Comment by buttercraft
1 year ago
> legislative gridlock and dysfunction
Isn't this a direct result of "no compromise" policies on one side of the aisle?
1 year ago
> legislative gridlock and dysfunction
Isn't this a direct result of "no compromise" policies on one side of the aisle?
Right, democrats were ALWAYS looking for compromise. Hell, democrats have to compromise with their own party!
If you doubt me, simply go read votes from the past 20 years, and compare it with say 1960-1980. Republicans do not cross the aisle anymore.
The interesting part is that at some point republicans had so propagandized their voters against the very concept of governance that "Elect me to office for the next 6 years and I promise nothing will get done" was a decades long strategy that worked! The more republicans obstructed, including preventing republican voters from getting things they claim to want, the more republicans got voted in. For decades now, republicans that compromise with democrats have been primaried by less collaborative republicans.
Imagine a judge getting elected for insisting they will never hear another case!
None of this should be controversial, republican politicians have literally stated this as their goal and promise.
This even happens at a local level. I witnessed a Republican county councilor who was beginning to work with a local community on a serious issue they were having with their ferry. She got replaced with someone who wants to obstruct and cut in all cases, which serves as an object lesson for anyone else on the council with an at-risk seat.
For some reason the people who keep saying government doesn't work are working very hard to make government not work.
> For some reason
Fairly obvious what that reason is.
It's the same reason Putin supports Trump -- if you yourself are threatened by something (democracy) then you need to go make that thing a joke.
For those looking for something to Google or concrete facts to back this up, "obstructionism" is the proper term for this.
Some key examples: Reagan saying "the government is the problem", Newt Gingrich starting the modern obstructionist movement in congress with the Contact with America (also backed by the Heritage Foundation, which is behind project 2025), and Mitch McConnel breaking norms to practically shut down congress under his leadership, openly stating his intent several times.
Republicans don't want to lead in any practical sense. They want to break the government and privatize the pieces so they can buy in and profit off of them. Anyone who can't buy in gets screwed, because services will cost more to pay for the investment and profits that the investors demand.
Trump's biggest achievement last term was a massive tax cut for the rich. So to balance to budget, they now want to destroy as many government services as they can, using "efficiency" as an excuse.
Breaking things is great when you run a social media company. Worst case scenario, your website goes offline for a few hours. When you start breaking the government, people die. Of course, if you're richer than God, you don't have to worry about the fallout. It doesnt matter if the FDA falls apart and leads to massive food contamination when you only eat Wagyu beef from your private ranch. People will die, you pay less taxes, and you only see it as a success.
There are many other critiques to be made, but this is just the surface.
I recently watched a 2 hour congressional committee session, with 5 minute talking points per member. BOTH sides of the aisle used their entire 5 minutes to spout one-sided rhetoric and talking points obviously designed for re-election rather than anything resembling debate or conversation.
I have no idea which side "started it", but where we've landed isn't useful.
These sessions are used to record clips that they can show their constituents. They are not for real debate.
I don't think you can make a general statement based on watching a single 2-hour committee session.
Yes, and the filibuster.
The causes are more complicated.
The founding fathers envisioned the legislature be slow and deliberate, so it was never intended to move quickly.
One major party doesn’t think government solves any problems, so it’s not incentivized to use it to solve any problems. In fact, a generation of Republicans have tried to stifle fixing any of the large problems.
The other party is frequently torn between a wide spectrum of “do everything for citizens in a wide swath of policy areas” and “neoliberal free market capitalism”, so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.
The rest is usually downstream of sound-byte media (stripping out nuance and polarization of media outlets), paid advertising scaremongering voters (money in politics), and electoral engineering like gerrymandering (legislators picking voters instead of the inverse).
Agreed on this - the country is founded on a deep skepticism of government oversight. Some of what we see today is cultural blowback for those who think that core value has been lost by dems.
I'd also put out that the lessons of the Tea Party (Gingrich style) have not been lost on modern people with political goals -- a fairly small group has used the heavy party whipping that the Republicans use to become an important swing vote / caucus -- and the republican party was more amenable/vulnerable to this sort of tactic, precisely for cultural reasons embedded in the Republican party's history, governance and setup.
> so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.
"Weird" is a presumably a typo there, but I think it actually works as-is. As long as we allow for the verbing of adjectives, anyway.
No, it's the lack of representation. We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries, worst representation in the free world. Even Communist China has better representation. The U.S. in the 1790s had representation in line with Nordic countries today.
The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.
Re the Apportionment Act of 1929 -- care to elaborate? Are there figures for "the worst representation in the free world"?
My impression is that there are many reasons for the dysfunction of congress; the media feedback control system (in a literal and metaphorical sense) plays an important role, as does the filibuster, lobbyists, and other corruption.
(Aside: in aging, an organisms feedback and homeostatic systems tend to degrade / become simpler with time, which leads to decreased function / cancer etc. While some degree of refactoring & dead-code cruft-removal is necessary - and hopefully is happening now, as I think most Americans desire - the explicit decline in operational structure is bad. (Not that you'd want a systems biologist to run the country.))
Not the parent, but broadly agree that a change to apportionment would heavily change the US for the better. I don't think it would be a single fix for the country, but I think it would greatly help quite a few of the issues.
Originally there were about 35k constituents/rep. Today it's an average of ~750k constituents/rep, with some districts at over a million.
This is because of the Apportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of reps. If we had the same constituent/rep ratio, we'd have ~10k reps total.
If instead we went back to the constituent/rep ratio that existed originally, a lot of our structural problems go away, via a mechanism that's accessible via US code rather than a change to the constitution.
For instance, the electoral college is based on federal representation. If you expand the house by ~50x, that dominates the electoral college by nearly two orders of magnitude, and creates a very close to popular election.
It's also much much harder to gerrymander on that scale.
That scale would also have a return to a more personal form of politics, where people actually have a real chance to meet with their reps (and the candidates) face to face.
It also feels that by having a much larger, more diffuse legislative body, we'd better approximate truly democratic processes in a representative democratic model.
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Biology is a bad example when applied to a government.
Almost all change in biology happens to populations, not individuals. In order for that to apply to governments, we would need to have massive churn and rapid experimentation of government policies and structures. These are not conducive to voter feedback (eg. Democracy) and would be so disruptive to business and life as to make governments useless until they reached some steady state.
I remember hearing that Italy had 52 governments in 50 years. It’s suffering from all of the same problems as the rest of western countries, perhaps somewhat worse than average.
Increasing the size of the House and fixing apportionment would certainly help with some things, but we need to eliminate gerrymandering too.
It is bonkers to me that legislative districts are drawn by whatever party is in power once every ten years. Not only should the census be more frequent (real-time/ongoing, really, and more lightweight than the system we have now), but districts should be redrawn yearly, and it should be done by a non-partisan committee.
And we really need an objective, quantitative measure of gerrymandering, and comprehensive law against it.
But really I don't think all of that is it. Making representation more proportionate might make Democrats win the House (and possibly presidency, since electoral college votes are apportioned the same way) more often, but the Senate will still be broken, and political polarization will still rule the day.
We need more than two viable political parties (which would require a major overhaul of each and every state's election process, at the least), and they need to govern through coalition-building, more like how parliamentary systems operate.
And ultimately it's just the tone of the whole thing. Legislators need to stop with this all-or-nothing approach, where the biggest hot-button issues don't see any measure of compromise. But that's a culture thing, and you can't fix that with laws or process.