I am thinking that in the future campaign contributions might eventually matter less than it does today. For example, it is a good thing all 40 states in the US does not do the presidential primary on the same day.
How so? I think the biggest problem with campaign contributions is that ads are so incredibly effective at getting congresspeople reelected. Maybe if everyone agreed to ignore these ads campaign contributions would be worthless. But there's a significant enough number of people who are swayed by it to matter.
People are always gonna be getting video content from somewhere, and they're not gonna be paying for it enough to make it ad-free, so they're gonna see ads regardless of the medium.
Maybe if the advertising worked on the princple, that negative advertising about, or even mention of another candidate or party was banned, so that candidates would be forced to campaign on there own positions and party lines, instead of the incessant muck raking and smearing that the circus has descended to today.
In many countries competitive advertising that mentions other brands etc, is banned.
Honestly, no. It's essential that law makers can be informed by all interested parties. The problem is a lack of transparency. Complex to control but not impossible. Every single meeting between an elected officials and anyone lobbying them should be in some way recorded and made public. As if it were a public debate. The other issue is fund raising. Too broad and complex to really go into here but if a politician didn't or couldn't raise funds it would make lobbying more honest, imho.
That's a good point. The biggest problem with it though is how effective it can be at influencing policy against the public interest. I suppose if I wrote a letter to my congressperson it would be considered lobbying but that's rarely what people mean.
> The biggest problem with it though is how effective it can be at influencing policy against the public interest.
The thing is that "public interest" is hard to define and dependent on each individual. Someone lobbying for a nuclear power plant in "City A" will be lauded by some and derided by others. In this case, is lobbying good, or is it bad? Who decides that?
Transparency means nothing. If anything, many of the transparency programs are fodder, advertisements for lobbyists -- they prospect clients by showing them all of the big shots the competition are meeting with.
If lobbying and fundraising were more restrictive, ultimately access to policy makers and legislators would improve. Today, all that matters is the check.
"The problem is a lack of transparency" might have been true in some historical era when there was less money involved; We could target a singular corrupt politician taking bribes if we knew about the bribes. Sure.
But that's not the problem we have. Our problem is fund-raising. Politicians are not meeting once every few years with a lobbyist at 2AM beneath the Lincoln Memorial, they're spending 60% of their time on the phone begging moneyed interests for reelection campaign funds or party goals, the day after they get elected. They're spending 25% of their time negotiating with lobbyists about what laws the lobbyists get to write ("The legislative subsidy model" of RL Hall, wherein they replace Congressional staff increases), and another 10% trying to raise their professional profile through non-legislative activities in the press or with political powerbrokers. Maybe 5% of their time is spent in committee meetings or on the floor.
On top of that, it starts out as a part-time job, with meaningful meetings limited to a few days of the week in order to satisfy the need to fly home to meet with contributors. The Senate has become nearly impossible to get bills through for a similar reason - a filibuster is a time-wasting annoyance legislatively, but its requirement that 51 Senators stay on the floor to break it prevents them from spending days fundraising, an existential threat to their careers, while the filibustering party only has to commit a couple Senators to keep it active.
Of the bills voted on in their legislative career, the proportion actually read by the legislator will be under 1%. The number read in full by their staff, under 10%.
Politicans are not hiding this; They are complaining about it. We have created a system wherein legislating ranks as the lowest priority, and not even the wealthiest in Congress can be free of implicit corruption.
What I find hilarious (and a little soul-sucking for the politicians), is that the money that they raise from taxpayers is used...to convince taxpayers to elect them, so they can raise money from taxpayers...ad nauseam
Not true. The EFF lobbies, for example. I think this is OK. But I'd like the times and minutes of their meetings to be publicly available and searchable.
I'd prefer if the lawmakers were only informed through public hearings. That's already how it happens in other countries where lobbying is illegal.
Public hearings are public, recorded, and there are voices from multiple camps speaking out about an issue, and given equal time to do it.
Lobbying happens in back rooms, and it's only one person talking at a time making their point. Registering lobbyists and saying when they talk to politicians won't help much if we also don't know what they're telling the politicians or if other voices don't get equal time to speak to those politicians.
When SOPA was about to pass, one politician ignorantly said that "the People" should just get their own lobbyists. Yeah, except the people can't afford to get a lobbyist for every issue. They can afford to participate in a public hearing.
Politics were probably more corrupt and lobbying was even more dominant (just in different forms) in the 1800s.
Obviously, the train has gone off the rails at this point, but we aren't at a fundamentally different place politically than we were in, say 1896, when many of the same issues were at play.
Definitely. At that time the biggest issue was supporters of candidates being given jobs in the government just because they were supporters. It was a huge problem and definitely makes me think lobbying must not have been a concern.
It also makes it more expensive. A freight train is more efficient in terms of cost per unit of mass moved, but few can afford one, and you'd need to have a lot of things in need of moving to even bother. Decentralized power is cheaper, not on the per-"unit of power" basis, but in terms of absolute numbers for real (albeit small and local) problems that it can solve for a price.
Such corruption, because it deals with those small and local problems, is mostly contained. But if you happen to be within its scope, it can be just as much, if not more, of a problem, than corruption on higher levels (because it immediately affects the things that happen around you in day-to-day life).
And the article misleads about the state of lobbying today, for example:
> lobbyists who take out lawmakers for expensive lunches
A lobbyist who buys an expensive lunch for a lawmaker (member of Congress) is committing a federal offense under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. The rule is so strict that if a member of Congress is attending a public event with food at a lobbying org, the org cannot provide utensils, unless the member of Congress pays for their food.
Executive Order 13490 also prohibits all executive branch political appointees from receiving gifts of any kind from lobbyists, including lunch.
The 1999 Supreme Court decision was the right one, as it struck down an interpretation that was obviously too broad. The article names Scalia since he wrote the opinion, but the vote was 9-0! (Obviously this was back in the good old days when the Supreme Court still had 9 justices.)
Lobbyists must be doing something to warrant all the money involved, no? Arguably, lawmakers are being persuaded. Could it just be the abstract strength of their arguments? Somehow, I doubt that.
“You as a lobbyist cannot buy me a dinner for $40,” Mr. Ackerman said in an interview, as he nibbled finger food at a recent conference on government ethics in New York. “But if you give a contribution to my campaign, I can take you to dinner, and we can discuss politics or official business. You, the lobbyist, can give my campaign $1,000, and the campaign can pay for our dinner. That’s perfectly legal, and it’s perfectly dumb.”
I don't disagree - but this sentiment can easily mislead. While it's folly to think any set of rules will be perfect, it's also folly to conclude that just because a rule has absurd corner cases that it therefore has no value overall.
Ironically (given the complaint Mr Ackerman voiced) one way to encourage imperfections in rules is to allow lobbying, which biases the decision making process towards small, focused groups that have a lot to gain by affecting the rules over large, general benefits.
> Ironically (given the complaint Mr Ackerman voiced) one way to encourage imperfections in rules is to allow lobbying, which biases the decision making process towards small, focused groups that have a lot to gain by affecting the rules over large, general benefits.
Yeah, it's difficult to perfectly take advantage of an imperfect system, and that's a good thing.
Background: I am Finnish. The country routinely tops the world corruption perception index as the least corrupted country in the World. (Not every year, but you get the point.)
In my mind, that tells diddly squat about how well things are in Finland. It only highlights how wretched the situation is even in the runner-up country.
Perhaps the least understood view of lobbying that really informs how perverse the system has become is that as a general rule people believe the lobbyists are calling the congresspeople to offer them money. In reality, it's the congresspeople, desperate for campaign cash, that are calling the lobbyists for money.
The cost of congressional elections has increased so much that it has become essentially required for someone aspiring to political office to raise enormous amounts of money. As a result they're asking lobbyists to contribute. As a result they're more likely to take positions that are friendly to those interests.
Effectively the polarity of the commonly stated narrative is backwards. It's not lobbyists giving money for special favors, it's congresspeople needing money who give special favors in the hopes of maybe getting money. This is even more perverse, and harder to fix than the former. Essentially, I wish my congressperson was more traditionally corrupt, that's an issue we know how to solve.
This is true for direct contributions to a candidate's campaign, for contributions to an member of Congress's "personal PAC", and for contributions to political parties.
It's not true for contributions to "super PACs" and other independent expenditures, aka outside money--the stuff the Citizens United decision liberalized. The reason for that is that the law (even post-CU) prohibits coordination between a candidate and any group making independent expenditures. Ted Cruz cannot ask anyone to give money to his super PAC.
And it's important to understand that there are still limits on the contributions in my first paragraph. A given person can only contribute a set amount of money per election cycle to each candidate, each PAC, and each party committee. That said, the aggregate numbers are still huge.
CU did not outlaw limits on those types of contributions. I wish we could lower then farther and (especially) take away the privileged position that political parties have within elections and campaign finance laws.
Thing is though, it's not about Ted Cruz, or Obama or even the congress. Sure, it's a problem at those levels, but it's a REAL problem at the state and local level. As a super PAC you can have a much larger influence in these relatively less watched elections as you can in a national election. These smaller elections have candidates that aren't as well known and don't have the money to fight back.
Political speech can be codified and regulated with channels and times (which is largely already is via the political "seasons" and campaign routes). The questions of how to structure it, are many and varied, but would result in a normalized process that is distinctly devoid of corruption. Take money out of the process.
Advertising, in any market, is a race to the bottom (to the top, really, in terms of cost). If everyone spends 100% on advertising, only the advertising platforms benefit, not the advertisers themselves.
It would be much better to ban all lobbying, so each candidate would only have a very small amount o fmoney to spend on elections, and people would be less manipulated into voting them.
>It would be much better to ban all lobbying, so each candidate would only have a very small amount o fmoney to spend on elections, and people would be less manipulated into voting them.
I can make up my own mind for who to vote for. I don't need or want anyone to protect me from persuasion. I can't think of an idea more insidious to a free society, that the government needs to control the expression of ideas to protect people from "manipulation".
