexperienced legislators with fresh ideas who understand how the world actually works over 80 year old careerists whose only skill is fundraising and who still see the world through the lens of Cold War great man politics. Long tenure is how you get entrenched power dynamics, dynasties and eventually dictatorships, and government locked in eternal stasis and unable to adapt to modernity.

I'm really starting to think Thomas Jefferson was right and every 20 years we should just burn Washington to the ground, rip up the Constitution, hang every politician and start over, and make the new blood walk through the corpses on their way to work just to keep the fear of God fresh in their hearts.

FFS, Hillary Clinton had the long tenure. She had experience - implicitly as first lady, and explicitly as governor and secretary of state. She campaigned on policy. She lost to a buffoon conman sex pest with no political experience whose reputation hitherto was playing himself on tv.

Am I saying Hillary Clinton was a better person than Donald Trump? No. I'm not even saying she would have been a particularly good President. But I'm just pointing out how little "reputation" actually matters to American voters, because she was obviously vastly more qualified for the job, and if that mattered it wouldn't have been a contest at all. But the one thing Americans hate more than an experienced politician is an experienced legacy politician. FFS the most popular American President in recent history was an actor who had Alzheimers in office, and got advice from his wife's astrologer.

What he have is already an absolute catastrophe, an utter circus. The competent, well-meaning civic minded politicians you're referring to don't exist, nor does the educated, discerning voter base necessary to put them into office. People voted for Donald Trump the second time because they thought he could control the price of eggs. Like there was a fucking knob somewhere and Joe Biden just didn't want to turn it.

The least we can do is try to minimize the damage any specific idiot (in the voting booth or in office) might cause.

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