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The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government. Given how difficult it is to predict policy outc

by fwungy 4y ago

The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government. Given how difficult it is to predict policy outcomes this is probably a good idea. Even if a collection of policies are good on the individual level there is no way to figure out if the interaction will be net positive, nor if the cost of remedy reverses the calculus.

candiddevmike 4y ago
But now we have a strong federal government that can't agree enough to keep up with the needs of it's citizens. The worst possible outcome, IMO.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Or perhaps the predictable outcome?
carom 4y ago
The problem now is that the government is large and it is nearly impossible to shed the cruft that has accumulated.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Nothing ever gets shed or revised. The stale regulatory agencies are captured, corrupted, and stale/weak. OSHA has no teeth (they are just a nuisance to the scofflaws) FTC is underpowered EPA needs shut down FDA is on record for enabling very harmful medical devices I remember something about Boeing colluding with regulators to put people in harms way. I could hop on a search engine and dig up a tome-worth of completely unacceptable shit from the last 40 yrs in this regard.
  - rnk 4y ago
    We'd be so much better if there were no environmental rules, wouldn't we? Medical regulation, who needs it?
  - rvba 4y ago
    "Starve the beast" is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
    - fwungy 4y ago
      The most dangerous, murderous things in history are powerful central governments. They are like the Ring of Power, everyone thinks they can wield it for good, but it doesn't work out that way.
      - flangola7 4y ago
        Powerful and authoritarian are two different things. I want a powerful but democratically controlled via popular vote government. Power abhors a vacuum. I would rather that power be in the hands of the citizen votes.
      - throwaway173738 4y ago
        That’s a nice general principle but you didn’t provide evidence of specific harm. I think arguing past each other from first principles is exactly why the US is in this mess in the first place. The fact is that all these government agencies are preventing specific harms. Throwing them out because of some vague “big government is bad because it might turn into a tyrrany later” isn’t an argument that the harms being prevented don’t exist. It’s a non-sequitor, like saying the sky is blue when someone complains about airplane noise.
    - notch898c 4y ago
      And what does spending indicate. Has the beast been starved?
      - rvba 4y ago
        I dont live in USA so I dont know. But here the ruling party is losing in local elections in town, so they cut the amount of taxes aplocated to muncipialities while at the same time they ask them to deal with more issues. So muncipialities are forced to degrade the quality of their services - since they dont have enough money. Then the ruling party claims that the local politicians cannot rule properly. What is just a lie. But this lie works.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The size is less a problem than our system stabilizing at two viable parties, both of which would stand to lose a great deal of power if they actually fixed some of the core problems with the Constitution.
- rjmunro 4y ago
  It's not that the government is "large". It's that the representatives from different parties are unable to work together to get stuff done. I think it's mostly the way the media cover politics - they can't be seen to be weak.
lesuorac 4y ago
Sure, the founders in 1776 desired a weak federal government. But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.
- bluGill 4y ago
  The founders in 1776 were happy with things in 1788 and generally opposed the constitution. After reading the articles of confederation (yes I actually did that), there are some things that should have been cleaned up, but overall I think it was a good enough system that didn't need to be replaced.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    It wasn't, then or in the 1860s, hence the strong, modern, adaptive federalism we have today that treats states as provinces and makes important things move quickly. One could squint and say states matter today, but that's just admitting a need for glasses. They are ghosts of what they were, and increasingly need to be retired. It will be nice when we put to pasture the policy-as-experiments across states for things that are clearly universally demanded: finance, health insurance, women's medical care, education, defense, gun control, decreased corporate control of the food supply, transportation, environmental regulation, and so forth. It's amazing how much the modern GOP has pushed folks towards this, may they continue their business Republican-led shenanigans to unite the country and encourage progress when otherwise we would be slovenly. Why is this the case? Duplication of fixed costs are expensive. Let's get rid of these crufty overindulgent home-owners-associations-on-steriods and federalize already. (paragraphs 1, 4 serious, the rest in jest)
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      While paragraph 3 may be in jest, the non-standization meant that some states did allow women to vote long before it was constitutionally mandated. Of course it also meant some people were enslaved long before it was explicitly constitutionally allowed.
cipheredStones 4y ago
1. The much-mythologized founders disagreed on how strong the federal government would be; the first political parties were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (technically the Democratic-Republicans, but carrying on that same ideology). 2. Filibusters are not in the Constitution, weren't possible for decades after it was signed, weren't used for half a century after it was signed, and didn't become the "sixty votes required for anything" tool they are today until 10-15 years ago. The founders had nothing to do with it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pirate787 4y ago
