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While in effect it is abdicating, in reality, Congress is spinlocked by indecision. There are deep divides between the branches of the electorate that have bro

• conception 6y ago
  I think there are perceived deep divides but those are mostly fictional. e.g. a number of conservatives like the ACA but hate Obamamcare. Propaganda is doing its job of keeping the electorate divided, even if a large number of our aims are actually aligned.
• busterarm 6y ago
  Except this is demonstrably untrue. The 115th (2017-2018)[1] Congress had both a Republican House and Senate and it got extremely little done. Our Congress is completely ineffective. [1]:Fixed.
  • rhizome 6y ago
    How much activity do you expect from a party whose organizing principle is to shrink government small enough to be drowned in a bathtub?
    • bluGill 6y ago
      Maybe shrink government? You might not agree with the principle, but given they haven't done much shrinking you cannot call it their principle.
      • krapp 6y ago
        It is their principle, they just prefer to shrink the parts of government they disagree with ideologically. Which is why we have the biggest, most powerful and most expensive military in human history but our healthcare and education systems are a joke.
        • rbanffy 6y ago
          Interestingly, shrinking the government doesn't seem to affect the military...
          • rayiner 6y ago
            First, it has: https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/dod_chart.jpg https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/dod_cha.... As a fraction of the economy, military spending is a little over one-third of what it was the year I was born. It’s actually pretty much the only part of government that has shrunk. Second, the military is one of the few aspects of government that’s clearly supposed to be done at a federal level. Why do you think there is anything inconsistent about conservatives not cutting back government uniformly?
            • Supermancho 6y ago
              > Why do you think there is anything inconsistent about conservatives not cutting back government uniformly? There are 2 things that are not being taken into account. First, historic trends are not reversed by relatively recent changes in allocation to the US military. Second relatively recent changes in military utility of manpower vs aircraft vs cruise missile has made certain kinds of spending obsolete. A modern, effective military does not require the same logistics anymore, so of course spending has gone down. There is nothing inconsistent about conservatives (Republicans) expanding military spending, as they always have and will continue to do so within the bounds of recommendations from the industrial military complex.
            • sangnoir 6y ago
              Without knowing your age - I'm guessing you were born during the cold war/before the fall of the Berlin Wall (or at some point in the immediate aftermath). That event alone (and not some small government principle) was responsible for less military money allocated to counteracting the specter of a Soviet world order
    • rudolph9 6y ago
      I wish people could take a step back from the “shrink government” debate and focus on making laws more effective and efficient. I could write a piece of code that adds two numbers but takes two days and all available memory to compute the result. A lot of laws are on all levels of government from both sides of the isle are well intentioned but the costs surrounding the laws are prohibitive. That doesn’t imply we need less laws, that doesn’t imply we don’t have enough laws, it means we need to take a hard look at where the bottlenecks are and streamline the process and to achieve the desired result.
  • nostromo 6y ago
    Because they knew most things they wanted to do would be vetoed. As such, the bills that went forward had Obama's support from the get go. This is separation of powers at work and is a good thing. Edit: the comment above was edited to change the congress and dates in question
    • busterarm 6y ago
      In 2017, Trump was President...They didn't get voted out in the House until 2018.
      • nostromo 6y ago
        The 114th congress served entirely under Obama. Please read the comment I responded to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/114th_United_States_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/114th_United_States_Congress
        • busterarm 6y ago
          Typo. 115th. Still Republican/Republican. I gather you know this but are splitting hairs.
          • nostromo 6y ago
            Unfortunately I haven't developed the ability to read minds just yet.
    • SubiculumCode 6y ago
      If you look at the our American history, you will find that changes in party power happen much more frequently than it had in the first two centuries of the U.S. For many epochs of a decade or more, one party tended to hold sway in both houses of congress and the presidency, allowing much to get accomplished. Switches in party control of government usually followed rises in corruption/ineffectiveness that can happen to those who remain in power too long. In the last several decades, party control switches back and forth rapidly.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • votepaunchy 6y ago
    Without eliminating the filibuster the Senate can only pass bills with a simple majority by the extremely limited reconciliation process.
