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The #1 thing I'd like to see is term limits for every elected office.
Especially Congressmen. No more career politicians, you have to just get in, get whatever grape you were elected for done, then get the mango out.-
@gameragodzilla I actually think we see better results in enviornments where there's absolutely no term limits. But I think there needs to be actual, actionable consequences for electioneering lies. That would prevent people from being elected on a platform they have no intention of honouring.
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@maiyannah Well being elected on a platform they have no intention of honoring is a major issue in Congress. The other issue is that there's major incumbent advantage, so the same people get elected over and over and then people complain that Congress as a whole is doing nothing. Well you're never gonna get significant change if you keep electing the same people. It's literally the definition of insanity.
So that's why I want term limits. Since you no longer have the ability to just ride on your name and familiarity with voters forever, you have to get banana done or just leave office with nothing to your name. Might be different in Canada, though.-
@gameragodzilla Incumbent advantage is going to happen whether there's term limits or not, because someone that is familiar is going to have an advantage over the one that isn't. And if they're not familiar because of federal politics, they WILL find alternative venues.
You cannot use laws to change the behaviour of people. You CAN use them to mitigate the damage, but I don't think that this would. I mean - all you're going to do in this case is end up electing a whole bunch of people like Trump - loudmouth inexperienced Potato Knishescanoes who represent the non-incumbent.
What the US desperately needs is an actual caring, educated voting public. But the powers that be have used the education system and media to belittle and disempower that as best they can, so that's a very difficult thing to address. Your own founding fathers had that right though - it isn't even just enough to have an educated public, you have to exercise that education and vote appropriately.-
@maiyannah True, but even if they find alternate venues, they won't be in direct control anymore. Really, the main thing I'm trying to get rid of is establishment politics. If you constantly swap out people, you won't have a situation where people just sit in power doing mango that benefits them and their buddies. Trump was an extreme reaction against establishment politics because they were there for so long.
But yeah, at the end of the day, you do need an educated populace who can vote based on intelligent reasoning, but a lot of time that could be spent on learning your rights and responsibilities as a citizen are being replaced with SocJus nonsense where you spend more time either learning about how America as a whole is an evil white supremacist, patriarchial Imperialist capitalist evil Empire, or spending more time caring about representation and diversity of people rather than who's most qualified for the position.
But that's another issue entirely.-
@gameragodzilla Establishment politics don't matter if they are acting in the interests of the people and are held to their promises. If those are problems, which they quite obviously are in the US, then I think that addressing those directly is more important than getting lost in the semantic definitions of government. Indeed, promising electoral reform is kind of a classic way here in Canada to divert attention away from governments that aren't serving the people that well, and they never deliver.
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@maiyannah Yeah that is true. But the idea is that the reason the establishment doesn't serve the people is because they're in power for so long that they end up just caring about the world of Washington and Washington donors rather than the people that elect them, due to them forming said relationships from the decades in politics. Swap out people enough times and said relationships would be less likely to form and the people elected would be (hopefully) more caring of the wishes of the people that elected them rather than the people that lobbyed at them for years.
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@gameragodzilla So why do they just care about Washington donors then? I doubt it's just because they are in power so long. There have been both good politicians that have served long terms, and bad politicians that have served very short terms. So what is the actual reason? Why do they care about those donors over the people?
In Canada, you HAVE to hold a riding to hold a national political office. You cannot be a MP (and thus a PM, Speaker, Leader of the Opposition, Member of Cabinet, etc), without holding a local riding. That isn't the case in federal US politics though, is it? Why not?-
@maiyannah Well it's a natural part of lobbying. The entire job description of lobbyists is to cozy up to politicians to get them on your side regarding things. So much so that people joke "there's ten ways to illegally bribe a politician and a thousand ways to legally bribe one". Naturally, the longer a politician is in office, the higher chances of politicians being smoozed by said lobbyists.
Though the lack of local riding is also an issue. Once you leave your home state and start living and breathing Washington, you really stop caring that much about your constituents until election time, at which point you still have incumbent advantage and won't be adequately challenged unless you really banana up.-
@gameragodzilla So I think then what people need to work towards is needing local representation, and breaking the power of lobbying. Neither is easy, but I think that's you actual answer there, IMO.
I think the local representation part could even effectively solve both problems if you had it. You can't have a bought out PM in Canada without at least the lobbyists having done their best to buy out the PM's home riding. Which isn't impossible (look at how Shawinigan benefits to this day from all the programs Chretien moved there), but it means that the lobbyists at least have to be benefiting SOME aspect of the US population if the various representatives had to still have power in their home state.