  You're incorrect, the first filibuster was 11 years after the Constitution was ratified and have been common since 1917 and common in their current form since 1970 (that's 53 years not 10-15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Using the filibuster the way it's used now and not actually trying to come to a compromise is definitely new. It's not something that changed about the rule itself, but about the way it's used. See the graph in this article: https://www.statista.com/chart/25929/number-of-senate-filibusters/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25929/number-of-senate-filibu... IMO it all comes down to the insight that the opposition party has nothing to gain from cooperating. If something good gets passed, the majority party gets the credit. If nothing gets passed, the majority party gets the blame, regardless details how that outcome was achieved and what role the minority party played. So blocking everything is the best strategy. IMO, it's disgusting to have politicians put party over country, but here we are.
    - lumost 4y ago
      I wonder if there has been a change in how senators are judged by their constituents. We’re they judged on their individual records rather than party records in the past?
coliveira 4y ago
That might had make sense 200 years ago when Fed government was small. Nowadays it is a slow death sentence to the country.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Several features of or accidents-resulting-from the US constitution amount to that. With the added "fun" that they also create a system in which fixing any of them is unlikely, from within the system. There's a reason even we don't tend to push a US-style system on fledgling democracies, when setting them up. It's got well-known, grave, fundamental, and avoidable flaws.
  - coliveira 4y ago
    The big problem is that neither party in power wants to change the system. After all, they're beneficiaries and creators of the status quo. This could only change if somehow a new party emerged, which is quite unlikely.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Right, that's why, despite its being about as close to a dull, settled fact in policy-wonk and poli-sci circles as anything is, that the US system sucks in about a dozen important ways that other modern democratic systems do not, we cannot fix it. The system is broken in ways that prevent fixing that very brokenness. We know exactly what's wrong, but can't do anything about it. You'd have to get a whole bunch of people whose personal power is tied up with the status quo, to, all at the same time, vote to weaken that power and the power of the organizations that put them where they are. Or you'd have to get at least some of the states that benefit from the brokenness to agree to weaken themselves. Neither is likely to ever happen—short of some very risky and probably-bad-rather-than-good developments that are more likely to end in authoritarianism than an improved democracy.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Well theoretically you could, it's just that the big states would have to offer up an amazing deal to entice the smaller states to agree to call a constitutional convention. The supermajority of the electorate in the smaller states might be willing to exchange future political influence for sufficient wealth or some other compensation.
downWidOutaFite 4y ago
The founders added a bunch of checks and balances but not the filibuster. The fillibuster was more of a gentlemanly agreement until the 1970s and it wasn't until the Obama era that it was regularly used on almost every single vote.
SoftTalker 4y ago
The system the founders designed didn't even have an income tax. We should go back to that.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government. Spot on. Yet we continue to insist on using the system in a way (i.e., overly strong fed gov) that it's not good for. This isn't a Dem or Republican issue. It's history. And the more taxes Uncle Sam collects, the stronger and more bloated he gets. At some level we need to come to terms with the fact that we're using a screwdriver as a hammer. That doesn't work well. Ever.
- brookst 4y ago
  The founders also designed a system that a very few people got to vote, and with the assumption it would take days for representatives to hear from their constituents. Yet nobody seems to be saying the answer is going back to horses and written mail in the name of making our government fit our lives better.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    It's all in the name: The United States. States is the key word. No one is suggesting horses or written email. It's a simple understanding of history, and a practical and honest observation of how dysfunctional things continue to be. Yet we keep pushing that the answer is more of the same? That's naive. That's not sustainable.
    - brookst 4y ago
      We certainly need to improve. I am not convinced in the "go back to the way it was designed" argument, since you either have to cherry pick the aspects you like, or advocate for reversing women's suffrage, emancipation of slaves, etc. As soon as we agree that the founders got some things right and some things wrong, there is no more argument that they were prescient and we should revert to their designs. IMO better to take stock of the current situation and seek changes based on their merits today, independently of whether they align to the ideas of 250 years ago.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
The founders didn’t create the filibuster because they already created a fuck load of checks on the majority. Making even more is senseless.
sanderjd 4y ago
"The founders" did not create the filibuster. They actively debated whether it should require more than a simple majority to pass legislation, and decided that was a bad idea. They had already designed a system with a ton of friction in it. It didn't need one more hurdle.
dougdekins 4y ago
The Founders were of diverse positions and ideas on the topic. A couple overly simplistic examples: Jefferson wanted the Constitution rethought every 19 with modern wisdom to prevent it becoming a carceral joke society laughs at as dated and sad. Madison felt the future was forever obligated to fit themselves into a past framework as a kind of thank you for the hard work the long dead performed. “They did not want a strong federal government” is overly reductive and normalizes into a boring sound bite what was really a complex and lengthy back and forth. It would be fair to say that most feared a strong executive turning autocratic/monarchic but that’s about all they agreed on readily. I suppose I fall into Jefferson’s camp. Paraphrasing, he wrote to Madison “clearly the dead so not rule the living.” To the flames with this outdated gibberish. To us it’s all hand me down spoken tradition we never witnessed anyway.
shapefrog 4y ago
> difficult it is to predict policy outcomes Are they really - or are they pretty obvious to anyone who casually glances at the headline of the policy, but the consequences are a problem after the next election. If you win you can always just blame the other side and if you lose you can blame the other side as well.

