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Comment by chrisan | Hacker News Reader

> 9) Congress is still necessary to save America, and cynics aren't helping

> Discouragement is for wimps. We aren't going to change the Constitution, so we need to make the system we have work. ... Our greatest strength is our ability to bounce back from mistakes like we are making today. ... The point here isn't to make us something we're not. The point is to get us to make sausage again. But for that to happen, the people have to rise up and demand better.

How exactly are we supposed to get them to "make sausage again" when #2-8 pretty much list out why they aren't going to make sausage?

Have we not been demanding better? Any laws we might want of them to limit 2-8 is going to require the people who benefit the most from 2-8 to vote against themselves.

Articles like this is exactly why I'm discouraged and each voting cycle I get less and less inclined to go out and vote and just stay home and code.

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> Articles like this is exactly why I'm discouraged and each voting cycle I get less and less inclined to go out and vote and just stay home and code.

I still vote, because while a single vote by itself doesn't make much of a difference, and even which flavor of shill who wins doesn't make much of a difference, the fact that a population votes does (I think) make a difference, regardless of the outcome.

If we collectively don't bother to vote, then we the people become all but irrelevant.

If you're too disgusted to vote, it's probably because the votes for people are between two equally repugnant choices. So go out and vote "anyone but those two." Vote third party. It doesn't matter what third party you vote for, because what you're really doing is showing up. It's a holding action, to preserve the vote, until we've figured out how to make it work again.

Think hard about holding on to your right to vote. Right now, in Congress, they still hold "voice votes," where individual votes are not counted, and instead the person running the vote decides based on the volume of "yeas" or "neighs" which side of the vote won. Before modern technology there were practical reasons/excuses for this practice, but now it's just a way to a) allow voting members to be anonymous, and b) the leadership to have undue tie-breaking influence. And it's lazy.

Who's to say that Congress won't eventually grow the balls (or have paid balls attached) to declare that they know how a district would vote anyway, based on blah blah blah, and just declare winners, because people aren't voting anyway.

At least force them to continue to lie. Don't just give it to them.

Any percentage of the electorate abstaining their vote through apathy reduces the legitimacy of the congress / system

If a significant portion of the population refuses to vote, it only reduces the legitimacy of the democracy.

But the system is still perfectly robust. How can you expect the government to improve if you refuse to utilize the only mechanism you have for imparting change?

Comments like yours seem to imply that there needs to be some sort of radical revolution in order to see any improvement in our system. What kind of revolution do you imagine?

There is no mechanism for measuring voting percentage and triggering a legitimacy action in the US.

Yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine. As far as I know, right now it's structurally impossible to have Congress make real reform, or even legislate effectively. There have been a string of these "inside" articles from staffers and congressmen themselves. They all have the same tone: money ruins politics, partisan politics ruins legislation, lobbyists steer the wheel more than the people, congressmen don't spend enough time with each other so they see each other as enemies, and so on.

This article in particular is funny. The writer suggests that we won't change the constitution. If the problem is that deeply rooted, what else could work but an amendment? Why not just change the rules of the game? I don't think there's a person I know who's happy with Congress, regardless of political party. I think it could work. All you need is enough people who agree, right?

See, I think we can change the Constitution. I've been thinking about this for a couple years. I think we need to start with a couple common-sense amendments for which broad-based, non-partisan support could be garnered. I have 2 ideas:

1. Fractional electoral college voting for president. This would instantly bring all 50 states back into play for presidential campaigns and enfranchise millions of people into the process whose vote for president is hardly relevant currently.

2. Instant-runoff (ranked) voting. This would allow people to vote more closely with their preferences and eliminate costly runoff elections. As a bonus, it might break the Ducorcet Law [1] tendency of "first past the post" to create two-party duopoly.

These are far from end-all, be-all solutions, but I believe them to be steps in the right direction. I truly believe we could get much of the intellectual energy of the country behind these two ideas. I think we're in dire need of something to shake up the status quo. And then maybe we can have some more substantitve debates.

You left out a link for your [1], and I think you misspelled "Condorcet" [2], unless you're thinking of something I'm not familiar with.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion

It's Duverger's Law, actually.

Can't edit, but yes, you're right.

> Have we not been demanding better?

We haven't. Instead, we've been saying things like: How exactly are we supposed to get them to "make sausage again" when #2-8 pretty much list out why they aren't going to make sausage?

I, too, primarily get discouraged each voting cycle and feel progressively less inclined to take any sort of political action. I'm right there with you. It's actually very heartening to me that whoever wrote this article is optimistic that, if we really demanded it, change might come.

The powers that be have zero interest in the legalization of marijuana and yet it continues despite directly contravening federal law.

"The powers that be have zero interest in the legalization of marijuana and yet it continues despite directly contravening federal law."

The steady march towards legalization of marijuana is, quite frankly, a model for how people can work outside of D.C. to make things happen. This really began at the state level, then picked up momentum among voters by word of mouth, spreading from state to state.

I remember many years ago, when some political activists thought that medical marijuana was a strategically poor route to legalization. That has turned out to be completely wrong. Acceptance of the medical benefits of marijuana did a lot to change general public perception of cannabis. It completely reframed the issue, from one of moral panic, to one of compassion and economics. Over time, marijuana became so normalized as to stop outraging the kinds of voters it used to outrage. These days, even if many people still don't accept the medical benefits, they're not up in arms about the subject. They've accepted that people are going to smoke weed, and that the world doesn't fall off of its axis when people do. Haters have stopped hating.

Now that cannabis has been destigmatized, and all but normalized--in pop culture, in common experience, and at the polls--its former controversy has been short circuited. It's no longer a hot-button "social values" issue with any significant blocks of voters. Hence, no congressperson's job depends on coming out for or against it every election cycle. So congresspeople are apathetic about it. They're not going to try to help the issue, but they're not going to try to stop it, either.

Marijuana beat Congress because marijuana went around Congress. That seems to be the secret to making things happen in this country: make something a grassroots issue, generate "demand" (so to speak), and build a groundswell of inevitability before dealing with D.C.

I agree. If you want something done, don't bother with Congress. State or local is the only way to make a direct and timely difference in our lives.

Yet, state and local politics is also where some of the most regressive changes are happening. It's a real double-edge sword.

Then if you're a small-p progressive, and you want to keep regressives in check, that's the place to be. :)

I'm interested in reactions to this idea: a virtual "shadow Congress."

The plan would be to get broad participation in an unofficial election process which would elect representatives to "shadow Congress." They'd at least start out by addressing the same agenda as real Congress, and be forbidden from introducing new agenda. The idea would be to generate a template of what a broad-participation representative group of citizens would like to see happen from Congress.

The theory is that if this shadow Congress is representative enough, it becomes hard for real Congress to ignore. The compromises it comes up with are a template for real compromises. When the national media starts writing stories like "Why can't real Congress do what shadow Congress can?" or "Here is the Senator unilaterally blocking the rest of Congress from following the shadow Congress' lead on this issue." the idea will have worked.

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