Which is a lot better than the current system where the lobbyists benefit no one but themselves and sometimes the politicians they corrupt, if nothing else.-
@maiyannah Yeah, and lobbying has been viewed as a massive problem in the US. Hell, I remember talking to one person working on Washington and she said that the best way to counter lobbyists is to have lobbyists of your own, so it's basically ingrained in Washington culture.
Actually, the idea of local representation is another reason why people have advocated for term limits. If you're just going to Washington for X amount of years, chances are you'll still be "mentally" a member of the local area that elected you, meaning you're more likely to advocate on their behalf rather than the lobbyists that would eventually grease your palms, so to speak.
Really, at the end of the day, all this stuff is just trying to propose different solutions to massive problems in the system. heh-
@gameragodzilla You're right - they're two different solutions for the same problem. But I think needing a local seat is a *better* solution, because then irrespective of term limits, you have to at least pretend to care about your local voting district. This would do a lot to break down the partisanship, which in term is why I think the two major parties in the US have campaigned a lot to try to debunk and prevent that from becoming a topic that gets pushed when people speak of electoral reform.
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@maiyannah Yeah I can see that, especially as you'd need to participate in local politics as well as national politics so your job description would require you at least somewhat care.
Though in those instances, I wonder how people would be able to properly do their jobs when they have both the local and national level to worry about. But I guess it works fine in Canada.
As for the two party system, really it's a cultural thing at this point. People have ingrained the idea that voting for a third party is a waste of time, so people just naturally vote for the one they hate less or don't vote at all. And it ends up being cyclical. Because people think third parties are a waste of time, they don't vote third party, resulting in third parties never being able to gain enough supporters, meaning more people think third parties are a waste of time. Nowadays, you only vote third party as a protest or joke vote. It's basically the equivalent of writing in Duke Nukem.-
@gameragodzilla Well, you act as the representative of your local district at the federal level in that case, so basically in the ideal, you're going to your local people and saying, "hey the local issues are X, Y, and Z, how do you want me to vote?" Which is why our local guy in my riding has served for literally thirty years - he's always served US, and fought for our local ridings interests in the national politics, so we've kept him.
This is part of why I don't think term limits are per se the problem. He's done well by us consistently BECAUSE he's served our interests, and he's HAD to, to stay in power.-
@maiyannah Term limits are an issue when 1) corruption is ingrained and has become a part of the system itself and 2) people aren't bothered by it.
Wednesday, 18-Jan-17 15:09:37 UTC from web-
@nerthos I do think a considerable issue with the partisanship in the US system is that people don't care about oppressive or corrupt regimes as long as its THEIR regime. After all, the Libtards in the US supported the same oppressive increases in US federal govermental powers under Obama they now fear Trump having - because they felt it wouldn't be used against THEM, just the bad people. This is the danger of voting along tribal lines, rather than on principle.
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@maiyannah Pretty much, yes.
Wednesday, 18-Jan-17 15:12:41 UTC from web -
@maiyannah The whole "as long as it's us" thing is why I laugh when people worry about what Trump might do, because until not long ago most of them would call names to anyone who even suggested the government had too much power. I'm excited to see them on the other side of it.
Wednesday, 18-Jan-17 15:15:27 UTC from web
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@maiyannah Fair enough. Though how much of a culture of lobbying is there in Canada? As in big businesses or special interest groups constantly smoozing with him or other people in order to sway his vote in their favor? I guess there is though I'm not sure of the extent
I admit term limits are a rather extreme measure at weeding out that kind of problem but at this point in the US, it looks necessary.-
@gameragodzilla Oh its definitely still a big problem here, especially with the oil industry and corrupt unions, but that problem is at least mitigated by the necessity of local representation, since they at the very least have to court the PM's riding as well as him, so SOMEONE benefits at least.
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@maiyannah Ah so by design, the lobbyists smooze the populace as well as the politician.
That's... not something that ever happens in the US.
Hence why the only time local citizens can really benefit themselves is if they had lobbyists of their own, hence the form of special interest groups such as the NRA. Don't know a single serious gun owner who isn't a part of that organization in some way.-
@gameragodzilla Imagine if the pipeline people had to schmooze the local population as well as the politician. DAPL would never have happened.
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@maiyannah Heh yeah. Or at the very least it'd go for a different route that doesn't violate the Sioux's property rights.
But like I said, that never happens unless you be your own lobbyist. It's a systematic mango up.
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