by fwungy 4y ago

candiddevmike 4y ago

But now we have a strong federal government that can't agree enough to keep up with the needs of it's citizens. The worst possible outcome, IMO.

SoftTalker 4y ago
Or perhaps the predictable outcome?

carom 4y ago

The problem now is that the government is large and it is nearly impossible to shed the cruft that has accumulated.

datavirtue 4y ago
Nothing ever gets shed or revised. The stale regulatory agencies are captured, corrupted, and stale/weak. OSHA has no teeth (they are just a nuisance to the scofflaws) FTC is underpowered EPA needs shut down FDA is on record for enabling very harmful medical devices I remember something about Boeing colluding with regulators to put people in harms way. I could hop on a search engine and dig up a tome-worth of completely unacceptable shit from the last 40 yrs in this regard.
- rnk 4y ago
  We'd be so much better if there were no environmental rules, wouldn't we? Medical regulation, who needs it?
- rvba 4y ago
  "Starve the beast" is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
  - fwungy 4y ago
    The most dangerous, murderous things in history are powerful central governments. They are like the Ring of Power, everyone thinks they can wield it for good, but it doesn't work out that way.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      Powerful and authoritarian are two different things. I want a powerful but democratically controlled via popular vote government. Power abhors a vacuum. I would rather that power be in the hands of the citizen votes.
    - throwaway173738 4y ago
      That’s a nice general principle but you didn’t provide evidence of specific harm. I think arguing past each other from first principles is exactly why the US is in this mess in the first place. The fact is that all these government agencies are preventing specific harms. Throwing them out because of some vague “big government is bad because it might turn into a tyrrany later” isn’t an argument that the harms being prevented don’t exist. It’s a non-sequitor, like saying the sky is blue when someone complains about airplane noise.
  - notch898c 4y ago
    And what does spending indicate. Has the beast been starved?
    - rvba 4y ago
      I dont live in USA so I dont know. But here the ruling party is losing in local elections in town, so they cut the amount of taxes aplocated to muncipialities while at the same time they ask them to deal with more issues. So muncipialities are forced to degrade the quality of their services - since they dont have enough money. Then the ruling party claims that the local politicians cannot rule properly. What is just a lie. But this lie works.
yamtaddle 4y ago
The size is less a problem than our system stabilizing at two viable parties, both of which would stand to lose a great deal of power if they actually fixed some of the core problems with the Constitution.
rjmunro 4y ago
It's not that the government is "large". It's that the representatives from different parties are unable to work together to get stuff done. I think it's mostly the way the media cover politics - they can't be seen to be weak.