I find the idea that a few powerful people have such enormous influence that nobody else's ideas matter to be more insidious than the idea of a government that tries to level the playing field.
Edit: I wanted to add that I feel like money being treated as speech is the same as running an organization that goes with whatever the loudest man in the room has to say, rather than the best ideas. Have you ever been in a meeting where someone with a big voice and a small brain steals all the airtime by never stopping talking?
A system where no candidate has campaign money does not produce an even playing field. It gives the incumbent and/or famous candidate an even bigger advantage than now.
Indeed, I think the best explanation for the campaign finance laws of the recent decades is that they're intended to protect the incumbents that enacted them.
Your argument rests on the idea that the candidate with the most money always wins. This is the "common sense" model, but it's not supported by empirical data.
In reality election victory is related to money the same way individual happiness is:
Without money a person will not be happy, and a candidate will not be elected. But once you have enough money for a comfortable life/campaign, more money does little to improve things.
Once you've made all voters aware of who you are and what you stand for, your campaign has done the advertising it needs. Telling them again and again will change very little. Jeb Bush is the latest of many well funded failed candidates showing this.
Easier in the sense that every citizen should be able to contribute more, and that can also be achieved through public funding.
But not easier in the sense that anyone can donate an infinite amount directly to the campaign. That just skews the system in the favor of a few donors (as it already has to a great degree).
We need the "money vote" to be "equalized" among people, just like the ballot vote is. One person shouldn't be able to donate $10 million, when 90% of the others can only donate up to $100 in a campaign. Then it just becomes inevitable that the candidate listens to the people donating $10 million, rather than those donating $100 (even if there are many more of them).
What I'm saying is that it would be easier for the candidate to raise money.
If there is plenty money to be had from many sources, candidates don't need to spend so much time getting it, and they don't need to offer so many legislative favors in return.
Note that you only need enough money to run a good campaign. Getting twice or 10 times that money does very little for your electability.
The solution is to actually increase the number of politicians so that each district is small enough that you don't need money to get elected (you need districts of about 25,000 voters). The crazy thing is it doesn't even cost anymore money because as you increase the politicians you take away their staff.
Even better, do multi-winner districts (3-9 per district) with a ranked choice voting system that would greatly increase how well people are represented in Congress through proportional representation.
The problem with having large electorates is you still need a lot of money for advertising. By making the electorates small you basically can campaign by visiting and speaking to every person in the electorate. Get rid of the need for expensive advertising and you get rid of the need to raise money.
I do agree that there are much better voting systems then simple majorities - I like instant runoffs.
Smaller congressional districts could also help decrease the effect of gerrymandering.
This is interesting.
On the other hand, will we make ourselves even more vulnerable to "grassroots campaigns" like the tea party and lobbies like Alec?
I'm not an expert but there are mathematically and sociologically sound alternatives that are better than what you and I can prescribe. I'd prefer one of those.
There are defiantly better voting systems than first past the post (I have a soft spot for instant run offs), but having smaller congressional districts should make the system more resistant to lobby groups. The campaign process would move to a more personal reputation based system where the representatives know most of the voters in their district. You might get extreme candidates in some districts, but they would be a small minority without much power at the congress level.
If you were the representative of a small district you would face exactly the same problem as with big districts. You would still face the interest trading that all politicians face.
I would imagine that committees would get bigger. Hopefully with more politicians you would get more people who actually knew about the area that they were on a committee for. The main thing is once you got rid of the need for money the desire to be on a powerful committee would decrease.
I still find the nonmonotonicity of instant runoffs problematic. Something seems wrong about a system where you can lose by gaining votes. I'd expect instability to be higher than a similar system that is monotonic.
You never lose by getting more votes - the nice thing about instant run offs is it simple (just rank) and it is close to the ideal outcome. It is not perfect, but it is not too bad.
In regards stability it is better than proportional voting which tends to splinter the electorate. With instant run offs the candidate that is close to the consensus tends to win.
Yes you can. Basically the scenario is that by gaining votes from other parties, you can change who is eliminated in the first round, which changes distribution of second round votes.
You can argue about how likely this is to happen, but on some level it doesn't matter. If people can't feel absolutely confident that voting for who they actually want won't reduce their vote's impact, many will continue to vote tactically.
That is not how the system works for in example Australia. What happens is the votes for the lowest ranked candidate are given to all the second choice candidates and the process repeated until you get a candidate with 50% of the vote. There is no way that placing your preferred candidate first can ever result in your vote not being given in the order you choose. If you prefer candidate X above candidate y then candidate y will never get your vote unless X is eliminated.
Yes, I understand how IRV works, and indeed I used to believe it was flawless.
>There is no way that placing your preferred candidate first can ever result in your vote not being given in the order you choose.
No, but it can end up harming your second choice, by eliminating them early, so your vote for them doesn't matter. This is called Favourite Betrayal, and it's a serious problem with IRV:
And as a quick worked example, if you have 4 people voting A>B>C, 4 people voting C>B>A and 3 people voting B>A>C, then A wins. If one person voting C>B>A changes their vote to B>C>A, then B wins. So by putting C first, they were harming their second choice B.
These type of contrived examples appear to occur rarely in practice. I would love to see some bootstrap simulations on real IRV elections results to see how sensitive IRV is to these pathological outcomes. Most of the time you are only interested in which of the major candidates gets your second choice.
I don't know if they're that contrived. The scenario is that you have a closely matched two party system (as most FPTP places do) and a third party which is close in popularity to one of the mainstream ones on first votes, but is not universally supported by the remaining mainstream voters over the other mainstream party.
That doesn't just sound plausible, it sounds like exactly the pattern of growth for a third party that you'd expect.
I'm drawing my conclusions from the visualizations here: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ (search for "nonmonotonicity"). Maybe I should have said public opinion. Shifting public opinion closer to your position can make you lose in IRV; I'm not sure if there's an actual vote count increase as well.
From those visualizations and my reading elsewhere it looks like approval voting is the closest to a Voronoi-style partitioning of the opinion space without being subject to strategic voting.
There is no perfect electrol system, just systems of more or less degrees of badness. Any system chosen is always a balance between simplicity and correctness.
Score Voting and Approval Voting are clearly the best alternative systems for single-winner elections (for multi-winner elections, many people support some form of Proportional Representation).
The problem is that FairVote, which advocates IRV (apparently because it's a useful steeping stone to the their REAL goal of STV), is run by a professional liar named Rob Richie, and he disseminates a massive amount of false and misleading information about voting systems. E.g.
Indeed. Approval voting seems a bit simpler to me than instant runoff, but instant runoff is better than simple plurality. If a location is considering changing voting systems though, IMO they would be best served by skipping IRV and going for approval. After that we can try to fix party line voting in the US.
In short, tactical voting isn't all that important. For instance, Score Voting and Approval Voting perform better with 100% strategic voters (in which case they are identical) than IRV does with 100% honest voting. So even if IRV magically encouraged all voters to be honest (which it doesn't), Score/Approval would still be superior.
Score Voting is definitively superior to Approval Voting in terms of producing the right electoral outcome (ignoring practical concerns around complexity and the cost of adoption, upgrading voting machines, etc.). That's because, for tactical voters, both systems are the same. But for honest voters, Score Voting adds less noise/loss/distortion, because it doesn't force you to round your 7 up to a 10, or your 3 down to a 0. Hence better outcomes overall, as seen in this graph of Bayesian Regret figures.
For future discussions: I advocate Approval because it's both "good enough" and easy to administrate, tabulate. Balancing concerns from the election integrity viewpoint.
Incidentally, the guy behind Zesty.ca lives across the street from me in Berkeley. I co-founded the Center for Election Science. It was a complete coincidence. We moved here from SF a few years ago, and one day I was walking by his house and recognized him sitting on the steps, from a picture on his site. From like 20 feet away. It's a small world.
Not sure why smaller districts prevent gerrymandering. Small districts can be more easily targeted to homogenous communities - you could create a few almost 100% democrat districts in the center of a city, then surround that with 60% republican 40% democrat mixes of city suburb and exurb to turn a popular democrat majority into an entrenched republican majority (inverse gerrymanders are of course also possible). And you could do that without having to create long thin districts that wrap round cities if the districts were smaller making it harder to object to the gerrymander on the grounds that a district is not compact.
In fact any proposal which claims that making districts more homogenous in their voting behavior - "80% of people in this town vote republican so why don't we just make a district that reflects that commonality," for example - is effectively gerrymandering and disenfranchisement harming both sides. 20% of the population of that town will always be ignored. 30% of that town are casting republican votes that don't matter at a larger level, and which don't contribute to countering a democrat vote.
Seems to me smaller districts would be more likely to exhibit those alignments and disenfranchise more people?
I like the idea. One thing though, this won't work unless people vote. A major reason the system doesn't work well today is because only the most extreme voters turn out for primaries. Even if you reduce gerrymandering, it's hard to eliminate entirely.
On the other hand, in smaller districts the electorate will be more likely to share opinions and interests so maybe that counteracts the problem?
Adding "none of the above" to every race is one of my favorite fantasy ballot reforms. If no candidate wins, the contest is a do-over, with a new slate of candidates.
The second benefit, for election integrity activists, is preventing the "under vote", where down ballot races which are left blank, and potentially filled in by helpful administrators.
Note that in the US, ballots in metro areas can easily have dozens of races. Sheriff, judges, schools, water district, city, county, state, national, referendums, levies, etc.
Technically it is not compulsory voting, just compulsory turning up at the polling station and put papers in box. If you don't want to vote you don't have to.
I do agree that it is a very good idea, but compulsory voting doesn't solve the corrupting effect of large districts.
Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. I wonder how much effect it has on turnout. I one looks at the "VAP"
("The voter turnout as defined as the percentage of the voting age population that actually voted")
, it seems Australia is a somewhat higher than the UK, and around the level of eg. Sweden (neither of which have mandatory voting).