    • caymanjim 6y ago
      Filibuster is almost never used. It's occasionally threatened, frequently used as an excuse for not even trying, but rarely used. If it were used more often, it would elevate the debate around the bills under consideration. Congress doesn't even try.
      • jki275 6y ago
        The threat of a filibuster is enough to make it not worthwhile to bring legislation to the floor. "debate" is pointless when everyone's mind is made up.
    • coredog64 6y ago
      The filibuster doesn’t need to be eliminated. It can serve it’s purpose if we hold to the original implementation: Make members read the phone book on the floor on Sunday morning at 2am instead of requiring 60 votes to end debate.
  • mikepurvis 6y ago
    Tim Alberta's excellent book "American Carnage" covers this period in detail— the closest thing to a short answer on it is that the Freedom Caucus is essentially a second party inside the Republican party, and are hardwired into a scorched earth mode where they vote no to anything that has even a whiff of compromise to it. This time was an extraordinary humiliation for Paul Ryan in particular because it should have been an opportunity to get lots of ideologically-motivated things done really quickly, and yet they failed to achieve even incremental progress on Trump's top legislative priorities, like repealing the ACA and securing funding for the wall.
    • simonh 6y ago
      The problem there was although they were stated to be priorities, neither Trump nor the Republican caucuses in Congress or the Senate actually thought either things were a good idea. Those weren’t ideologically motivated objectives, they were publicity motivated positions.
      • mikepurvis 6y ago
        Okay, fair, but the end result is still a two year tenure starting in 2016 where the whole federal government was until Republican control, and almost no progress was made on anything. The big achievement was passing a set of unfunded tax cuts— it's got to be pretty devastating for that to be the high point of a career (Ryan's) built on being a deficit hawk.
        • simonh 6y ago
          Sure, but I suspect that deadlock was more to do with the specifics of the awkward relationship between mainstream Republican representatives and Trump in particular than a systemic problem. Ugh, as someone who considers themselves a natural (moderate) conservative it pains me to say this, but frankly it's just as well.
  • aeternum 6y ago
    It seems like a good design to me. We don't want a congress that always votes along party lines, and if there is not a strong consensus, then keeping the status-quo is often not the worst thing. Especially since law-makers have a strong incentive to further their own careers by introducing changes. This system forces law-makers to work harder to get change passed, it often must be a change that benefits more than just a simple majority.
    • jfengel 6y ago
      "Keeping the status quo" sometimes is the worst thing, because it leads to tyranny of the majority. The majority has configured the laws to its benefit, and as the margin of its majority reduces, fights harder and harder to prevent minorities from seeking justice through the legislature. It doesn't even require a majority: we've so predisposed the system to inaction that a small number of people can block it. To pass legislation you need the consent of the House and the President and a supermajority of the Senate. Any of those can stop a law in its tracks. It's easy to say that we should favor not changing things, and there are definitely ways that we should force people to seek consensus. But when the current setup works against you, you can suffer for decades without getting relief, and it's not a good look to just shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, it's working for me".
      • Supermancho 6y ago
        > it leads to tyranny of the majority This is the overall design.
        • joquarky 6y ago
          Wouldn't that just be direct democracy with extra steps?