lesuorac 4y ago

Sure, the founders in 1776 desired a weak federal government. But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.

bluGill 4y ago
The founders in 1776 were happy with things in 1788 and generally opposed the constitution. After reading the articles of confederation (yes I actually did that), there are some things that should have been cleaned up, but overall I think it was a good enough system that didn't need to be replaced.
- tomrod 4y ago
  It wasn't, then or in the 1860s, hence the strong, modern, adaptive federalism we have today that treats states as provinces and makes important things move quickly. One could squint and say states matter today, but that's just admitting a need for glasses. They are ghosts of what they were, and increasingly need to be retired. It will be nice when we put to pasture the policy-as-experiments across states for things that are clearly universally demanded: finance, health insurance, women's medical care, education, defense, gun control, decreased corporate control of the food supply, transportation, environmental regulation, and so forth. It's amazing how much the modern GOP has pushed folks towards this, may they continue their business Republican-led shenanigans to unite the country and encourage progress when otherwise we would be slovenly. Why is this the case? Duplication of fixed costs are expensive. Let's get rid of these crufty overindulgent home-owners-associations-on-steriods and federalize already. (paragraphs 1, 4 serious, the rest in jest)
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    While paragraph 3 may be in jest, the non-standization meant that some states did allow women to vote long before it was constitutionally mandated. Of course it also meant some people were enslaved long before it was explicitly constitutionally allowed.

cipheredStones 4y ago

1. The much-mythologized founders disagreed on how strong the federal government would be; the first political parties were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (technically the Democratic-Republicans, but carrying on that same ideology). 2. Filibusters are not in the Constitution, weren't possible for decades after it was signed, weren't used for half a century after it was signed, and didn't become the "sixty votes required for anything" tool they are today until 10-15 years ago. The founders had nothing to do with it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pirate787 4y ago
You're incorrect, the first filibuster was 11 years after the Constitution was ratified and have been common since 1917 and common in their current form since 1970 (that's 53 years not 10-15) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States_Senate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Using the filibuster the way it's used now and not actually trying to come to a compromise is definitely new. It's not something that changed about the rule itself, but about the way it's used. See the graph in this article: https://www.statista.com/chart/25929/number-of-senate-filibusters/ https://www.statista.com/chart/25929/number-of-senate-filibu... IMO it all comes down to the insight that the opposition party has nothing to gain from cooperating. If something good gets passed, the majority party gets the credit. If nothing gets passed, the majority party gets the blame, regardless details how that outcome was achieved and what role the minority party played. So blocking everything is the best strategy. IMO, it's disgusting to have politicians put party over country, but here we are.
  - lumost 4y ago
    I wonder if there has been a change in how senators are judged by their constituents. We’re they judged on their individual records rather than party records in the past?

