15 ms·
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
by 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 agoHow 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 agoMaybe 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 agoIt 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 agoInterestingly, shrinking the government doesn't seem to affect the military...
- rayiner 6y agoFirst, 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 agoWithout 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
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> Second, the military is one of the few aspects of government that’s clearly supposed to be done at a federal level. According to the 18th-century conception, the army indeed becomes a federal concern in wartime, but on an everyday peacetime basis, the training of soldiers was supposed to be done within militias regulated by the states.
- rayiner 6y agoOn education, we spend among the most per student in absolute terms on K-12 and right at the OECD average as a fraction of the economy: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/figures/images/figure-cmd-3.svg https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/figures/images/figure-cmd-3... As a portion of the economy, just our public spending on healthcare is higher than the OECD average public spending: https://www.oecd.org/media/oecdorg/satellitesites/newsroom/48294761hd2011fr.png https://www.oecd.org/media/oecdorg/satellitesites/newsroom/4...
- rhizome 6y agoNow weight those rankings with each country's military spending.
- brandmeyer 6y agoThis is a great example of the flaw of using averages in an unbalanced society. Some wealthy districts spend far above the OECD average, while many poor districts are grossly under-funded (and under-achieving).
- s1artibartfast 6y agoSure, but that is not evidence that republicans have shrunk educational spending. Instead, it is evidence that there is bipartisan support for educational spending, but with uneven beneficiaries. This is a different issue and the solutions to the first problem are not the solutions to the second. Last, this isn't really a partisan federal issue. Most school spending is determined the state or local level and the same inequality is present in predominantly red and blue states.
- evan_ 6y agoJokes are supposed to be funny, our health care and education are tragedies
- rhizome 6y agoI don't know how you're reading all of that into my comment, but my point is that the members of a political party dedicated to shrinking government to nothing isn't going to do much work. That's the shrinking.
- jki275 6y agoRepublicans don't want to shrink the government any more than Democrats do. They just want to spend the money that doesn't exist on different things.
- rhizome 6y agoDo you know who Grover Norquist is? I don't mean to be curt, but there are specific Republican projects here that have been operating for decades.
- jki275 6y agoNo one really cares who Grover Norquist is. He has no influence on anything.
- rhizome 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#Taxpayer_Protection_Pledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist#Taxpayer_Prote... Humility is a virtue.
- jki275 6y agoThanks for posting a Wikipedia article. I'm well aware of who he is. What he wants doesn't actually get done, no matter how many pledges people sign. It's a fantasy.
- rudolph9 6y agoI 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 agoBecause 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 agoIn 2017, Trump was President...They didn't get voted out in the House until 2018.
- nostromo 6y agoThe 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
- SubiculumCode 6y agoIf 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 agoWithout eliminating the filibuster the Senate can only pass bills with a simple majority by the extremely limited reconciliation process.
- caymanjim 6y agoFilibuster 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 agoThe 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 agoThe 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 agoTim 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 agoThe 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 agoOkay, 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 agoSure, 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 agoIt 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 agoWouldn't that just be direct democracy with extra steps?
- jfengel 6y agoThe 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 agoCalling 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 agoThe 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 agoCongress 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 agoProhibition 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 agoI 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 agoEh... 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.