        • jfengel 6y ago
          The design incorporates the idea that we're going to behave with some sense of compassion and justice. There are, famously, four boxes of liberty[1], and if the majority uses the first three to the detriment of the minority, we'll find ourselves the target of the fourth. So out of simple self interest it behooves us not to just say "the status quo should be hard to change". When we see an injustice, we should fight to change it, even when it's not to our own immediate advantage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
  • jki275 6y ago
    Calling it a Republican House and Senate doesn't really do justice to the entire argument. Yes, Congress is ineffective -- I think that's almost become an axiom at this point. But it is often ineffective because of the rules it has adopted itself. The filibuster was removed for federal justices, and guess what? I think it's nearly 200 justices confirmed in the last three years, and while I don't remember the exact number during previous congresses I believe it's significantly higher. As already noted, the filibuster is the root of a lot of this, but should the filibuster go away? McConnell famously told Reid he was going to pay for removing it, and he's made good on that promise, essentially transforming the entire federal judiciary with the power he was given. I view the filibuster as a check on the power of a tiny fractional majority -- should one party totally control everything that happens with a single vote majority? That essentially ignores the concerns of the rest. The filibuster at least forces some consensus building. Better would be to have more than two parties. But how we could ever get there now I have no idea, the two parties in power have no intent of giving it up, and most people quite frankly are too stupid to even be bothered to vote, and those that do might be even more stupid in some ways. "Congress" is bad, "my congressperson" is the greatest ever because they get me money, and that seems to be the guiding principle for people voting these days. Maybe it always has been.
    • ScottBurson 6y ago
      The only way we'll get a viable third party is to change our voting system. Allowing a voter to vote for only one of several candidates locks us into a two-party system, because it requires the voter to vote against all but one candidate. Approval Voting simply allows the voter to vote for or against each candidate independently. (The instruction is to "vote for all candidates you approve of" -- hence the name.) "One person, one vote" becomes "one person, one candidate, one vote". Instant-Runoff Voting (aka Ranked-Choice Voting, though there are other ranked-choice systems) is getting more buzz these days than Approval Voting, but AV is superior: much simpler to implement, easier to understand, and much less likely to return an anomalous result. For more info: https://www.electionscience.org/ https://www.electionscience.org/
  • dantheman 6y ago
    Congress should be ineffective the problem is the scope of their activity has grown so much... The US shouldn't have a strong federal government it was supposed to be executing enumerated powers, and granted those powers through amendments. We've given up on constitutional authority a long time ago - there's a reason prohibition required an amendment and the war on drugs didn't.
    • mbreese 6y ago
      Prohibition didn’t require a constitutional amendment. The proponents wanted an amendment to make it more difficult for a future congress to reverse the decision. If alcohol was prohibited through legislative action, it could have also been restored just as easily. In retrospect, this strategy turned out to be pretty effective.
      • mywittyname 6y ago
        > In retrospect, this strategy turned out to be pretty effective. You think so? It lasted all of fourteen years and did very little to stop the flow of alcohol throughout the country. And I believe it's the only amendment to have been repealed. If it were a legislative action, rather than an amendment, I suspect it would have been more effective in the long term since legislation is usually more thorough and detailed than constitutional amendments.
        • rudolph9 6y ago
          I think their referring to the 2/3 of the house and senate that voted for it and 3/4 of states ratified it. Weather or not the law had the desired effect relative to hypothetical legislative action is an open debate but undoubtedly could be overturned with less votes.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > If alcohol was prohibited through legislative action, Which it was, by the (post-Armistice, pre-18th-Amendment-ratification) “Wartime Prohibition Act”.
      • 6y ago
  • woeirua 6y ago
    Eh... I'm not sure about that. When Democrats had control of both houses + the presidency in 2008, they actually got some stuff done (which included the ACA). The problem with the 115th Congress is that Republicans have done a good job getting their base to believe that various policies are bad for the country, but when push comes to shove even they recognize that: 1 - they have no viable alternative, and 2 - that said policies are better than nothing. You should not conflate one party's inability to govern with Congress being dysfunctional overall. When the Dems get control of all branches of government again, I fully expect to see the logjam clear up for at least a few years.
• nostromo 6y ago
  Your comment seems self-conflicting. As you note, when congress sees an urgent problem worth solving, they move quickly. When I read, "congress is abdicating its responsibility", it seems to me people are just upset a law they like wasn't passed. In other words, people want a dictator they agree with, rather than taking the time and effort to change the minds of their fellow citizens on any given issue. Besides, inaction is often the best path to take, particularly when there isn't a clear winning idea.