Mexico doesn't do too well, but apparently mandatory voting isn't enforced.
The trouble with the Australian 'VAP' number is Australia has a very large percentage on non-citizens. It seems from the data that they have divided the votes by the total population rather than the number of Australian citizens.
It is very easy to become a citizen of Australia once you are a permanent resident - the large number of non-citizens is a personal choice of the people involved.
It is an interesting question if the vote should be extended to non-citizens. I can see good and bad aspects to doing so and I am not sure which is more important.
> Radicals like me believe no taxation without representation.
For reasons of equality among the states, the US capital is not located in any of them. The District of Columbia, not being a state, doesn't have the privileges of a state either, such as being represented in the US government. This is not easy to fix; giving DC state privileges would be a severe blow to the idea that the federal government doesn't favor any one state over another.
It still gets taxed, though. People are sore enough about this that when someone submitted the suggestion of "no taxation without representation" for the slogan on DC license plates, it was vetoed by DC government for being "too controversial".
I would actually be OK with saying that DC doesn't get taxed, since they're legally prohibited from participating in the government. But I don't think that's a widespread viewpoint. Do you have an opinion?
Once you make the connection between the representatives and the votes more personal you will increase the likelihood of voting. As a voter you are not voting for someone you don't know, but for "good old joe" who you speak to every couple of months.
The idea is to not solve every problem with democracy, but to remove the corrupting influence of needing to raise money from vested interests to spend on advertising so you can get elected. This is the major problem.
The number one driver for voting participation is competitive races. Hence the need for redistricting which maximizes competitiveness.
Unlike every other modern democracy, the US has opt-in voting. To the best of my knowledge, universal voting registration does not increase participation. But it does prevent disenfranchisement. Only compulsory voting would (otherwise) increase participation.
Some of our jurisdictions have switched to all postal balloting. This permits ballot chasing. In general, these campaigns no longer attempt to persuade. (Clinton vs Sanders is a notable exception, because most contests are face to face.) They spend most of the money on GOTV (get out the vote), turning out your base (supporters). Which has led to alienating voters. No one likes to be contacted 30 times per election (4 times a year) to be reminded to mail their ballot.
Postal balloting has also harmed the culture of voting. This intangible is very hard to measure. But some studies show that "I voted" style markers, visible to your friends and family, boost voter participation.
I agree with you that postal voting is very harmful practice to democracy. The solution to people not having time to get off work to vote is not postal voting, but to move the date to a weekend or holiday.
Moving to proportional representation would greatly curtail gerrymandering or even eliminate it altogether, especially with some sort of ranked voting system. It also solves the third party problem; no longer does a vote for the Green party hurt the Democratic candidate or a Libertarian vote hurt the Republican candidate.
Anyone that wants to be on a ballot for a particular position should have to do the same thing as anyone else (probably collecting a modest number of signatures on a petition, maybe with some rules to limit the number of candidates).
I guess parties might be allowed to place an endorsement on a ballot, but if not they could still release a list of endorsements.
In that arrangement, contesting the national delegate convention to get the endorsement of the party might still happen, but it would not be so inordinately important.
A party organization would still be hugely useful in getting wide ballot presence, but an incumbent organization would not have the huge advantages that they enjoy today.
Ireland works this way; there are about 25k voters per representative. What happens is clientilism: representatives become very concerned with local issues and neglect national issues. Corruption of a different, more local kind, is encouraged.
Irish political corruption is a different kind of corruption. I don't think it is due to the size of the electorate, but more a reflection of history. Whatever the cause it is not due to the need for the representatives to raise truckloads of cash to buy advertising to get elected.
democracy \di-ˈmä-krə-sē\ a form of government in which people choose leaders by voting - Merriam Webster, first definition
democracy (dĭ-mŏkˈrə-sē) Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives - American Heritage dictionary, first definition
With apologies to Plato, the word "democracy" most commonly refers to nearly any political system that involves voting. The only time anyone uses the word democracy to mean "direct democracy," with every citizen voting on every issue, is when they're criticizing someone else for using the word democracy in exactly the way almost everyone does all the time.
See my companion rant: Hitler's National Socialism was a form of fascism in the way we use that word today, even though he and Mussolini had distinct political ideas.
I attended a lecture by an Irish psephologist which covered the neglect of national issues in Irish politics. His view was that the cause of this "chronic localism" was a lack of effective local democracy. (I'd like to see this dealt with, because in some important respects the rest of the world has something to learn from the Irish constitution. Only Austria, Germany and Switzerland have more institutionalised checks on executive power, and all three use forms of proportional representation that I consider inferior to Ireland's.)
I disagree, the chances of one member of Congress pushing through legislation or raising an issue a Knouff for a constituent, is so overwhelmingly difficult, that it's pointless. And lobbyist gathers multiple members of Congress, educating and building a coalition, because that client elected official has to balance the request with all the other constituent request. It's simply not possible.
increase the politicians you take away their staff
Respectfully disagree. It's not that easy.
Legislating is an information processing problem. The politics of attention. All the legislators I know can barely keep up with the torrent of information. Overwhelming them with info and votes and meetings prevents them from taking initiative. They need more staff.
All games have winners and losers. Weakening legislators -- thru term limits, cutting staff, whatever -- strengthens lobbyists and administrators (heads of departments, the silent state) and executives.
My baptism to the policy world flipped most of my positions.
Some measures that would strengthen legislators, give them more autonomy, would be public financing of campaigns (no more dialing for dollars), public disclosure commissions, pay raises and full time employment (so regular people, not just lawyers and retirees, could serve), full staffs, recording every vote (disallowing roll call voice votes), lengthen the legislative calendar, diffuse power thru more fair committee assignments (not just seniority), etc, etc.
There's no shortage of worthy reform proposals. Just mind the winners and losers with every rule change.
The problems you describe are the complexities resulting from overworked representatives and complex societies. The proposal to increase the number of representatives does not directly change this (it should help by having a wider pool of individuals to draw on when composing committees), but about getting the need for money out of the system. This is the core cause of corruption.
Because ultimately a spending limit boils down to "you're not allowed to air this film" because you already spent too much. In fact, that's exactly what the Citizens United case was. We have a Bill of Rights which guarantees that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, the right of the people to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
What this amounts to is Michael Moore now has to make his movies for $2700 (assuming that's the limit) instead of the $20 million he's making them for now.
The reason Citizens United was decided the way it was is because it costs money to make movies, and even if you somehow allocate public money towards the distribution of the film on PBS or whatever, you're still insisting that the movie makers aren't allowed to spend more of their money to make the movie to their own standards.
It drives me crazy that people don't understand Citizens United was about free speech. And most people who say they don't like the ruling reverse positions once I explain exactly what it was about. Stopping a film maker from making or airing a political film seems horrible to me.
In France and Belgium the total amount of money you can spend on your campaign is regulated and financed by the state. Which of course leads to another kind of problems.
- Also there can be some voting(?) threshold you have to reach to be eligible for the reimbursement of campaign costs (5% for the french presidential I believe) so small parties are gambling a lot by throwing themselves into the pit with other well established big parties and sometimes they simply decide to make a coalition in order to have the guarantee to survive financially. But then they are forced to reframe their political agenda and this usually weakens the ideological stances of everyone.
Of course I am not blaming the system. But at the moment the implementation lacks several error catching checks to make sure the whole thing runs as intended (eg: the official/national organ that is supposed to investigate these campaigns and make sure everything stays legal is largely under funded).
I gave some notorious examples from right parties but it doesn't mean the left doesn't dabble into those waters (in France and in Belgium).
That still leaves a little bit of an issue: taxpayers financing campaigns for parties they will never vote for.
As a French citizen, I can't figure out a good reason why I have to give a cent to some nutjobs just because they woke up one morning and decided they were fit to rule the country (Jacques Cheminade, far left/right leaders, etc.).
How do you deal with third parties? In the US every time we try to limit what politicians can spend, the money goes instead to "independent" single-issue groups.
In Belgium there are enough parties that not a single one can grasp 51% of the votes. Moreover since the country consists of two linguistic communities with their own set of different parties (there isn't any national, translinguistic parties anymore) there is always the need for build a « coalition » or a « majority » between parties that then form a government. edit: in Belgium we don't have a presidential body. We vote for the federal parliament, parties gather together to see who's going to ally with who to reach a majority and then those parties build a government by picking up ministers from their rank. If during the legislature a party should break away from that majority in the parliament then the government would fall and there would need to either form a new majority or call for anticipated elections. (that's a gross approximation of the legislative process)
The situation is more contrasted and antagonistic in France where the left (PS: Socialist Party) and the right (LR: The republicans) are so huge they don't share the power (at least in the government). In Belgium we can have left and right ministers at the same time depending on which party entered the coalition. In France the government is basically either from the right or the left. The parliament is more nuanced.
Both countries have a senate with elected members (who make up groups as well).
I see I wasn't clear. When I said third parties, I didn't mean political parties, I meant it in the more literal sense. That is, groups that aren't technically affiliated with a political party. In the US you can't always tell what the group is by the name, e.g. "People for a Better Tomorrow" or "Alliance for Children" or "People Who Care More Than You". Well, okay, I made the last one up, but only just.
Anyway, when you limit money going to politicians it goes to these sorts of groups instead. Then they turn around and buy air time supporting whoever funded them. If you limit money to those groups (which isn't constitutional anyway), you get money supporting dubious university research and "think tanks". And so on. If all those are limited, people start buying media organizations.
The point being it doesn't seem like there's any way to remove or even curtail the influence of money in politics. All they can seem to do is move it around. That's why I'm curious what sort of legal environment Belgium has in place to prevent that.
Are you asking how it who be decided who gets the money? I would suggest opening it up to both public debate and research; meaning we would need to learn what works best, and very possible there maybe no single right solution; for examples, cities and non-city area are different in my opinion.
