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Why have we as a people allowed our past three administrations to continue to rule by fiat? Ultimately, these are probably perfectly reasonable ideas, but this

Why have we as a people allowed our past three administrations to continue to rule by fiat? Ultimately, these are probably perfectly reasonable ideas, but this kind of action must come from the legislature.

pdonis 6y ago
The legislature has already long since punted regulation of most things to the executive. The Code of Federal Regulations is a lot larger and lengthier than the United States Code. That includes environmental regulations: the EPA is an executive agency. If your response is that the above is a bad idea, I agree; I think the legislature should be prevented (by Constitutional amendment, if necessary) from punting regulation to the executive. Anything that has the force of law--and regulations issued by executive agencies do--should have to go through the Constitutional process to create a law. But that's not how things are currently done.
cgrealy 6y ago
Because your system of government is so fundamentally broken it barely even qualifies as a democracy anymore? All the systems built into the US government were designed for a country with 1% the number of people it has now, when the fastest method of communication was a horse and the majority of it's populace were farmers. There are a few simple things that could be done right now to fix the US government (abolish the EC and gerrymandering to start with), but no one has the political will to do it.
- tathougies 6y ago
  Gerrymandering isn't really a thing IMO (see the Big Sort by Bill Bishop). It ends up hurting each party in reality. I think the most important thing is getting rid of first past the post voting, and moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    > ...moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district. It’s honestly surprising that only two states are winner-takes-all by district. The other 48 are winner-takes-all for the whole state.
    - Natsu 6y ago
      That's neglecting this, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
      - microcolonel 6y ago
        It deserves to be neglected, it is an extremely foolish idea. It literally can only hurt the Democrats advocating for it in the solid blue states that are signatories.
        throwaway2048 6y ago
        It only comes into force when a majority of EC delegate-states agree, not before.
      - tathougies 6y ago
        This is illegal. The constitution mandates that each state must offer its residents representative democracy. If a state apportions electors based on the results of another state that is basing their election on the votes of residents of another state, which means the voters of the state in question are being disenfranchised.
        Klathmon 6y ago
        According to the wiki article above that doesn't seem to be the case: > The Constitution reserves the choice of the precise manner for creating electors to the will of the state legislatures. It does not define or delimit what process a state legislature may use to create its state college of electors.
- rohan_ 6y ago
  The court system has already determined gerrymandering to be unconstitutional, how would you go about abolishing it?
  - gobengo 6y ago
    That's not entirely true, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause
  - tasty_freeze 6y ago
    Which court? The supreme court rules that gerrymandering is 100% AOK by them so long as it isn't done for the express purpose of racial disenfranchisement. Gerrymandering to warp democracy and give the members of your party more power than members of the other party are OK, according to our current supreme court. https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/politics/partisan-gerrymandering-supreme-court/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/politics/partisan-gerrymander...
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Even the racial disenfranchisement line has been significantly weakened - there have been cases going up with clearly racially biased districts but so long as there is some other property the districts could have been gerrymandered based on (i.e. "Urbaness") then the courts have let it through. Right now, anything goes (and the fact that gerrymandering with the explicit intention of entrenching a political party isn't illegal is bonkers).
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Districts drawn via a published, mathematically derived method would be a hell of a start.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Alternatively district abolishment and proportional distribution of delegates would also pretty much resolve it - even with a mixed geographic and proportional system where some delegates do have specific areas and others are floating delegates that are used to balance out proportions while allowing local districts to chose an advocate specifically for them.
- veeralpatel979 6y ago
  I hate gerrymandering too. More competitive elections, in my view, makes politicians less partisan and incentivizes them more to deliver for their districts. But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander. If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan? Can the public hold members of this commission accountable? Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?
  - mcv 6y ago
    You shouldn't have electoral lines at all. Proportional representation has a couple of advantages: all opinions, and not merely the majority opinion, gets represented; you're likely to get more than two parties, which means parties have to compromise with each other; and the system isn't nearly as easy to game.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Oh - districts should be drawn to guarantee mathematical fairness and a few relatively good measures exist[1] including one that was used in court in connection to a particularly egregious Wisconsin district (the efficiency-gap measure). This is really less of an unsolvable problem than people make it out to be - it's just that most of the discussion you hear about it is from the political parties both of which benefit from its existence and, especially, the incumbents who have a much more secure seat with careful district drawing to make sure you don't get too many progressives that might vote out a centrist (or ditto on the other side) 1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematician...
    - veeralpatel979 6y ago
      Got it, so you're proposing electoral lines by drawn by algorithms? I don't see any problems with this myself, as long as the algorithms are fair -- what are some downsides of this, though?
- microcolonel 6y ago
