Congress is getting less productive
Congress is getting less productive
The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.
When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.
The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.
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I wonder if this would change if we didn't know how our representatives voted. If they were all to blame for the failures of the institution rather than being able to point to their individual vote maybe people would put more pressure on them to work together.
Also it would mean they couldn't be pressured or paid into voting a specific way. Then again, nobody ever likes this idea when I bring it up so I expect to get a lot of angry replies.
I think a problem with blind voting is, who do the citizens know who represented them and acted in their interest, and therefore who they should support and vote for? Backroom deals and corruption would run rife. Greater transparency is better than less.
A conscience vote, where the party leaders do not enforce a particular party line, instead accept the will of the representative member (notionally on behalf of their constituents) should be more commonplace. This is essentially the same as getting an independent. Best bet is to break up the 2-party system.
If Congress isn't doing its job as a whole, the voters will vote out their individual Congressman, even if they're not the cause. If you know you're gonna lose your job because your coworker is fucking up you're gonna police them. If things get bad enough the entire Congress could be replaced for incompetence.
Voting transparency also allows those backroom deals, but this time the Congressman can show that they did what they were bribed to do. So even if a vote fails the person giving the bribe got what they paid for. Or, to put it another way, are you really gonna try to bribe someone if you can't verify that they're going to do what you paid them to do?
If voters want to be informed of their Congressman's positions, they can look at the records of debates and committee meetings. Votes are not the only way to know if your representative is doing their job.
These are the same reasons we have blind voting as individuals - so that voters can't be intimidated or paid to vote a certain way. I think Congress would work better if they went back to anonymous votes.
Best bet is to break up the 2-party system.
I think getting Congress back to anonymous voting is a far more achievable goal, and might actually help with that.
Down-under, we have some other mechanisms to try to preserve democracy:
Mandatory voting and preferential voting. This provides opportunities for third parties and independents who engage with voters.
Ethics Committees, used at state levels but pushes for a Federal Ethics Committee. "They allow Parliament to scrutinise the Executive more effectively, making it more responsible to the people"
Caps on political donations is another measure, supported by progressives but not yet by the conservatives.
Canada has similar safeguards, except we allowed third-party political funding into the mix a few years back (similar to the American super pacs) ... which was snuck in under the radar so many Canadians are unaware of it.
I am still pissed about that crap migrating up here.
Makes sense. It's a shame when these should be fundamental principals and accountability of the person's elected.
The concern for me is there would be those that act without conscience or care, the 'wreckers' that don't have any current policy or engage in rational debate, they're in plain sight already today and not being held to account?
I think the reason they're not held to account is because everyone else can just point to that individual and say it's not their fault. But with anonymous voting, acts of Congress would be blamed on the entire Congress, and would incentivize Congressmen to police themselves lest they lose their jobs along with the at-fault party.
Also, there's a lot of other bad behavior that individual Congressman can engage in that would be firmly pinned on that individual. Their words in committee or on the floor, would still be available, and their voters could vote them out on that.