Well, no, they probably can't. Under Citizens United and FEC v McCutcheon, the idea of banning lobbying (at least via SuperPac) is a non-starter with the courts. That may have changed with Scalia's passage, but under current precedent, you can't ban it, whether or not you replace it with something else for the party insiders.
Can confirm. I was a lobbyist for several years in Washington. My job was to break through the bubble of Congress to educate members of Congress about my clients, a medium size nonprofit. The desperate crush for campaign donation requests was overwhelming.
Why do countries like Germany make do without these huge fundraising campaigns, while a having a more balanced parliament, and the US is just Rep or Dem (binary) plus a huge show on a tour bus across the country, instead of doing real politics? I mean, what's the cultural difference in the US population that facilitates the circus?
I can't speak much for other countries, but for the Germany I suspect that a big part of the difference ultimately derives from a different voting and representation system that is much less focused on individual politicians, and therefore has a much lower tendency to devolve into a popularity contest. (It's still a popularity contest, but much less so.)
The unit that really matters in Germany is the party, and the most important vote in all elections at the state and federal levels is a party vote rather than a vote for an individual. Something like a Sanders candidacy would be completely unthinkable in Germany simply because of how the elections work.
(There is a secondary vote in elections in which you vote for an individual, but that can only marginally affect the final composition of parliament in terms of number of seats per party. The details are complicated, and for the purpose of this discussion it's best to pretend that this secondary vote doesn't exist.)
At its most extreme, neither the chancellor nor the state prime ministers are elected by direct vote.
Then there's an admittedly somewhat random element of political culture in that there are no open primaries. The selection of candidates within each party is done by vote among delegates internal to the parties, and is almost completely devoid of public spectacle. (The news media typically reports once on these internal elections on the day that they happen, and that's it.)
To top it all off, parties are subsidized by the state. Once a party wins a number of votes in an election - the threshold is fairly low, and lower than the number of votes required to enter parliament - they receive money proportional to their electoral success. This reduces the need to create a huge fundraising apparatus in the first place.
I'd say Lessig is right in that campaign financing reform is probably the best path forward for the US, since changing the other aspects I mentioned would require much deeper constitutional changes.
This is very similar to the Canadian system - the main problematic outcome in it is when the Inner Party takes control of the agenda... In contrast to the interests of the rank and file.
We're seeing it happen right now in the US, with Clinton and the Democrats, and we're also seeing it happen in Canada, with the debacle that is the NDP / Mulcair.
For non-Canadians, the NDP is supposed to be Canada's socialist party - it was responsible for putting senior security, national healthcare, student issues, unions, etc on the table. Over the past ~15 years, it has shifted so much that it's almost entirely to the right of the big-business-friendly Liberal party. This has largely happened behind closed doors - with no input from their grassroots supporters. Most of my socialist friends are very close to tearing up their memberships.
Implement full accountability for all promises and actions in order to fix the most glaring issues. But who would go into politics if you're accountable for lying or misappropriation of funds (which includes uneconomic projects).
One solution is to replace elections altogether and instead institute a lottery system pooled from the general population with term limits at various levels of government.
There's going to be problems as long as money gives such a big boost towards being elected.
Could candidates have standardized, free/fixed low price advertisement? At least some portion of it?
There they would get to state their goals and views, and people could make an informed decision on who to vote.
There are "voting advice applications" where a voter can answer a web quiz and then see which candidate answered closest to them, with explanations, comes closest. We have a few of those, by broadcasting companies, newspapers and magazines here, and I believe they have some effect at least on candidate discovery. Then they can go to the candidate's web site to learn more. I'm from a country that has a multi party system though. As far as I know, it doesn't cost anything for the candidate to participate (answering the quiz), and the money comes from ads / general visibility to the quiz host.
> it's congresspeople needing money who give special favors in the hopes of maybe getting money
"Special favors" are only given when the public does not speak out or vote. If the public is largely silent on an issue, the politician's perspective is his constituents don't care about that issue.
Barney Frank: "If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district." [1]
We need to discuss and debate the issues more with each other. Techies may also help provide better tools for representatives to gauge public interest.
Ah yes, the old "I do it because everyone else does it" excuse. It's not the system that's broken, it's every individual politician who chooses to follow that path. "You won't make it in industry X unless you do Y" is pure self-serving bullshit.
Lobbying was made legal because it was (and will) happen regardless of legality. With legality, it can be documented and the details publicly released. If we made it illegal, it will just go back to being an "under the table" thing and we won't know who has been bought by whom.
Do I think lobbying (as a system) needs to be fixed/changed/altered/tweaked? Most definitely. But making it outright illegal is like making drug use illegal, people are still going to do it regardless. At least with it being legal, we can keep tabs and utilize harm reduction when necessary.
It's good that people are cognizant of the problems here but lobbying and money in politics are much more symptoms of deeper issues. You can treat the symptoms all you like but without solving the underlying problems you'll likely get something just as bad happening in a way you can't control. Right now the system is so corrupt and broken in every way that the only people who would ever want to be a part of it are either corrupt themselves, power seekers, or incredibly dedicated (which leads to an odd mix for sure).
Things are changing, slightly for the better in some ways though it's overall a complete mess. It helps that it's no longer necessary to spend tens of millions of dollars just to communicate with the electorate, though we're still not quite there yet.
We can't just make a few tweaks to the legal code and magic our way out of these problems. It's going to take a generation or more of concerted effort and, as always, constant vigilance afterward, and a bunch of legal changes along the way as well.
A winner-take-all electoral system concentrates power and enables winners to sell influence.
If I could hire whichever representative I want to exercise my vote in the legislature and fire him whenever I want, chances are I will have a representative that follows my wishes.
How would a collective decision making system work if you were designing it from scratch? Would it look anything like the American system?
No, I think it would be more like a parliamentary system using proportional representation.
But even that falls far short of what we could accomplish with modern technology.
Its also worth pointing out that the Founders did not set up elections for both houses of Congress. The Senate was appointed by the governors of the states. After that was changed, it became easier to buy influence. And easier to centralize everything farther away from the people.
They're not. Lobbyists are breaking federal law if they take a congressman out to a nice dinner.
Paying them more wouldn't solve this problem because running an election campaign is so expensive that they spend the majority of their time trying to raise money. They end up taking positions that are friendly to potential donors in the hope that the donors will keep sending them money.
The major problem isn't that they trade favors to lobbyists to enrich themselves directly (although some undoubtedly are), the problem is that they trade favors to lobbyists in order to keep getting re-elected.
So should we pay them less maybe, so that only those that care about politics run? Or does that leave them more open to bribery? A complex problem to solve!
The problem seems to be that a slightly indirect variation of bribery (aka lobbying) has been legalized in the first place, not that such bribery is hard to detect.
If there was any political will to solve this problem, it would have been solved long ago.
Right, so what happens instead is the lobbyist donates some money to the campaign, and the campaign takes them out to dinner, where they can talk about future campaign funding.
Yeah that happens, but they're trading favors for continued campaign contributions not free dinners, so paying them more money isn't going to fix anything.
Forcing all interactions with lobbyists to be recorded and released might help.
Publicly funded campaigns would also probably solve this problem (but could also cause its own problems).
Teachout: “If any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make market of themselves in this way, to procure the passage of a general law with a view to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right-minded man would instinctively denounce the employer and employed as steeped in corruption.”
Alex Mayyasi notes that the First Amendment guarantees the right to petition the Government. However, Teachout was discussing a case in 1866, many years before corporations were granted First-Amendment rights. Indeed, I believe that only public-interest corporations were legal in 1866.
This article kinda just glosses over any causes of lobbying, and then complains about the symptoms.
There is one incredibly interesting video I have seen which lays out a major root cause of corruption in the US, and the rise of lobbying and corruption since the 1970s.
TL;DW (sorry, this is still long, the video is an hour!): Something happened in the 1970s which caused a major shift in a number of indicators in the US, leading to a general decline and increase in corruption in Congress. Lots of media kinds of sees this trend happening, but none of them have found a cause.
The author was in Africa, thinking about how E-voting could help to reduce the costs of voting. Which sounds great, but then, why is the formal voting process today, with voting booths, neutral polling places, private voting, etc. so sacred to democracy?
Two major problems come up when votes are not secret: intimidation, and vote buying. Leading to harassment and electoral fraud. We have already fixed this problem now here in the public, using the secret ballot. We are taught it in school and use it wherever we need a fair democratic process.
Except in one place - Congress. All votes are recorded and public, just see govtrack.us to see how your Congressman voted. But hasn't it always been this way? Even from the first Congress, with Yea or Nay votes recorded? No, it hasn't...
There is a little-known bill called the 'Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970', which introduced the electronic vote buttons into Congress, and records the vote for each bill by each Congressman. Before these buttons, they would mostly not record each vote individually. This bill overwhelmingly passed at the time, with no discussion about the problems this total transparency in Congress would introduce.
There has been no discussion since either! No pieces anywhere discussing this bill as a root cause since the bill passed in 1970. Kennedy was the only one that mentioned anything about the danger of transparency - as it would turn Congressmen into 'seismographs of public opinion.' But what actually happened was worse.
Since it takes a lot of money to run for elections, it is easy to turn to lobbyists to raise money. With transparency, lobbyists can directly see if the bills they want propped up are being voted for. Endless congressman admissions of the problems: “There aren't any poor PACs, Food Stamp PACs, or Medicare PACs.” A more complex tax code has ushered in a huge increase in complexity in the financial system since the 1970s, and led to even more lobbyists from Wall Street. “But once lobbyists knew your every vote, they could use it against you.” Almost all giant lobbying organizations (ALEC, Heritage Foundation) were founded only a year or two after this bill. Congressmen cannot vote their conscience anymore, they are pressured to vote for whatever the lobbying firm or corporation wants. Bills are basically introduced by special interests now.