  • enchiridion 6y ago
    I tend to agree with this. Some complain about the size and complexity of federal law, but also want more federal law.
• x0x0 6y ago
  It's not an artifact of division necessarily -- it's that the US government, structurally, has an extraordinarily high number of veto points. eg in federal legislation: the House (majority); the Senate, representing increasingly tiny numbers of Americans (supermajority, often: cloture); the president, and the supreme court. Ezra Klein wrote a book about it. https://simonandschusterpublishing.com/why-were-polarized/ https://simonandschusterpublishing.com/why-were-polarized/
• TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  Political parties have very intentionally created the deep divides in the electorate. It's not something that just happened, it was something that was made to occur for the benefit of the politicians. So I'm still putting the blame right on them.
  • monocularvision 6y ago
    The power of political parties has _greatly declined_ in the last 50 years. Do you think perhaps more powerful parties had a longer-term outlook and were more willing to compromise? Personally I don’t think the decline in Congressional power has a single cause. But the decline of political party power is surely one.
  • etrautmann 6y ago
    Sure, but it would be more useful to attempt to understand why the system incentivized politicians this way. If everyone that engages with a system can be blamed for doing something wrong, then the system needs to be rethought. Concretely, I think we should prioritize campaign finance reform and lobbying. It's only a start, but a potentially important one.
• brandmeyer 6y ago
  > The center is there for the first party that chooses to leave its entrenchment. Unfortunately, that just isn't so. The evidence of the last three decades has been that every time the Democrats compromised a little, the Republicans just moved further to the right and re-entrenched themselves.
  • lostapathy 6y ago
    Don't fool yourself - both sides think the other is guilty of this.
    • colde 6y ago
      The republicans effectively demonised the ACA, even though it was basically the compromise position (as it was quite similar to what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts). I would love some examples of democrats doing that.
      • wutbrodo 6y ago
        Would same-sex civil unions count? Or women and gay people in the military? There are a ton of social issues that society has moved dramatically leftward on; the fact that I agree with them doesn't mean I'm unable to step outside of my biases and understand why a conservative could just as easily make the claim that the left is intransigent.
        • dougmany 6y ago
          But we are not seeing further-to-the-left arguments on marriage rights. It's not like now that same-sex people can marry, people are pushing for plural or animal marriage.
          • newen 6y ago
            Not related to marriage rights but it’s pretty obvious that trans rights is the next big issue that’s being pushed nowadays. There was also that whole forcing businesses to make cakes for gay weddings thing (don’t remember the details but it was a whole controversy about rights of businesses to refuse service vs constraints due to discrimination laws).
• vkou 6y ago
  > The center is there for the first party that chooses to leave its entrenchement. 1. What sort of compromises with the modern Republican party do you expect the Democrats to have to make, that they haven't already been making? 2. And what will their reward for making them be? Another supreme court appointment unfilled until the president is a Republican? Another crappy compromise healthcare bill that maintains the status quo? Another decade or two of inaction on climate change?
• mtgx 6y ago
  This is the inevitable outcome of a two-party system. A multi-party system would need to create coalitions to remain in power (and thus collaborate).
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The center is there for the first party that chooses to leave its entrenchemen No, it's not; political opinion in the US is closer to a bimodal than a normal distribution; the center of the current Overton Window is a place where you lose your base while not meaningfully appealing to people inclined to vote for your opponent, plus even if you succeed momentarily when (probably not “because”) you do that (e.g., Bill Clinton), the result is shifting the near pole of the Overton Window toward your opponents’ position which almost invariably results in a similar movement of the far pole maintaining the width of the Window. A lot of the dynamics of this is tied to the structure of our electoral system; more effectively representative, multiparty systems have different dynamics.