The week the web changed Washington
radar.oreilly.com
radar.oreilly.com
I don't know what the exact balance should be, but I would start low, rather than high. The number of people necessary should be low enough that 80% of the "bad bills" don't pass anymore, but also high enough that you don't have 80% of these oppositions as abuses of the law.
The reason I would start with a lower number first, is because we've already tried the "more representative" version of the Government, and it hasn't been working that well lately, and because it's much easier to get them to raise the number later if it gets too abused, than it is to get them to lower the number, because that would mean giving even more power to the people, and it's not something they'd like to do.
I'm not entirely sure how this opposition should happen - through signatures, I guess? But they should give a lot of information about themselves to verify them easily, or it needs to be done in such a way that a politician can't easily manufacture these to stop an opponent's bill.
Maybe this is a good suggestion, maybe it isn't. But I do believe that in the future we'll need more direct democracy influences on the Republic, for it to stay healthy. The Republic needs to be a lot more bottom-up than it currently is. Voting every 2 or 4 years to change a candidate, from the very few options, when in 98% (fact) of the cases those with the most campaign money win anyway, and then allowing them to do whatever they want when they get there, is just not enough anymore, and it's clear it hasn't been working well. This is why so many people are frustrated with the voting process and don't vote. They know it's mostly useless. The Republic needs to be upgraded for the 21st century.
No that's good. At a Macro level change can only lead to reduce the power of the incumbents.
Anything we can do to fight the kind of people who actually believe that the internet is really a "series of tubes" (again, at a Macro level, this'll be the Boomers) is a GOOD thing.
And in the other side of the spectrum, there are very heated subjects, like abortion. If you enable a way to postpone or kill a bill, based on say 3M online votes, I can bet that every church will ask their parishioners to vote. (please, I simply put this as an example) How do you stop that?
On the other hand, I can bet that some corporations are going to put incentives to vote in favor or against some legislation. (e.g.: giving bonuses to the ones who vote the desired option). Everything becomes much more harder to analyze to detect corruption.
But of course this could be easily abused, too, if not done carefully. That's why they shouldn't be able to veto the bill - but only postpone it and force Congress to hold a public debate about it over a number of months.
The only threat to this is getting this happening way too often, and making Congress very inefficient (not that it's extremely efficient now) by postponing everything. This is why it needs to be thought through a little bit, and as soon as there are signs of this, the numbers should be altered to balance the law.
That sounds nice when you only think about "good" people opposing "bad" bills, but you can say goodbye to any kind of social reform under that system.
Repealing DADT, Repealing the Defense of Marriage act, same-sex marriage are some social reforms that would never happen under such a system because you can easily find millions of americans that are extremely outraged about those issues.
The protests against SOPA and PIPA worked because the absolute majority of the american population didn't care and didn't have an opinion either way, but the tech community had an expert opinion against it based on facts and technical knowledge.
But if you open up your suggested system to issues where everyone has an opinion and noone really knows the effects, the results are going to be abysmal.
I wonder what the US would look like with a proportional representation system instead. Where you would have an actual Tea-party party with as many seats in congress as they actually have nationwide support for. And where the other "factions" of the Democrats and the Republicans formed parties in their own right, and people could have a more active role in shaping the policies of the "block" of their choosing, instead of just voting for it because they don't want the other side to win.
I wonder what it would look like if every vote counted, if there were no swing-states, no gerrymandering, if the electoral college votes where also proportional, so that voting for a third candidate is meaningful, or a fourth, or a fifth. I wonder what would happen if the election results showed the "purple" America that actually exists, instead of the red vs. blue illusion.
How is postpone and force a public and (hopefully) fair debate about a subject the same as stopping it from happening?
So? Why shouldn't they have the ability to postpone things? "Postpone" doesn't mean block. In this context, it just means "takes more time".
I find it interesting that "not changeable by reasoned debate" applies mostly to positions that the speaker don't hold.
I'm just saying we need some light direct democracy influences in the republic, to have more checks and balances against the representatives.
Maybe 6 months is too much. Maybe 100,000 is too low. I'm sure we could find a balance. And I'm only asking to postpone the bill and have set-up some kind of open debate process - like multiple hearings with the public or civil liberties organizations involved - anything like that, as long as they don't rush it through Congress.
Yes, that is what proportional representation and a plurality of political parties achieve. In the last elections here, I first selected one of the major blocks of parties, and then a specific party within that block. That way my vote gets a little bit more power, I get to say something about the general political foundation, and I get to say something about specific issues that are important to me.
If the party I generally vote for does something I'm completely against, I don't have to abandon the fundamentals, I can still keep my vote within the bigger block, but shift it to another party, which means the entire block shifts direction ever so slightly.
This way, outside voter forces act on the blocks to change them and shape them, instead of that process being completely internal and driven by their perception of popular opinion.
> And I'm only asking to postpone the bill and have set-up some kind of open debate process
The biggest problem with this is that politics is all about compromise. It's about giving and receiving, about making deals. It allows parties to get their way in issues they and their voters care deeply about, in exchange for not getting their way in less important issues.
But if you add an open debate process, you lose the bigger picture. Different parts of the public, different organizations will get involved in different issues, and completely ignore others, and each organization will act as if their issue is the only important one, and not be willing to budge an inch. For every issue you can always find enough people that cares very deeply about it, but it's much harder to see the bigger picture, how many people actually care deeply about a certain issue? And I think that only by giving them the power to vote can you really find out.
Under this kind of system, every minority would be oppressed.
"They let us go. It was the only reason for the
ease of our escape."
-- Princess Leia
"The Empire Strikes Back"
-- George Lucas
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
-- Thomas Jefferson