The nice thing, is that there is an easy solution - reintroduce the secret ballot in Congress. AKA, a $5 Cardboard Box to have Congressmen vote in private. It's a tough pill to swallow as it goes against the nice idea of having transparency, especially at the highest levels of government. But we must reintroduce it if we ever want to have a Congress that is not controlled by lobbyists and corporations, one that is truly democratic.
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Really interesting video, definitely merits some discussion somewhere about the problems that total transparency in Congress can create.
Along similar lines, one of the main causes of the massive expansion of the federal government in the 20th century is that the US Senate was originally designed to be a check on federal power -- Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures.
Then the 17th Amendment changed Senators to be elected by popular vote and the states lost their voice in the federal government.
Don't we want intimidation/vote buying of members of congress, in a sense? As a voter, it's important to be able to verify that the people I voted for actually represented my interests, rather than just paying lip service in the campaign. A citizen at the polls has no constituency.
Doesn't seem to me like there's an easy answer, although I'm open to the idea that closed votes are the lesser issue.
> As a voter, it's important to be able to verify that the people I voted for actually represented my interests, rather than just paying lip service in the campaign.
I think this vastly overestimates the degree to which voters actually look at how representatives voted rather than what they say on television. The only people actually looking at votes are lobbyists and party leaders.
The whole idea of representative democracy rather than direct democracy is that you elect people you trust to represent your interests. If you don't trust them then vote them out, because individual voters clearly don't have time to micromanage untrustworthy members of Congress.
The actual votes are all choreographed anyway. Everybody knows ahead of time whether or not a bill is going to pass and by exactly how many votes. Which means every bill that passes or fails with a margin of more than one vote (which is almost all of them) would have allowed anyone to change their vote from the one they preferred to the one their constituents or donors would have preferred without changing the outcome, and party leaders generally only care about the outcome. And if it would have changed the outcome then that means the vote was close and it shouldn't be hard to find someone on the other side that you can trade votes with so that you can both vote the way your respective constituencies want to see you vote even though you each effectively voted the other way.
The only thing revealing the votes does is allow the exact thing we wanted to prevent, i.e. it allows a representative to be rewarded or punished for voting a certain way but only by the people who know enough to distinguish when the vote is only for show and when it really changed the outcome.
A lot of people seem to think that banning lobbying will make things better. But looking at campaign finance in India - where lobbying is illegal - the big problem is that all of this gets pushed underground. And what gets formed is this dirty nexus between criminals, politicians and businessmen. It gets worse because extortion is used as a measure by criminals to fund political campaigns (P.S. is this the reason for the tacit acceptance of the Yakuza in Japan..another place with no lobbies?).
Campaign finance needs to be more transparent... But the lobbying process in the US is already aspirational for me.
First get rid of the "dark" money. If a candidate has $1M then the electorate should know where this money came from to the last dollar. No laundering through PACs or other organizations.
That "citizens united" is even an issue is completely unfathomable for an outside observer (as is this whole vocabulary that's been invented for describing a defunct political system: "gerrymandering", "filibuster", "fiscal cliff" etc. I mean come on...).
In most other western democracies a constitution is something no one thinks about. No one praises it or accuses any one for being "unconstitutional". Yet the US political system and the constitution it relies on (I presume) seems to be held in very high regard, despite being outdated and clumsy in many areas.
Admittedly - the US isn't a country it's a bunch of largely independent states and the federal government is more like the EU than it is like France. And the european politics is arguably working a lot worse than the US.
IMO part of the reason for the sacredness of the Constitution is that it is nearly impossible to change. 3/4 of states must approve a change, a very high bar. Maybe in the 1790s when there were comparatively few states and fears of tyranny were more reality based this was more reasonable, but with 50 states it's very unrealistic.
The other reason it's sacred is that we Americans revere our founders to an absurd degree. They were great men but not gods. They were deeply flawed, just like leaders of today.
Holding the founding fathers in high regard isn't a bad thing - but holding an outdated constitution in high regard may be damaging. It should be hard to change a constitution. It's amazing how a lot of the US electorate finds the constitution so flawless, yet thinks "Washington" and the political establishment to be flawed - as if the political establishment is a product of itself and not of the legislation. I think winner-takes-all two party systems have the intrinsic problem that changes (such as to gerrymandering) will always benefit one side more than the other and thus it's hard to pass.
I think that as it gets harder to change a constitution, judicial workarounds will become more frequent. This then causes more anger around not following the written law in the general population. Since the founders are Gods who wrote the Constitution, defying this law is heresy. Political evolution is slow until the next big court case.
At the other end of the spectrum it's so easy to change that your rights can be removed in any old vote. Political evolution occurs at a faster pace.
I'd like different levels of review for certain pieces of the puzzle. Editing the first amendment? 3/4 of all states seems fair. Giving DC voting rights? Maybe a lower bar is appropriate, but not quite an up or down vote level.
As a European I'm not jealous of the money aspect in US politics. I see US politics as completely corrupt, and it's all legal. The coming elections is the 10% against the 1%. The one who cobbles together most money gets to influence most voters though campaigning and commercials. 90% of the electorate does not seem to understand that they are bought and paid for.
And because the US is the most powerful country internationally, it influences Europe in a big way. We get to deal with thing like TTIP, which seems to be a direct product of US corruption, and a refugee crisis, a direct result of failed US foreign policy (which Europe would not improve on, admittedly)
I never got why it cant be legal AND combined with a tax.
25 % of all Voices go to the Economics, but they have to "vote" for this- in secrecy, meaning, they pay taxes, and the amount of taxes determinate the share they hold on there part of the power.
Any lobbying outside of this, is illegal and leads to a company being auctioned off to the public.
When a force distorts your laws and warps society, one has to sap this force via constructs and channel it where it can be useful. And this has to be done, without this force being able to destroy the machinery that channels it.
It has been done with the military. It has been done with nobility. It can be done with what shall come.
One problem with lobbying right now is not that it's legal, it's that its legal definition is so narrow that much of it doesn't actually fall under regulation.
I haven't seen comments from a lobbyist yet. I was a lobbyist in Washington for many years, both for small companies and nonprofits. My job was to work with my clients elected official, to educate other members of Congress, raise the profile of the issue, and do all of the heavy lifting and work that the elected official can't or won't do.
There are 535 members of Congress. Unless it's the President, the chances of one elected official pushing through the needs of their constituents is extremely difficult.
Lobbyists fill the gap by educating congressional staff, piercing the bubble that congress lives in, and providing expertise on issues that the staff may not have. I have never given a campaign donation, I have never paid for anything for an elected official or their staff. It makes things difficult sometimes, because most members of Congress won't return your calls unless you've given at some point. But I believe that's the ethical way to work.
tl;dr: Lobbyists are paid educators and mouthpieces, for people, corporations, and organizations that can't afford to be in Washington all the time, to make sure that their issue is heard and considered by the widest audience possible.
Lobbying is bribery whether it's the lobbyists giving the money or congressional candidates asking for it. The fact that this practice is so apparent in our system is a shame and contradictory to the system itself.
> As one judge wrote, a lobbyist is “induced to use his influence for the money he is to obtain; when, as a patriot and a citizen, he should only act for the good of his country.”
I wonder if we could agree that technology really allowed money to be transformed into speech, which is something the founding fathers could not have really envisioned. So maybe restricting political message in the media would be a solution? Although I don't really know as I am not an american.
Anyway, as long as unfettered free speech is put on a pedestal, it's never guaranteed to always benefit the public.
In This American Life's episode on "Take the Money and Run for Office" [1], Barney Frank said,
> If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district. [2]
A lobbyist is just a person seeking to influence decisions made by government. Another way to say this is a person who educates Congress. Education is just a nicer sounding word for society's desire to influence its upcoming generation.
Congress is made up of lawyers. They don't know everything about the industries they need to regulate. Drug companies are trying to get away with using unknown substances which they proclaim are safe. Some are life saving, some aren't. Banks are constantly coming up with new financial products. Some help the economy, some don't. We need people to debate these new drugs and market dealings. The people who debate them should be experts. They should publish findings which can be replicated by independent parties. These experts and independent parties often come in the form of lobbyists. One of the EFF's jobs is to lobby.
Lobbyists aren't inherently evil, and while I think we should further restrict money in politics, you're never going to completely remove it.
Fortunately, as Barney pointed out, we have the ability to fire our elected officials. The problem lately is not just with lobbyists. It's also that we're not turning out to vote during primaries and general elections. If we want to get better representation we have to study up on the issues and candidates, debate the issues with each other, and vote.
Lobbying: Where rich people have free speech while in an office (or on a golf course) with their Congressman. And poor people have free speech in the comfort of their home.
My solution: publicly funded elections, and pay congress people a lot more so they can't be bought off with a new porch and hot tub, like that Ted Stevens. It would be money well spent. Make them millionaires, maybe some intelligent people would be enticed into public service.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadIn many countries competitive advertising that mentions other brands etc, is banned.
Honestly, no. It's essential that law makers can be informed by all interested parties. The problem is a lack of transparency. Complex to control but not impossible. Every single meeting between an elected officials and anyone lobbying them should be in some way recorded and made public. As if it were a public debate. The other issue is fund raising. Too broad and complex to really go into here but if a politician didn't or couldn't raise funds it would make lobbying more honest, imho.
The thing is that "public interest" is hard to define and dependent on each individual. Someone lobbying for a nuclear power plant in "City A" will be lauded by some and derided by others. In this case, is lobbying good, or is it bad? Who decides that?
If lobbying and fundraising were more restrictive, ultimately access to policy makers and legislators would improve. Today, all that matters is the check.
But that's not the problem we have. Our problem is fund-raising. Politicians are not meeting once every few years with a lobbyist at 2AM beneath the Lincoln Memorial, they're spending 60% of their time on the phone begging moneyed interests for reelection campaign funds or party goals, the day after they get elected. They're spending 25% of their time negotiating with lobbyists about what laws the lobbyists get to write ("The legislative subsidy model" of RL Hall, wherein they replace Congressional staff increases), and another 10% trying to raise their professional profile through non-legislative activities in the press or with political powerbrokers. Maybe 5% of their time is spent in committee meetings or on the floor.