coliveira 4y ago

That might had make sense 200 years ago when Fed government was small. Nowadays it is a slow death sentence to the country.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Several features of or accidents-resulting-from the US constitution amount to that. With the added "fun" that they also create a system in which fixing any of them is unlikely, from within the system. There's a reason even we don't tend to push a US-style system on fledgling democracies, when setting them up. It's got well-known, grave, fundamental, and avoidable flaws.
- coliveira 4y ago
  The big problem is that neither party in power wants to change the system. After all, they're beneficiaries and creators of the status quo. This could only change if somehow a new party emerged, which is quite unlikely.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Right, that's why, despite its being about as close to a dull, settled fact in policy-wonk and poli-sci circles as anything is, that the US system sucks in about a dozen important ways that other modern democratic systems do not, we cannot fix it. The system is broken in ways that prevent fixing that very brokenness. We know exactly what's wrong, but can't do anything about it. You'd have to get a whole bunch of people whose personal power is tied up with the status quo, to, all at the same time, vote to weaken that power and the power of the organizations that put them where they are. Or you'd have to get at least some of the states that benefit from the brokenness to agree to weaken themselves. Neither is likely to ever happen—short of some very risky and probably-bad-rather-than-good developments that are more likely to end in authoritarianism than an improved democracy.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Well theoretically you could, it's just that the big states would have to offer up an amazing deal to entice the smaller states to agree to call a constitutional convention. The supermajority of the electorate in the smaller states might be willing to exchange future political influence for sufficient wealth or some other compensation.

downWidOutaFite 4y ago

The founders added a bunch of checks and balances but not the filibuster. The fillibuster was more of a gentlemanly agreement until the 1970s and it wasn't until the Obama era that it was regularly used on almost every single vote.

SoftTalker 4y ago

The system the founders designed didn't even have an income tax. We should go back to that.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government. Spot on. Yet we continue to insist on using the system in a way (i.e., overly strong fed gov) that it's not good for. This isn't a Dem or Republican issue. It's history. And the more taxes Uncle Sam collects, the stronger and more bloated he gets. At some level we need to come to terms with the fact that we're using a screwdriver as a hammer. That doesn't work well. Ever.

brookst 4y ago
The founders also designed a system that a very few people got to vote, and with the assumption it would take days for representatives to hear from their constituents. Yet nobody seems to be saying the answer is going back to horses and written mail in the name of making our government fit our lives better.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  It's all in the name: The United States. States is the key word. No one is suggesting horses or written email. It's a simple understanding of history, and a practical and honest observation of how dysfunctional things continue to be. Yet we keep pushing that the answer is more of the same? That's naive. That's not sustainable.
  - brookst 4y ago
    We certainly need to improve. I am not convinced in the "go back to the way it was designed" argument, since you either have to cherry pick the aspects you like, or advocate for reversing women's suffrage, emancipation of slaves, etc. As soon as we agree that the founders got some things right and some things wrong, there is no more argument that they were prescient and we should revert to their designs. IMO better to take stock of the current situation and seek changes based on their merits today, independently of whether they align to the ideas of 250 years ago.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

The founders didn’t create the filibuster because they already created a fuck load of checks on the majority. Making even more is senseless.

sanderjd 4y ago

"The founders" did not create the filibuster. They actively debated whether it should require more than a simple majority to pass legislation, and decided that was a bad idea. They had already designed a system with a ton of friction in it. It didn't need one more hurdle.

dougdekins 4y ago

The Founders were of diverse positions and ideas on the topic. A couple overly simplistic examples: Jefferson wanted the Constitution rethought every 19 with modern wisdom to prevent it becoming a carceral joke society laughs at as dated and sad. Madison felt the future was forever obligated to fit themselves into a past framework as a kind of thank you for the hard work the long dead performed. “They did not want a strong federal government” is overly reductive and normalizes into a boring sound bite what was really a complex and lengthy back and forth. It would be fair to say that most feared a strong executive turning autocratic/monarchic but that’s about all they agreed on readily. I suppose I fall into Jefferson’s camp. Paraphrasing, he wrote to Madison “clearly the dead so not rule the living.” To the flames with this outdated gibberish. To us it’s all hand me down spoken tradition we never witnessed anyway.

shapefrog 4y ago

> difficult it is to predict policy outcomes Are they really - or are they pretty obvious to anyone who casually glances at the headline of the policy, but the consequences are a problem after the next election. If you win you can always just blame the other side and if you lose you can blame the other side as well.