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I think the only way to improve things is to have a representative based system. Local community picks a rep, sends them to a higher level meeting, all the chos
by luxuryballs 4y ago
I think the only way to improve things is to have a representative based system. Local community picks a rep, sends them to a higher level meeting, all the chosen reps pick a rep from among them to send to the next level, repeat and scale the number of layers as needed. Then there’s no mystery because everyone at each level knows who they agreed to send to represent them. Your party should just be your literal party, your local community.
This whole top-down thing where powerful established groups that already have their own agenda tell you and your neighbors that you can only choose between a few of their chosen people to represent you has got to go, the agenda should be your agenda, the rep should be your rep. This is totally doable, repeal the 17th amendment for starters. Add more meeting houses next, counties/districts can have their own house that each elect the state Congress, etc, micro-service distributed architecture!
- squokko 4y agoThis was how the US Constitution was designed by the smart people, before various idiots screwed it up with the 17th Amendment and Permanent Apportionment Act. Your US representative was supposed to represent about ~30,000 people and your state representatives even fewer than that. Now each representative represents close to a million.
- kylebyproxy 4y agoSo glad to see others calling-out the Permanent Apportionment Act. Maybe it made sense in a world without communications technology, but today we're able to scale to the numbers needed to support that ratio of representatives:constituents.
- hawkesnest 4y agoWould the House be more or less effective if there were 10,000+ representatives to meet the 30,000:1 ratio in the original Constitutional setup?
- squokko 4y agoMore, because the House is not a deliberative body. Reps could stay in their districts and just vote online.
- sfifs 4y agoThe episode "Power To The People" in the satirical comedy Yes Prime Minister deals with exactly this. It also looks at the trade-offs, which explains why this will almost certainly not actually happen. Well worth a watch :-) https://archive.org/details/yes-prime-minister-power-to-the-people-1991-uk-vhs https://archive.org/details/yes-prime-minister-power-to-the-...