On top of that, it starts out as a part-time job, with meaningful meetings limited to a few days of the week in order to satisfy the need to fly home to meet with contributors. The Senate has become nearly impossible to get bills through for a similar reason - a filibuster is a time-wasting annoyance legislatively, but its requirement that 51 Senators stay on the floor to break it prevents them from spending days fundraising, an existential threat to their careers, while the filibustering party only has to commit a couple Senators to keep it active.
Of the bills voted on in their legislative career, the proportion actually read by the legislator will be under 1%. The number read in full by their staff, under 10%.
Politicans are not hiding this; They are complaining about it. We have created a system wherein legislating ranks as the lowest priority, and not even the wealthiest in Congress can be free of implicit corruption.
Except lobbying does the opposite of that. It means only the wealthy parties are heard.
Public hearings are public, recorded, and there are voices from multiple camps speaking out about an issue, and given equal time to do it.
Lobbying happens in back rooms, and it's only one person talking at a time making their point. Registering lobbyists and saying when they talk to politicians won't help much if we also don't know what they're telling the politicians or if other voices don't get equal time to speak to those politicians.
When SOPA was about to pass, one politician ignorantly said that "the People" should just get their own lobbyists. Yeah, except the people can't afford to get a lobbyist for every issue. They can afford to participate in a public hearing.
Politics were probably more corrupt and lobbying was even more dominant (just in different forms) in the 1800s.
Obviously, the train has gone off the rails at this point, but we aren't at a fundamentally different place politically than we were in, say 1896, when many of the same issues were at play.
So congress had far less product to sell.
Such corruption, because it deals with those small and local problems, is mostly contained. But if you happen to be within its scope, it can be just as much, if not more, of a problem, than corruption on higher levels (because it immediately affects the things that happen around you in day-to-day life).
> lobbyists who take out lawmakers for expensive lunches
A lobbyist who buys an expensive lunch for a lawmaker (member of Congress) is committing a federal offense under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. The rule is so strict that if a member of Congress is attending a public event with food at a lobbying org, the org cannot provide utensils, unless the member of Congress pays for their food.
Executive Order 13490 also prohibits all executive branch political appointees from receiving gifts of any kind from lobbyists, including lunch.
The 1999 Supreme Court decision was the right one, as it struck down an interpretation that was obviously too broad. The article names Scalia since he wrote the opinion, but the vote was 9-0! (Obviously this was back in the good old days when the Supreme Court still had 9 justices.)
Alternatively, you can always threaten to fund someone else in the next party primaries/election.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20lobby.html
Ironically (given the complaint Mr Ackerman voiced) one way to encourage imperfections in rules is to allow lobbying, which biases the decision making process towards small, focused groups that have a lot to gain by affecting the rules over large, general benefits.
Yeah, it's difficult to perfectly take advantage of an imperfect system, and that's a good thing.
I really don't think you should say that like it's a good thing.
It's like saying "American is less corrupt than North Korea!" . That's not saying much.
Background: I am Finnish. The country routinely tops the world corruption perception index as the least corrupted country in the World. (Not every year, but you get the point.)
In my mind, that tells diddly squat about how well things are in Finland. It only highlights how wretched the situation is even in the runner-up country.
That's one of the more amusing typos I've seen lately :)
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/27/145923803/the-f...
The cost of congressional elections has increased so much that it has become essentially required for someone aspiring to political office to raise enormous amounts of money. As a result they're asking lobbyists to contribute. As a result they're more likely to take positions that are friendly to those interests.
Effectively the polarity of the commonly stated narrative is backwards. It's not lobbyists giving money for special favors, it's congresspeople needing money who give special favors in the hopes of maybe getting money. This is even more perverse, and harder to fix than the former. Essentially, I wish my congressperson was more traditionally corrupt, that's an issue we know how to solve.
It's not true for contributions to "super PACs" and other independent expenditures, aka outside money--the stuff the Citizens United decision liberalized. The reason for that is that the law (even post-CU) prohibits coordination between a candidate and any group making independent expenditures. Ted Cruz cannot ask anyone to give money to his super PAC.
And it's important to understand that there are still limits on the contributions in my first paragraph. A given person can only contribute a set amount of money per election cycle to each candidate, each PAC, and each party committee. That said, the aggregate numbers are still huge.
CU did not outlaw limits on those types of contributions. I wish we could lower then farther and (especially) take away the privileged position that political parties have within elections and campaign finance laws.
Thing is though, it's not about Ted Cruz, or Obama or even the congress. Sure, it's a problem at those levels, but it's a REAL problem at the state and local level. As a super PAC you can have a much larger influence in these relatively less watched elections as you can in a national election. These smaller elections have candidates that aren't as well known and don't have the money to fight back.
Instead everyone is demanding to make it harder. The lack of Economics instinct is costly for our society.
Political speech can be codified and regulated with channels and times (which is largely already is via the political "seasons" and campaign routes). The questions of how to structure it, are many and varied, but would result in a normalized process that is distinctly devoid of corruption. Take money out of the process.
The problem isn't unmet demand, the problem is dependence and the power dynamic that creates.
It would be much better to ban all lobbying, so each candidate would only have a very small amount o fmoney to spend on elections, and people would be less manipulated into voting them.
I can make up my own mind for who to vote for. I don't need or want anyone to protect me from persuasion. I can't think of an idea more insidious to a free society, that the government needs to control the expression of ideas to protect people from "manipulation".
Edit: I wanted to add that I feel like money being treated as speech is the same as running an organization that goes with whatever the loudest man in the room has to say, rather than the best ideas. Have you ever been in a meeting where someone with a big voice and a small brain steals all the airtime by never stopping talking?
Indeed, I think the best explanation for the campaign finance laws of the recent decades is that they're intended to protect the incumbents that enacted them.
Your argument rests on the idea that the candidate with the most money always wins. This is the "common sense" model, but it's not supported by empirical data.
In reality election victory is related to money the same way individual happiness is:
Without money a person will not be happy, and a candidate will not be elected. But once you have enough money for a comfortable life/campaign, more money does little to improve things.
Once you've made all voters aware of who you are and what you stand for, your campaign has done the advertising it needs. Telling them again and again will change very little. Jeb Bush is the latest of many well funded failed candidates showing this.
But not easier in the sense that anyone can donate an infinite amount directly to the campaign. That just skews the system in the favor of a few donors (as it already has to a great degree).
We need the "money vote" to be "equalized" among people, just like the ballot vote is. One person shouldn't be able to donate $10 million, when 90% of the others can only donate up to $100 in a campaign. Then it just becomes inevitable that the candidate listens to the people donating $10 million, rather than those donating $100 (even if there are many more of them).
If there is plenty money to be had from many sources, candidates don't need to spend so much time getting it, and they don't need to offer so many legislative favors in return.
Note that you only need enough money to run a good campaign. Getting twice or 10 times that money does very little for your electability.
If you want to know more about this idea see [1].
1. http://www.thirty-thousand.org
http://www.fairvote.org/proportional_representation
I do agree that there are much better voting systems then simple majorities - I like instant runoffs.
This is interesting.
On the other hand, will we make ourselves even more vulnerable to "grassroots campaigns" like the tea party and lobbies like Alec?
I'm not an expert but there are mathematically and sociologically sound alternatives that are better than what you and I can prescribe. I'd prefer one of those.
Also I'm not very familiar with the work of committees. Would they grow larger? Would they become even more powerful and stay the same size?
I would imagine that committees would get bigger. Hopefully with more politicians you would get more people who actually knew about the area that they were on a committee for. The main thing is once you got rid of the need for money the desire to be on a powerful committee would decrease.
In regards stability it is better than proportional voting which tends to splinter the electorate. With instant run offs the candidate that is close to the consensus tends to win.
Yes you can. Basically the scenario is that by gaining votes from other parties, you can change who is eliminated in the first round, which changes distribution of second round votes.
You can argue about how likely this is to happen, but on some level it doesn't matter. If people can't feel absolutely confident that voting for who they actually want won't reduce their vote's impact, many will continue to vote tactically.
>There is no way that placing your preferred candidate first can ever result in your vote not being given in the order you choose.
No, but it can end up harming your second choice, by eliminating them early, so your vote for them doesn't matter. This is called Favourite Betrayal, and it's a serious problem with IRV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
And as a quick worked example, if you have 4 people voting A>B>C, 4 people voting C>B>A and 3 people voting B>A>C, then A wins. If one person voting C>B>A changes their vote to B>C>A, then B wins. So by putting C first, they were harming their second choice B.
That doesn't just sound plausible, it sounds like exactly the pattern of growth for a third party that you'd expect.
From those visualizations and my reading elsewhere it looks like approval voting is the closest to a Voronoi-style partitioning of the opinion space without being subject to strategic voting.
And there's obviously some variance of complexity between them, but even fine grained Range Voting isn't that hard to understand.
The problem is that FairVote, which advocates IRV (apparently because it's a useful steeping stone to the their REAL goal of STV), is run by a professional liar named Rob Richie, and he disseminates a massive amount of false and misleading information about voting systems. E.g.
https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/fact-check
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
In short, tactical voting isn't all that important. For instance, Score Voting and Approval Voting perform better with 100% strategic voters (in which case they are identical) than IRV does with 100% honest voting. So even if IRV magically encouraged all voters to be honest (which it doesn't), Score/Approval would still be superior.
Score Voting is definitively superior to Approval Voting in terms of producing the right electoral outcome (ignoring practical concerns around complexity and the cost of adoption, upgrading voting machines, etc.). That's because, for tactical voters, both systems are the same. But for honest voters, Score Voting adds less noise/loss/distortion, because it doesn't force you to round your 7 up to a 10, or your 3 down to a 0. Hence better outcomes overall, as seen in this graph of Bayesian Regret figures.
