Congress Became the Weakest Branch | Hacker News Reader

Congress Became the Weakest Branch

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20 pointsmarojejian15 comments

I've felt increasingly politically homeless over the past few years. Neither major party appears to care about the two largest problems facing the U.S.: the national debt, and the inability of Congress to assert the powers delegated to it by the Constitution. Though the problems become obvious to one party while the other is in power, they end up doing nothing about it when the pendulum swings back.

Getting rid of the filibuster, adding more seats to the House, and states adopting some form of ranked choice voting, would be a good start. Ultimately we will need a broader cultural shift back to the values of the Founders: rule of law, federalism, and limited government. Unfortunately with the rise of populism on the right and left, it doesn't seem like we are headed in the right direction.

> Neither major party appears to care about the two largest problems facing the U.S.

Forget about national politics and parties. Focus on the races in front of you. Irrespective of consequence. Local, primary, pre-primary informal caucusing, et cetera. It’s tedious. But there is a shocking amount of power that even small amounts of civic engagement away from general elections brings.

Unless the only issues you care about are hot button, there is a good chance you can individually sway policy outcomes in a meaningful way. (I have.)

If you honestly think think both sides are "abusing the same power", you clearly are oblivious.

Which your proposal to abolish the filibuster further proves: it would make governing even more a "winner-takes-all" game. Or ranked choice voting: you can't even stop Republicans from gerrymandering. (And no, gerrymandering is not done by "both sides". California did it as reprisal and put provisions to get back to a fair system when Republicans stop gerrymandering. And gerrymandering is the official strategy of the GOP from bottom to top.)

Your quote "abusing the same power" appears nowhere in my post. I am saying that neither Democrats nor Republicans, when they get into power, do anything to bring the deficit down to 3% of GDP as is recommended by economists, or to constrain the military actions and executive orders of the President on their side. I'm not making a "both sides are equally bad" argument, I'm saying that neither side is doing what it would take to fix the problem.

I'm willing to go either way on the fillibuster; that was just one example which the article talks about. In particular, they talk about filibuster reform rather than abolishing it, so I may have worded it too strongly in my original post. Still, I think there's a legitimate argument that the increase in use of the filibuster over the past few decades has had the practical consequence of delegating legislative power to the Executive branch.

> I'm not making a "both sides are equally bad" argument, I'm saying that neither side is doing what it would take to fix the problem.

Close but it's a feature, not a bug - both sides are equally good at not fixing, and not even acknowledging, the problems which leads to relentless beating around the bush, like wrangling about the filibuster, gerrymandering, etc.

> In particular, they talk about filibuster reform rather than abolishing it

That's not a real problem, it's just noise.

I think you're just wrong though. For one, the debt is not our top problem. It's a big one, but not the top. Climate is tops. Dems care about it somewhat and pushed a huge bill through during Biden's term. Republicans don't care at all. Healthcare is another big one. Dems do an ok job, Republicans are terrible. In terms of rule of law, again, Dems do ok and Republicans just wipe their ass with the Constitution. Dems are not strongly asserting their role because they are in the minority. There were many votes to curb tariffs and war powers and they were shot down on party lines. It's also very much the fault of the conservative supreme court who have been ridiculously deferential to Trump and are allowing him to seize unprecedented power. The same conservative justices who voted to allow unlimited corporate campaign spending, who declared the president immune to prosecution, who basically nullified the emoluments clause. And it's not just a question of failed institutions, it's voters who decided to just forgive Jan 6 and reelect a traitor. There's absolutely no "both sides" to this. The right are killing this country. The left are just not saving it fast enough.

I'm not sure I agree with you about the debt. If you don't manage the debt, eventually you'll loose investors, which means you'll loose the funds to do anything. Including fix the climate. We now spend more on interest (14%) than we do on national defense (13%).

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

"Eventually" is doing a lot of work. There's no indication we're anywhere near a threshold.

There’s also no indication that it’s not right around the corner. But it’s true, no one really knows where that threshold is. But it’s also the kind of thing that you really don’t want to know the “right” answer to, because by then it will be too late.

Can someone explain to me why the debt thing is an issue?

The US can inflate it away over time, with the main cost being the US standard of living staying flat or going down (which is annoying but very much tolerable given current American living standards). Moreover, paying for the debt by inflating it is a lot more politically palatable, as people don't usually think in inflation adjusted terms. Plus, you can take measures to fudge the official inflation numbers anyway.

Now compare this with climate issues, where no amount of financial engineering or political cost is going to fix environmental damage.

I'm not an expert but I can tell you why I think it's an issue.

The national debt has to be continually refinanced as parts of it become due. That works when investors are willing to give you money. But if investors think you are no longer a good investment they will continually ask for higher interest rates and then eventually they will stop giving you their money altogether. And if that happens then we're going to be in be trouble because we will have no means to pay what is due and we'll default.

The problem is the interest payment on the debt is starting to become a large fraction of the income of America and we are starting to look like an increasingly bad investment. And that shows in the rates we have to pay. I don't think we're in any immediate danger but spending goes up every year which means we need to borrow more and we move more toward that risky place.

And if history is to be any guide, when you hit the bad spot, everything falls apart fast in a very uncontrolled way.

So IMHO, we should ramp down spending slowly, in a controlled way to avoid having it ramped down for us in a rapid uncontrolled way. Either way, I suspect eventually spending is going to come down whether we like it or not.

The first sentence of Article II is “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” [1].

That should be changed to “the President shall execute the laws of the United States of America.” Rule of law.

(My other pet Article II amendment is striking “and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment” from § 2 and switching to direct election for the President.)

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-2/

Read this as part of my effort to understand this question. Seems like a good overview. while the solutions proposed seems good, they also appear to small/tactical

Jon Stewart's podcast with Heather Cox Richardson this last week is similarly good input for thinking about these things.

If they wouldn't have shut down the Office of Technology Assessment, legislators may actually have research collated that's more free of bias than whatever it is that the lobbyists vomit all over them, but we can't have nice things. Fucking Gingrich.

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