4 ms·

rather than worrying specifically about term limits, i think the general solution to political corruption is much more democracy, not less. make it very, very e

rather than worrying specifically about term limits, i think the general solution to political corruption is much more democracy, not less. make it very, very expensive for money to corrupt power, and make it hard to stay in power without maintaining fairness and integrity in the political system. instead of 100 senators, let's have 100 per state [0]. instead of 1 representative per 750,000, let's go back to the original 1 per 30,000, giving us 11,000 representatives. let's have 99 supreme court justices, rather than 9. let's elect all the cabinet positions directly and separately. instead of multi-year terms, let's vote every single year for each representative office, and make election day a mandatory-paid holiday for everyone (to give folks time to research and consider their votes). let's convert many more administrative positions to elected offices. repeal citizen's united, which flooded political campaigns with unlimited amounts of corporate money (giving the wealthy even more disproportionate voice on top of their already disproportionate voice). it's be messy at times, but we don't get good civics and good governance without the people being given more time and space to think about governance in depth. [0]: alternatively, we could divide up states into smaller entities, which would be even better for decentralizing power (and limiting corruption), but that's much harder to do.

jvalencia 5y ago
While I rather like this idea, there's something to the fact that we need a check/balance. What you don't want is to have a mob make bad policy, which I think is what would happen in this case. This is precisely why individual states can stand up to the federal government -- people in California could make policies that devastate Maryland, for example. Not because they want to, but because they lack context --- even reasonable authority.
- clairity 5y ago
  that scenario is unlikely in the proposed scenario, since the powers of the federal government is limited insofar as targeting like that is expressly prohibited. indirect targeting (crafting the specifics of a bill to exclude all but the target) is more prevalent amongst a smaller number of insiders working in dark corners of legislation. having many more people involved, and a more democratically-involved populace, provides sunshine on dubious shit like that.

jvalencia 5y ago

While I rather like this idea, there's something to the fact that we need a check/balance. What you don't want is to have a mob make bad policy, which I think is what would happen in this case. This is precisely why individual states can stand up to the federal government -- people in California could make policies that devastate Maryland, for example. Not because they want to, but because they lack context --- even reasonable authority.

clairity 5y ago
that scenario is unlikely in the proposed scenario, since the powers of the federal government is limited insofar as targeting like that is expressly prohibited. indirect targeting (crafting the specifics of a bill to exclude all but the target) is more prevalent amongst a smaller number of insiders working in dark corners of legislation. having many more people involved, and a more democratically-involved populace, provides sunshine on dubious shit like that.