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
In fact any proposal which claims that making districts more homogenous in their voting behavior - "80% of people in this town vote republican so why don't we just make a district that reflects that commonality," for example - is effectively gerrymandering and disenfranchisement harming both sides. 20% of the population of that town will always be ignored. 30% of that town are casting republican votes that don't matter at a larger level, and which don't contribute to countering a democrat vote.
Seems to me smaller districts would be more likely to exhibit those alignments and disenfranchise more people?
On the other hand, in smaller districts the electorate will be more likely to share opinions and interests so maybe that counteracts the problem?
The second benefit, for election integrity activists, is preventing the "under vote", where down ballot races which are left blank, and potentially filled in by helpful administrators.
Note that in the US, ballots in metro areas can easily have dozens of races. Sheriff, judges, schools, water district, city, county, state, national, referendums, levies, etc.
I do agree that it is a very good idea, but compulsory voting doesn't solve the corrupting effect of large districts.
Mexico doesn't do too well, but apparently mandatory voting isn't enforced.
http://www.idea.int/vt/countryview.cfm?id=15
Radicals like me believe no taxation without representation. I support enfranchising pretty much everyone, especially for local issues.
It is an interesting question if the vote should be extended to non-citizens. I can see good and bad aspects to doing so and I am not sure which is more important.
For reasons of equality among the states, the US capital is not located in any of them. The District of Columbia, not being a state, doesn't have the privileges of a state either, such as being represented in the US government. This is not easy to fix; giving DC state privileges would be a severe blow to the idea that the federal government doesn't favor any one state over another.
It still gets taxed, though. People are sore enough about this that when someone submitted the suggestion of "no taxation without representation" for the slogan on DC license plates, it was vetoed by DC government for being "too controversial".
I would actually be OK with saying that DC doesn't get taxed, since they're legally prohibited from participating in the government. But I don't think that's a widespread viewpoint. Do you have an opinion?
The idea is to not solve every problem with democracy, but to remove the corrupting influence of needing to raise money from vested interests to spend on advertising so you can get elected. This is the major problem.
Unlike every other modern democracy, the US has opt-in voting. To the best of my knowledge, universal voting registration does not increase participation. But it does prevent disenfranchisement. Only compulsory voting would (otherwise) increase participation.
Some of our jurisdictions have switched to all postal balloting. This permits ballot chasing. In general, these campaigns no longer attempt to persuade. (Clinton vs Sanders is a notable exception, because most contests are face to face.) They spend most of the money on GOTV (get out the vote), turning out your base (supporters). Which has led to alienating voters. No one likes to be contacted 30 times per election (4 times a year) to be reminded to mail their ballot.
Postal balloting has also harmed the culture of voting. This intangible is very hard to measure. But some studies show that "I voted" style markers, visible to your friends and family, boost voter participation.
IIRC Spain has a system along these lines.
First past the post needs to go.
Approval voting is best for executive positions, like governor, mayor, sheriff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
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FPTP is terrible. Among other reasons, per Duverger's Law, it begats a two party system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
People railing against duopolies (Democrats & Republicans) haven't yet learned it's the result of the form of elections, not a natural law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jS7b-0PV9E
Anyone that wants to be on a ballot for a particular position should have to do the same thing as anyone else (probably collecting a modest number of signatures on a petition, maybe with some rules to limit the number of candidates).
I guess parties might be allowed to place an endorsement on a ballot, but if not they could still release a list of endorsements.
In that arrangement, contesting the national delegate convention to get the endorsement of the party might still happen, but it would not be so inordinately important.
A party organization would still be hugely useful in getting wide ballot presence, but an incumbent organization would not have the huge advantages that they enjoy today.
I'd love some of that where I live. I now fully embrace transactional politics. Quid pro quo.
democracy (dĭ-mŏkˈrə-sē) Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives - American Heritage dictionary, first definition
With apologies to Plato, the word "democracy" most commonly refers to nearly any political system that involves voting. The only time anyone uses the word democracy to mean "direct democracy," with every citizen voting on every issue, is when they're criticizing someone else for using the word democracy in exactly the way almost everyone does all the time.
See my companion rant: Hitler's National Socialism was a form of fascism in the way we use that word today, even though he and Mussolini had distinct political ideas.
Respectfully disagree. It's not that easy.
Legislating is an information processing problem. The politics of attention. All the legislators I know can barely keep up with the torrent of information. Overwhelming them with info and votes and meetings prevents them from taking initiative. They need more staff.
All games have winners and losers. Weakening legislators -- thru term limits, cutting staff, whatever -- strengthens lobbyists and administrators (heads of departments, the silent state) and executives.
My baptism to the policy world flipped most of my positions.
Some measures that would strengthen legislators, give them more autonomy, would be public financing of campaigns (no more dialing for dollars), public disclosure commissions, pay raises and full time employment (so regular people, not just lawyers and retirees, could serve), full staffs, recording every vote (disallowing roll call voice votes), lengthen the legislative calendar, diffuse power thru more fair committee assignments (not just seniority), etc, etc.
There's no shortage of worthy reform proposals. Just mind the winners and losers with every rule change.
The reason Citizens United was decided the way it was is because it costs money to make movies, and even if you somehow allocate public money towards the distribution of the film on PBS or whatever, you're still insisting that the movie makers aren't allowed to spend more of their money to make the movie to their own standards.
It drives me crazy that people don't understand Citizens United was about free speech. And most people who say they don't like the ruling reverse positions once I explain exactly what it was about. Stopping a film maker from making or airing a political film seems horrible to me.
- Some parties/candidates spend more than they are allowed and try to hide the difference and that can only be done illegally (See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1085...).
- Also there can be some voting(?) threshold you have to reach to be eligible for the reimbursement of campaign costs (5% for the french presidential I believe) so small parties are gambling a lot by throwing themselves into the pit with other well established big parties and sometimes they simply decide to make a coalition in order to have the guarantee to survive financially. But then they are forced to reframe their political agenda and this usually weakens the ideological stances of everyone.
- I think you have to submit every spending and justify the origin of the money private donors give you. Except when they can't because that money was obtained in shady places (See the Gaddafi-Sarkozy affair http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22220272 or the Sarkozy-Bettencourt affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettencourt_affair).
Of course I am not blaming the system. But at the moment the implementation lacks several error catching checks to make sure the whole thing runs as intended (eg: the official/national organ that is supposed to investigate these campaigns and make sure everything stays legal is largely under funded).
I gave some notorious examples from right parties but it doesn't mean the left doesn't dabble into those waters (in France and in Belgium).
As a French citizen, I can't figure out a good reason why I have to give a cent to some nutjobs just because they woke up one morning and decided they were fit to rule the country (Jacques Cheminade, far left/right leaders, etc.).
The situation is more contrasted and antagonistic in France where the left (PS: Socialist Party) and the right (LR: The republicans) are so huge they don't share the power (at least in the government). In Belgium we can have left and right ministers at the same time depending on which party entered the coalition. In France the government is basically either from the right or the left. The parliament is more nuanced.
Both countries have a senate with elected members (who make up groups as well).
I don't know if it answers your question though.
Anyway, when you limit money going to politicians it goes to these sorts of groups instead. Then they turn around and buy air time supporting whoever funded them. If you limit money to those groups (which isn't constitutional anyway), you get money supporting dubious university research and "think tanks". And so on. If all those are limited, people start buying media organizations.
The point being it doesn't seem like there's any way to remove or even curtail the influence of money in politics. All they can seem to do is move it around. That's why I'm curious what sort of legal environment Belgium has in place to prevent that.
Why do countries like Germany make do without these huge fundraising campaigns, while a having a more balanced parliament, and the US is just Rep or Dem (binary) plus a huge show on a tour bus across the country, instead of doing real politics? I mean, what's the cultural difference in the US population that facilitates the circus?
The unit that really matters in Germany is the party, and the most important vote in all elections at the state and federal levels is a party vote rather than a vote for an individual. Something like a Sanders candidacy would be completely unthinkable in Germany simply because of how the elections work.
(There is a secondary vote in elections in which you vote for an individual, but that can only marginally affect the final composition of parliament in terms of number of seats per party. The details are complicated, and for the purpose of this discussion it's best to pretend that this secondary vote doesn't exist.)
At its most extreme, neither the chancellor nor the state prime ministers are elected by direct vote.
Then there's an admittedly somewhat random element of political culture in that there are no open primaries. The selection of candidates within each party is done by vote among delegates internal to the parties, and is almost completely devoid of public spectacle. (The news media typically reports once on these internal elections on the day that they happen, and that's it.)
To top it all off, parties are subsidized by the state. Once a party wins a number of votes in an election - the threshold is fairly low, and lower than the number of votes required to enter parliament - they receive money proportional to their electoral success. This reduces the need to create a huge fundraising apparatus in the first place.
I'd say Lessig is right in that campaign financing reform is probably the best path forward for the US, since changing the other aspects I mentioned would require much deeper constitutional changes.
We're seeing it happen right now in the US, with Clinton and the Democrats, and we're also seeing it happen in Canada, with the debacle that is the NDP / Mulcair.
For non-Canadians, the NDP is supposed to be Canada's socialist party - it was responsible for putting senior security, national healthcare, student issues, unions, etc on the table. Over the past ~15 years, it has shifted so much that it's almost entirely to the right of the big-business-friendly Liberal party. This has largely happened behind closed doors - with no input from their grassroots supporters. Most of my socialist friends are very close to tearing up their memberships.
Could candidates have standardized, free/fixed low price advertisement? At least some portion of it?
There they would get to state their goals and views, and people could make an informed decision on who to vote.
