(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions
(5) When possible, refer all matters to ' committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
I guess Dilbert might be working with the CIA after all.
Having one party control everything leads to shenanigans. Trust me, you do not want an agile and fast government.
You do not want an agile and fast incompetent government, that's for sure.
I'm perfectly okay with Congress deliberating on a piece of legislation for an entire year. Some issues are hard.
It was a fairly explicit design goal. By setting up Congress so that one house mirrored population and the other mirrored number of states, they basically guaranteed that there would be no substantial legislation passed on the issue of slavery, at least not until a major shift in culture.
In a broader sense, remember that "fast and agile" is another way of saying "changes rapidly". Since government writes the rules you have to operate by, both in your personal and economic life, it's important that those rules not change quickly if the changes are at all controversial.
attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
Attributed to Stephen Colbert.
You don't, actually. If that's all it took, we'd never have car crashes.
> What do you need to run a country? Not common sense I suppose.
"Common sense" is a lazy person's way of saying "what I believe". Akin is a fucking wingnut who was happily thrown out of office over his rape comments. Even before that, it's been pointed out that he was placed into committees with the least power because his colleagues weren't impressed by him. How is he even relevant? I'm not really okay with using 1 person as a representative sample of 500 people. It's like saying there was this one American who killed a guy, and therefore all Americans are psychopathic murderers.
More importantly, how does this remotely suggest that committees are an evil that Congress should do without?
Committees are bad, because you will never know what color the bikeshed should be.
You have exponentially many possible interactions between people in a group and any important information will almost surely get lost in the noise. Big committees are a wonderful stage for personal feuds, intrigues and outright sabotage (already in the formation phase).
The results you'll get will mostly be based on lobbying, popularity and whoever barked the loudest, not on benefit, cost, feasibility, let alone constitutionality.
OTOH, I don't really know what would be better. Smaller "committees", more like expert groups, can give better results if the right people are selected. Which is unlikely, given the present state of governments. At the moment it seems as if the best strategy is oversizing and over-bureaucratizing to slow down the process and limit the amount of damage done in that way. Meh. :-/
Most utopian schemes end up being conditioned on a lot of very difficult, if not outright impossible, presumptions. I am not claiming that the current system is perfect; it can, without reservation, be improved significantly. The question is how, why that how, and at what cost.
It's worth pointing out, btw, that the SCOTUS is a committee. Congressional committees are weak because their members are elected and, at least superficially, represent real people in a direct manner; their job is to be biased, and this bias makes them vulnerable to non-committee actions like lobbying and popularity contests. That is why you don't get to elect the SCOTUS: precisely to protect them from that weakness. (And also why you don't get to elect any other Presidential appointee; most of them also end up on committees.)
On a side note, it's a false equivalency to say "Congress"; it's the MO of the Republican party and those who share the frame of mind that is prevalent and represented therein.
When you have a bastardized bi-polar political system from the agricultural era of western history that merely represented a coincidental flame of sanity in the dark and gloomy misery of religious psychopathic fraud, human characteristics and mentalities will polarize. Although not in any way absolute, the reality is that as much as the bumbling, well-intentioned foolishly self-assured enablers end up on one side; the greedy, psychopathic, selfish, heinous, paranoid, and self-righteously sadistic end up on the opposite through a process of attraction and repulsion.
It is the reason why the nation was forged by sacrificing state power plurality as a result of the civil war, and it is what will continue to escalate the present disharmony and possibly lead to quite uncomfortable disruption.
I call it "things I'd like to happen less often, rather than more".