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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

One suggestion that I've heard, based on a lot of research, is to give Congress more relative power by having more closed door committees and committee votes.

The problem being if Congressional activities are too transparent, then the power shifts to whomever can lobby the best, which often means who can best track the behaviors and intimidate people into behaving certain ways. While citizens can view more with transparency, we often don't, and the richest companies and orgs do.

I've tried to loop in James to shed more on the research behind it but it's at congressionalresearch.org

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A possible improvement for this is to only publish the vote totals for measures that pass, not for measures that fail. Then if a measure the lobbyists wanted fails, they have no idea who to blame, but the public always knows who was responsible for a change to the law.

This could be further improved by displaying the live vote total during the vote and allowing anyone to change their vote until no votes have changed for at least 60 seconds. That way anyone can see if a measure would pass even without their vote and then change from no to yes if they don't want lobbyists to see that they would have been against it.

I'm quite intrigued by this.

That seems like a very real effect, but the votes need to be disclosed after they occur. Otherwise, the lobbyists have even more power, because the committee has an incentive to collude with the lobbyists, if their individual votes are not known, and they accept bribes. (I agree that having their votes be unknown helps if they do not accept bribes).

The only foolproof solution is to remove power from the lobbyists.

> The only foolproof solution is to remove power from the lobbyists.

How do you do this though?

Suppose Facebook wants to gut privacy rules. They control which news stories get prioritized for their users. They express their policy preference in public, then penalize politicians who cross them. Even if politicians pay no attention to this, the ones who cross them are more likely to lose their seats. Assuming politicians aren't too oblivious to notice it, they comply to avoid that, without Facebook ever explicitly threatening them.

The fact that Facebook can send someone into Washington to tell the politicians what they want in person instead of publishing it on their website doesn't really change the math, does it?

Yes it's hard to stop people from speaking and intimidating. That's why I almost see an elegance in this solution: if FB and other corps don't know who is contributing which part to a bill and they only get to look at the final answer, it's harder to know who to intimidate and who to blame. In other words, it's believing that politicians are being intimidated to decide in one direction or another and trying to give them cover to make more sound decisions.

Right. Someone comes in to bribe you, you take their money, you go vote against them anyway. Then when they come to you to object, you can shrug and say it must have been someone else. There is no way to for them to verify that their bribe is having the intended effect, so they'd have to pay you on faith. And who is going to trust a politician who is accepting bribes? They could be taking them from both sides!

Precisely.

And without knowing for certain whether that person actually voted in the committee for X or added X to the bill, it also makes it hard to know whom to intimidate, whom to threaten by being primaried out, whom to defame, etc.

James and the CRI go more in depth with this, but from what I recall, the idea is to have close door for committee deliberations so that they can work with each other to come up with a bill that works, then they come out and release either their committee votes or the floor votes.

Similar to how the Supreme Court releases their final votes but doesn't show people how the deliberations are being done.

From interacting with him and reading the CRI stuff, I learned a lot about how lobbyists will sit in on the bill making process and basically monitor the lawmakers' every move in the negotiation part of the bill.

He said to me once that they were called lobbyists because they used to have to wait in the lobby before they could talk to people, now they get to sit directly in the lawmaking chambers while it's happening.

I've also heard this was an unanticipated consequence of increased transparency. I'm not ready to give up my faith in the wisdom "the solution to democracy's problems is more democracy". But do try to be mindful that there's always tradeoffs.

> "the solution to democracy's problems is more democracy"

By democracy, do you mean direct democracy, representative democracy, both, or neither?

David Graeber style participatory democracy. Put decision making closest to the people impacted.

Doesn't scale. Which is a feature, not a bug.

If it doesn't scale, what would be the largest size it would work at, and then how to resolve conflict amongst those groups?

The other problem with this is that the existing votes are already choreographed for public consumption, so the existing transparency is an illusion.

There was a bill earlier this year to expand police funding. After a year of "defund the police" from AOC et al, it turned out that if she would have voted against it, it would have actually defeated the bill. So instead she voted "present" and the bill passed.

Most people aren't going to notice that, but that was equivalent to voting yes. And if her vote wasn't actually necessary to pass the bill, she'd then have been able to vote no specifically because it wouldn't change the outcome, even though as we know she would flip when it mattered. That happens on a regular basis too but in those cases it's undetectable.

One devil can the others. Who watch the agent behind close doors.

Hmm? I'm not sure what you meant, could you rephrase?

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