There are "voting advice applications" where a voter can answer a web quiz and then see which candidate answered closest to them, with explanations, comes closest. We have a few of those, by broadcasting companies, newspapers and magazines here, and I believe they have some effect at least on candidate discovery. Then they can go to the candidate's web site to learn more. I'm from a country that has a multi party system though. As far as I know, it doesn't cost anything for the candidate to participate (answering the quiz), and the money comes from ads / general visibility to the quiz host.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_advice_application
"Special favors" are only given when the public does not speak out or vote. If the public is largely silent on an issue, the politician's perspective is his constituents don't care about that issue.
Barney Frank: "If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district." [1]
We need to discuss and debate the issues more with each other. Techies may also help provide better tools for representatives to gauge public interest.
[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...
Do I think lobbying (as a system) needs to be fixed/changed/altered/tweaked? Most definitely. But making it outright illegal is like making drug use illegal, people are still going to do it regardless. At least with it being legal, we can keep tabs and utilize harm reduction when necessary.
Things are changing, slightly for the better in some ways though it's overall a complete mess. It helps that it's no longer necessary to spend tens of millions of dollars just to communicate with the electorate, though we're still not quite there yet.
We can't just make a few tweaks to the legal code and magic our way out of these problems. It's going to take a generation or more of concerted effort and, as always, constant vigilance afterward, and a bunch of legal changes along the way as well.
I could not tell when the author was writing something from Zephyr Teachout and when the author was citing another source.
If I could hire whichever representative I want to exercise my vote in the legislature and fire him whenever I want, chances are I will have a representative that follows my wishes.
How would a collective decision making system work if you were designing it from scratch? Would it look anything like the American system?
No, I think it would be more like a parliamentary system using proportional representation.
But even that falls far short of what we could accomplish with modern technology.
Its also worth pointing out that the Founders did not set up elections for both houses of Congress. The Senate was appointed by the governors of the states. After that was changed, it became easier to buy influence. And easier to centralize everything farther away from the people.
But that can be turned around.
The fact that a lawmaker is impressed by a nice dinner or a basketball game is embarrassing.
Paying them more wouldn't solve this problem because running an election campaign is so expensive that they spend the majority of their time trying to raise money. They end up taking positions that are friendly to potential donors in the hope that the donors will keep sending them money.
The major problem isn't that they trade favors to lobbyists to enrich themselves directly (although some undoubtedly are), the problem is that they trade favors to lobbyists in order to keep getting re-elected.
If there was any political will to solve this problem, it would have been solved long ago.
And that's totally legal.
Forcing all interactions with lobbyists to be recorded and released might help.
Publicly funded campaigns would also probably solve this problem (but could also cause its own problems).
Alex Mayyasi notes that the First Amendment guarantees the right to petition the Government. However, Teachout was discussing a case in 1866, many years before corporations were granted First-Amendment rights. Indeed, I believe that only public-interest corporations were legal in 1866.
It was a very different time. So it goes.
There is one incredibly interesting video I have seen which lays out a major root cause of corruption in the US, and the rise of lobbying and corruption since the 1970s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY (Cardboard Box Reform)
It is long, but well-reasoned and supported by a lot of evidence. Definitely worth a watch...
The author was in Africa, thinking about how E-voting could help to reduce the costs of voting. Which sounds great, but then, why is the formal voting process today, with voting booths, neutral polling places, private voting, etc. so sacred to democracy?
Two major problems come up when votes are not secret: intimidation, and vote buying. Leading to harassment and electoral fraud. We have already fixed this problem now here in the public, using the secret ballot. We are taught it in school and use it wherever we need a fair democratic process.
Except in one place - Congress. All votes are recorded and public, just see govtrack.us to see how your Congressman voted. But hasn't it always been this way? Even from the first Congress, with Yea or Nay votes recorded? No, it hasn't...
There is a little-known bill called the 'Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970', which introduced the electronic vote buttons into Congress, and records the vote for each bill by each Congressman. Before these buttons, they would mostly not record each vote individually. This bill overwhelmingly passed at the time, with no discussion about the problems this total transparency in Congress would introduce.
There has been no discussion since either! No pieces anywhere discussing this bill as a root cause since the bill passed in 1970. Kennedy was the only one that mentioned anything about the danger of transparency - as it would turn Congressmen into 'seismographs of public opinion.' But what actually happened was worse.
Since it takes a lot of money to run for elections, it is easy to turn to lobbyists to raise money. With transparency, lobbyists can directly see if the bills they want propped up are being voted for. Endless congressman admissions of the problems: “There aren't any poor PACs, Food Stamp PACs, or Medicare PACs.” A more complex tax code has ushered in a huge increase in complexity in the financial system since the 1970s, and led to even more lobbyists from Wall Street. “But once lobbyists knew your every vote, they could use it against you.” Almost all giant lobbying organizations (ALEC, Heritage Foundation) were founded only a year or two after this bill. Congressmen cannot vote their conscience anymore, they are pressured to vote for whatever the lobbying firm or corporation wants. Bills are basically introduced by special interests now.
The nice thing, is that there is an easy solution - reintroduce the secret ballot in Congress. AKA, a $5 Cardboard Box to have Congressmen vote in private. It's a tough pill to swallow as it goes against the nice idea of having transparency, especially at the highest levels of government. But we must reintroduce it if we ever want to have a Congress that is not controlled by lobbyists and corporations, one that is truly democratic.
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Really interesting video, definitely merits some discussion somewhere about the problems that total transparency in Congress can create.
Then the 17th Amendment changed Senators to be elected by popular vote and the states lost their voice in the federal government.
Don't we want intimidation/vote buying of members of congress, in a sense? As a voter, it's important to be able to verify that the people I voted for actually represented my interests, rather than just paying lip service in the campaign. A citizen at the polls has no constituency.
Doesn't seem to me like there's an easy answer, although I'm open to the idea that closed votes are the lesser issue.
I think this vastly overestimates the degree to which voters actually look at how representatives voted rather than what they say on television. The only people actually looking at votes are lobbyists and party leaders.
The whole idea of representative democracy rather than direct democracy is that you elect people you trust to represent your interests. If you don't trust them then vote them out, because individual voters clearly don't have time to micromanage untrustworthy members of Congress.
The actual votes are all choreographed anyway. Everybody knows ahead of time whether or not a bill is going to pass and by exactly how many votes. Which means every bill that passes or fails with a margin of more than one vote (which is almost all of them) would have allowed anyone to change their vote from the one they preferred to the one their constituents or donors would have preferred without changing the outcome, and party leaders generally only care about the outcome. And if it would have changed the outcome then that means the vote was close and it shouldn't be hard to find someone on the other side that you can trade votes with so that you can both vote the way your respective constituencies want to see you vote even though you each effectively voted the other way.
The only thing revealing the votes does is allow the exact thing we wanted to prevent, i.e. it allows a representative to be rewarded or punished for voting a certain way but only by the people who know enough to distinguish when the vote is only for show and when it really changed the outcome.
Campaign finance needs to be more transparent... But the lobbying process in the US is already aspirational for me.
In most other western democracies a constitution is something no one thinks about. No one praises it or accuses any one for being "unconstitutional". Yet the US political system and the constitution it relies on (I presume) seems to be held in very high regard, despite being outdated and clumsy in many areas.
Admittedly - the US isn't a country it's a bunch of largely independent states and the federal government is more like the EU than it is like France. And the european politics is arguably working a lot worse than the US.
The other reason it's sacred is that we Americans revere our founders to an absurd degree. They were great men but not gods. They were deeply flawed, just like leaders of today.
At the other end of the spectrum it's so easy to change that your rights can be removed in any old vote. Political evolution occurs at a faster pace.
I'd like different levels of review for certain pieces of the puzzle. Editing the first amendment? 3/4 of all states seems fair. Giving DC voting rights? Maybe a lower bar is appropriate, but not quite an up or down vote level.
And because the US is the most powerful country internationally, it influences Europe in a big way. We get to deal with thing like TTIP, which seems to be a direct product of US corruption, and a refugee crisis, a direct result of failed US foreign policy (which Europe would not improve on, admittedly)
Any lobbying outside of this, is illegal and leads to a company being auctioned off to the public. When a force distorts your laws and warps society, one has to sap this force via constructs and channel it where it can be useful. And this has to be done, without this force being able to destroy the machinery that channels it. It has been done with the military. It has been done with nobility. It can be done with what shall come.
There are 535 members of Congress. Unless it's the President, the chances of one elected official pushing through the needs of their constituents is extremely difficult.
Lobbyists fill the gap by educating congressional staff, piercing the bubble that congress lives in, and providing expertise on issues that the staff may not have. I have never given a campaign donation, I have never paid for anything for an elected official or their staff. It makes things difficult sometimes, because most members of Congress won't return your calls unless you've given at some point. But I believe that's the ethical way to work.
tl;dr: Lobbyists are paid educators and mouthpieces, for people, corporations, and organizations that can't afford to be in Washington all the time, to make sure that their issue is heard and considered by the widest audience possible.
I wish that was still true.
Anyway, as long as unfettered free speech is put on a pedestal, it's never guaranteed to always benefit the public.
> If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district. [2]
A lobbyist is just a person seeking to influence decisions made by government. Another way to say this is a person who educates Congress. Education is just a nicer sounding word for society's desire to influence its upcoming generation.
Congress is made up of lawyers. They don't know everything about the industries they need to regulate. Drug companies are trying to get away with using unknown substances which they proclaim are safe. Some are life saving, some aren't. Banks are constantly coming up with new financial products. Some help the economy, some don't. We need people to debate these new drugs and market dealings. The people who debate them should be experts. They should publish findings which can be replicated by independent parties. These experts and independent parties often come in the form of lobbyists. One of the EFF's jobs is to lobby.
Lobbyists aren't inherently evil, and while I think we should further restrict money in politics, you're never going to completely remove it.
Fortunately, as Barney pointed out, we have the ability to fire our elected officials. The problem lately is not just with lobbyists. It's also that we're not turning out to vote during primaries and general elections. If we want to get better representation we have to study up on the issues and candidates, debate the issues with each other, and vote.
[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...
[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...