You're right that the types of things being done by each party, when in power, are different, but the shared mentality amongst the party members, of both parties, is the same: our team must win at all costs.
That's not 'being distracted,' that's 'paying attention.' The mentality of the people voting for representatives is totally irrelevant when, once in power, those representatives behave extremely differently depending on party affiliation.
At some point you have to draw a line connecting the two groups, right?
Otherwise, if these groups differ significantly, then they'd be voted out. On the contrary, polls show overwhelming support from within that party.
>but the shared mentality amongst the party members, of both parties, is the same: our team must win at all costs.
Sorry. That's simply not true. Look at the House Russia investigation and the behavior of people like Nunes.
You'd be hard-pressed to find an equivalent dereliction from the other side in a matter as significant as that implied by the allegations and evidence to-date. Think of it: there was more emphasis on HRC's emails.
We can say it's a matter of opinion, but at some point we must converge on reason. There is no equivalence here.
It even works for uncontested races. The office goes empty until an acceptable candidate can be found to fill it.
2. I'm not sure that option is actually a good idea, since the effective result is that either the incumbent continues longer - which means the none-of-the-above vote is a vote for the incumbent, so it's still rational to vote for the "other party" - or the office is empty. That's good if your goal is a small and weak government, which is a totally reasonable thing to want, but probably not one that reflects the will of the majority of Americans.
And I explicitly said the office would remain empty. If an incumbent runs unopposed, the new option would be the way to force their party to pick someone else, since obviously no one had the moxie or political capital to challenge in the primary.
If it is important that the office be filled, it is important that the parties run candidates qualified to fill it. In light of recent events, I'd rather have no elected official or a temporary placeholder than a bad official. It would seem that our government has a limited capacity to operate rationally even when the person nominally in charge is incompetent or non compos mentis. It certainly happened in the later years of the Reagan administration. It might be happening now.
Europe has proved that short election cycles are possible. We could survive six weeks of vacancy in most offices while cranking out a mulligan election. And where it really counts, existing succession plans apply. We could certainly run one mulligan between November and January, and if another one is required, Congress still has time to pick their Speaker of the House before inauguration day, who would then have to take the office until an election finally succeeds in naming a full-term replacement.
The sheer panic, expense, and inconvenience of the first time would likely encourage the parties to not run crap candidates in the future.
I said "(Unless you have a realistic way of introducing good)" - I meant that the way of introducing it must be realistic, not simply that the good must be realistic. (Let me know if I could have phrased that more clearly!)
Any one of those might work.
But you don't always have unlimited attempts, so it's still worth considering the amount of resistance a sound, sensible, rational solution to a real, obvious problem that affects every constituent might face in the typical congressperson, especially when the problem at hand is the prevalence of congresspersons stubbornly obstructing bills that would benefit the whole population at their expense.
It's a natural side effect of a first-past-the-post voting system[1].
Like HRC purging hundreds of thousands of voters in Brooklyn for no reason the day before the primary?
This. What-aboutism is rampant these days, but frequently involves conflating things of such vastly different degree as to be of an altogether distinct quality.
The strange thing about the supposed "insurgent" party invoking it so frequently is that they are justifying their own behavior by equating it to that of those they so vehemently oppose and demand to be repudiated.