  The U.S. Federal government is not a direct democracy, it is a federal republic directed by representatives of states. If you have a fine idea for a law at this scale, and you want democracy, you have it within your state. For example, California passes all sorts of interesting environmental regulations; and the states regularly weigh on their neighbours and tributaries to have similar laws. > abolish the EC ... to start with No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything unless you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country, or have any restraint toward the rural minority.
  - kasey_junk 6y ago
    The rural minority already receives disproportionate representation in the legislative. There is -no- part of the government that provides urban voters with disproportionate representation.
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      That's true for the federal government, unless you abolish the EC (the thing I was responding to).
  - cgrealy 6y ago
    >> you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country Why would you think they don't? I'll admit this is a massive sweeping generalisation, but as a rule, urban voters tend to swing left and that mostly correlates with environmental advocacy. But more generally... >> abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything Yeah, it will. For a start, it will fix the problem of the Electoral College existing. It's an inherently undemocratic institution that is completely unnecessary in the 21st century. And that's not a partisan position (I live in NZ so I really don't have skin in the game here). If you're a democrat living in Texas or a republican living in California, you may as well not vote in presidential elections. You could move the presidential election to a Single Transferable Vote system and then you might actually get viable 3rd party candidates as people wouldn't have to worry about "wasting their vote".
- JPKab 6y ago
  I support abolition of the EC, but only if there is some form of geographic weighting (ideally a smart one) that doesn't allow a handful of cities to dominate the Federal gov't. I understand that this sounds crazy to people, but as a resident of Colorado who occasionally enjoys marijuana, a substance that my state allows but the Federal gov't has long outlawed, I like the fact that the current system puts a higher emphasis on winning over broader regions of the country without just focusing on cities. Obviously, I want it to be more of a sane weighting. My concern with not having some form of geographic weighting is that it sets up the USA not for some dramatic Civil War 2 that some people envision, but instead for a peaceful secession of certain regions who would end up going decades without having a voice in the Federal gov't. Most Americans don't have a strong grasp of WHY the Senate was made the more powerful chamber of Congress. It was done over the objections of the two largest, most powerful states at the time (Virginia and Pennsylvania) at the demand of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Mass, etc. They explicitly stated that they were worried that Philadelphia, New York City, etc would dominate the Federal Gov't and permanently ignore the smaller states who were irrelevant to the power process. It's an odd situation, because the Federal Gov't of the US was a creation of the state governments, not vice versa like many Europeans seem to think. Obviously, the current EC is pretty silly and feels arbitrary and unjust. But I don't foresee there being a single US nation without some mechanism to prevent a massive, contiguous chunk of the country from being permanently alienated from the legislative process. The history books are pretty clear on the longevity of empires whose governments ignore citizens outside of their urban centers. You can drive from Mexico to Canada in the US without driving through a single state that Hillary won in 2016. I don't see those people putting up with 6 elections in a row of defeat for their candidate. They frankly are already combative as it is. Ironically, many states in the US already have this issue within their own governments. The citizens of upstate New York are pretty much ignored at the expense of the citizens of New York City. Property taxes reflect this. My home state of Colorado is so dominated by Denver that a minimum wage law was enacted that ignores the vast differences in cost of living across the state, forcing small businesses in tiny towns with extremely low rents to pay as if their employees live in the relatively expensive Denver metro area. The Denver Post, which is absolutely not a conservative rag, opposed the minimum wage law's implementation due to this fact.
  - 6y ago
chmaynard 6y ago
> Ultimately, these are probably perfectly reasonable ideas Trump is told what to do. Ideas mean nothing to him. He is a man-child who knows his days in power are numbered. For the next six months, he will try to unwind our environmental laws to benefit himself and his fellow Republicans.
- hopfscotch 6y ago
  Over the last three years I've become a single-issue voter/activist. That issue is seeing Trump on death row. Ideally along with the other Trumps + Barr, Whitaker, and so many others. But I'll settle for just Donny.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I would prefer to see all familial wealth that was at all tainted by conflicts of interest during the course of the administration be seized and the proceeds going to fund national voting by mail. It's civil forfeiture - if they can definitively prove there was no crime they can have it back. And it's an easy bar to overcome just ask anyone who's ever had their property confiscated under that style of law.
  - dang 6y ago
    You can't post like this here, no matter how strongly you feel. Perhaps you don't owe "Donny" better but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - hopfscotch 6y ago
      Don’t care. Ban away. I’ll be back.
BurningFrog 6y ago
Yeah, it would be great if congress did its job as intended, and passed laws and stuff. Since it hasn't for decades, the Imperial Presidency rises to fill the vacuum.
cwhiz 6y ago
It took a lifetime of effort from Reagan Republicans to get where we are now. Working tirelessly for decades to make sure government is ineffective and doesn’t work.
- pstuart 6y ago
  "The Contract On America"

pdonis 6y ago

The legislature has already long since punted regulation of most things to the executive. The Code of Federal Regulations is a lot larger and lengthier than the United States Code. That includes environmental regulations: the EPA is an executive agency. If your response is that the above is a bad idea, I agree; I think the legislature should be prevented (by Constitutional amendment, if necessary) from punting regulation to the executive. Anything that has the force of law--and regulations issued by executive agencies do--should have to go through the Constitutional process to create a law. But that's not how things are currently done.

