3 ms·

Some other legislation, like EESA, gets passed while 99% of constituents oppose it. These same constituents then proceed to re-elect basically everyone.

• graycat 13y ago
  That 99% are opposed is, of course, nearly enough but not quite: In addition, need to get some voters up on their hind legs, totally torqued, so that the members of Congress can be sure about how these people will vote at the next election. And there are more complications: On some 'wedge' issues, it may be that all the torqued voters really are in the other party anyway and, thus, won't change the voting at the next election. But getting voters up on their hind legs is a crude way of saying we need an "informed citizenry". My view is that now the Internet is by a wide margin the most effective means of having such a citizenry in the history of the US. E.g., SOPA and PIPA went down likely mostly because they had to do with the Internet, and the Internet made it easy for citizens who cared about the Internet to become informed and to make their opinions heard. E.g., it was easy for me to become informed, write letters, and send them to Congress via the FAX modem in my computer. So, with FAX I got to send a nice looking letter, and what I sent was not on paper and, thus, didn't have to suffer a big delay going through some long process in the mail room of Congress to test for biochemical poisons. More generally, the legislative process has some motivations not to be simple or open and sometimes is neither. Still, the Internet is one heck of a nutcracker to pop open hidden work in Congress.