cgrealy 6y ago

Because your system of government is so fundamentally broken it barely even qualifies as a democracy anymore? All the systems built into the US government were designed for a country with 1% the number of people it has now, when the fastest method of communication was a horse and the majority of it's populace were farmers. There are a few simple things that could be done right now to fix the US government (abolish the EC and gerrymandering to start with), but no one has the political will to do it.

tathougies 6y ago
Gerrymandering isn't really a thing IMO (see the Big Sort by Bill Bishop). It ends up hurting each party in reality. I think the most important thing is getting rid of first past the post voting, and moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  > ...moving the EC (which should not be abolished IMO) into electing actual electors by district. It’s honestly surprising that only two states are winner-takes-all by district. The other 48 are winner-takes-all for the whole state.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    That's neglecting this, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      It deserves to be neglected, it is an extremely foolish idea. It literally can only hurt the Democrats advocating for it in the solid blue states that are signatories.
      - throwaway2048 6y ago
        It only comes into force when a majority of EC delegate-states agree, not before.
    - tathougies 6y ago
      This is illegal. The constitution mandates that each state must offer its residents representative democracy. If a state apportions electors based on the results of another state that is basing their election on the votes of residents of another state, which means the voters of the state in question are being disenfranchised.
      - Klathmon 6y ago
        According to the wiki article above that doesn't seem to be the case: > The Constitution reserves the choice of the precise manner for creating electors to the will of the state legislatures. It does not define or delimit what process a state legislature may use to create its state college of electors.
rohan_ 6y ago
The court system has already determined gerrymandering to be unconstitutional, how would you go about abolishing it?
- gobengo 6y ago
  That's not entirely true, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rucho_v._Common_Cause
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  Which court? The supreme court rules that gerrymandering is 100% AOK by them so long as it isn't done for the express purpose of racial disenfranchisement. Gerrymandering to warp democracy and give the members of your party more power than members of the other party are OK, according to our current supreme court. https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/politics/partisan-gerrymandering-supreme-court/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/27/politics/partisan-gerrymander...
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Even the racial disenfranchisement line has been significantly weakened - there have been cases going up with clearly racially biased districts but so long as there is some other property the districts could have been gerrymandered based on (i.e. "Urbaness") then the courts have let it through. Right now, anything goes (and the fact that gerrymandering with the explicit intention of entrenching a political party isn't illegal is bonkers).
- TylerE 6y ago
  Districts drawn via a published, mathematically derived method would be a hell of a start.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Alternatively district abolishment and proportional distribution of delegates would also pretty much resolve it - even with a mixed geographic and proportional system where some delegates do have specific areas and others are floating delegates that are used to balance out proportions while allowing local districts to chose an advocate specifically for them.
veeralpatel979 6y ago
I hate gerrymandering too. More competitive elections, in my view, makes politicians less partisan and incentivizes them more to deliver for their districts. But who should determine who draws electoral lines? Right now, it's in the hands of elected officials, so you can at least vote them out if they gerrymander. If electoral lines are drawn by a nonpartisan commission, who appoints the commission? How do you ensure the members of the commission stay nonpartisan? Can the public hold members of this commission accountable? Definitely our current system is broken; what are some alternatives to elected officials drawing electoral lines that are promising?
- mcv 6y ago
  You shouldn't have electoral lines at all. Proportional representation has a couple of advantages: all opinions, and not merely the majority opinion, gets represented; you're likely to get more than two parties, which means parties have to compromise with each other; and the system isn't nearly as easy to game.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Oh - districts should be drawn to guarantee mathematical fairness and a few relatively good measures exist[1] including one that was used in court in connection to a particularly egregious Wisconsin district (the efficiency-gap measure). This is really less of an unsolvable problem than people make it out to be - it's just that most of the discussion you hear about it is from the political parties both of which benefit from its existence and, especially, the incumbents who have a much more secure seat with careful district drawing to make sure you don't get too many progressives that might vote out a centrist (or ditto on the other side) 1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematicians-who-want-to-save-democracy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mathematician...
  - veeralpatel979 6y ago
    Got it, so you're proposing electoral lines by drawn by algorithms? I don't see any problems with this myself, as long as the algorithms are fair -- what are some downsides of this, though?
microcolonel 6y ago
The U.S. Federal government is not a direct democracy, it is a federal republic directed by representatives of states. If you have a fine idea for a law at this scale, and you want democracy, you have it within your state. For example, California passes all sorts of interesting environmental regulations; and the states regularly weigh on their neighbours and tributaries to have similar laws. > abolish the EC ... to start with No, abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything unless you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country, or have any restraint toward the rural minority.
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  The rural minority already receives disproportionate representation in the legislative. There is -no- part of the government that provides urban voters with disproportionate representation.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    That's true for the federal government, unless you abolish the EC (the thing I was responding to).
- cgrealy 6y ago
  >> you think average urban Americans care even one bit about the natural wonder of the country Why would you think they don't? I'll admit this is a massive sweeping generalisation, but as a rule, urban voters tend to swing left and that mostly correlates with environmental advocacy. But more generally... >> abolishing the Electoral College will not fix anything Yeah, it will. For a start, it will fix the problem of the Electoral College existing. It's an inherently undemocratic institution that is completely unnecessary in the 21st century. And that's not a partisan position (I live in NZ so I really don't have skin in the game here). If you're a democrat living in Texas or a republican living in California, you may as well not vote in presidential elections. You could move the presidential election to a Single Transferable Vote system and then you might actually get viable 3rd party candidates as people wouldn't have to worry about "wasting their vote".
JPKab 6y ago
I support abolition of the EC, but only if there is some form of geographic weighting (ideally a smart one) that doesn't allow a handful of cities to dominate the Federal gov't. I understand that this sounds crazy to people, but as a resident of Colorado who occasionally enjoys marijuana, a substance that my state allows but the Federal gov't has long outlawed, I like the fact that the current system puts a higher emphasis on winning over broader regions of the country without just focusing on cities. Obviously, I want it to be more of a sane weighting. My concern with not having some form of geographic weighting is that it sets up the USA not for some dramatic Civil War 2 that some people envision, but instead for a peaceful secession of certain regions who would end up going decades without having a voice in the Federal gov't. Most Americans don't have a strong grasp of WHY the Senate was made the more powerful chamber of Congress. It was done over the objections of the two largest, most powerful states at the time (Virginia and Pennsylvania) at the demand of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Mass, etc. They explicitly stated that they were worried that Philadelphia, New York City, etc would dominate the Federal Gov't and permanently ignore the smaller states who were irrelevant to the power process. It's an odd situation, because the Federal Gov't of the US was a creation of the state governments, not vice versa like many Europeans seem to think. Obviously, the current EC is pretty silly and feels arbitrary and unjust. But I don't foresee there being a single US nation without some mechanism to prevent a massive, contiguous chunk of the country from being permanently alienated from the legislative process. The history books are pretty clear on the longevity of empires whose governments ignore citizens outside of their urban centers. You can drive from Mexico to Canada in the US without driving through a single state that Hillary won in 2016. I don't see those people putting up with 6 elections in a row of defeat for their candidate. They frankly are already combative as it is. Ironically, many states in the US already have this issue within their own governments. The citizens of upstate New York are pretty much ignored at the expense of the citizens of New York City. Property taxes reflect this. My home state of Colorado is so dominated by Denver that a minimum wage law was enacted that ignores the vast differences in cost of living across the state, forcing small businesses in tiny towns with extremely low rents to pay as if their employees live in the relatively expensive Denver metro area. The Denver Post, which is absolutely not a conservative rag, opposed the minimum wage law's implementation due to this fact.
- 6y ago

chmaynard 6y ago

> Ultimately, these are probably perfectly reasonable ideas Trump is told what to do. Ideas mean nothing to him. He is a man-child who knows his days in power are numbered. For the next six months, he will try to unwind our environmental laws to benefit himself and his fellow Republicans.

hopfscotch 6y ago
Over the last three years I've become a single-issue voter/activist. That issue is seeing Trump on death row. Ideally along with the other Trumps + Barr, Whitaker, and so many others. But I'll settle for just Donny.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I would prefer to see all familial wealth that was at all tainted by conflicts of interest during the course of the administration be seized and the proceeds going to fund national voting by mail. It's civil forfeiture - if they can definitively prove there was no crime they can have it back. And it's an easy bar to overcome just ask anyone who's ever had their property confiscated under that style of law.
- dang 6y ago
  You can't post like this here, no matter how strongly you feel. Perhaps you don't owe "Donny" better but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - hopfscotch 6y ago
    Don’t care. Ban away. I’ll be back.

BurningFrog 6y ago

Yeah, it would be great if congress did its job as intended, and passed laws and stuff. Since it hasn't for decades, the Imperial Presidency rises to fill the vacuum.

cwhiz 6y ago

It took a lifetime of effort from Reagan Republicans to get where we are now. Working tirelessly for decades to make sure government is ineffective and doesn’t work.

pstuart 6y ago
"The Contract On America"