[sobkas]

> If people want congressional term limits, they'll vote in representatives that promise to enact them.

And then they'll pull WWE and designate on or two manchinns or sinemas to oppose it so they can say that they tried but failed. And they will blame voters for not voting harder.

Or do nothing and hope people will forget about it.

[tptacek]

It's fun to pretend there's a vast conspiracy in between you and your policy goals, but usually what's really happening is that most people don't care about your particular policy objectives. Nobody cares about term limits. There are opinion polls that say otherwise, but they're not measuring the salience of the issue. People have a stated (bullshit) preference, and then the preference they reveal when they reelect Chuck Grassley for the 9th time.

[pksebben]

you're wrong.

while "conspiracy" isn't precisely correct, the system has been architected, bit by bit, to get between the zeitgeist of public opinion and policy. I've had to explain this to so many folks that as of this posting, I'm saving the list in a note for quicker reference.

- gerrymandering: even if your opinion is part of the majority opinion, that may not matter because you might live in a place that's strategically districted to silence you[1]

- first-past-the-post [2]: this system of voting creates an environment hostile to all but two courses of action. Consequently, issues that are highly nuanced or divided along more than one line are conveniently wrapped up in...

- the two party system: if my choices are eat the turd sandwich or drink the giant bag of douche, you haven't given me a choice. All the more shame that my choices are defined by:

- the DNC / the RNC: neither of which is held accountable to the kind of transparency that "actual voting" is (never mind that, because of the issues previously mentioned, they do run the "actual voting"). And by bifurcating the voting bloc on either side of a strategic line, they make life a lot easier for..

- lobbyists: I can't stress enough how bad it is that these motherfuckers write things that make it into actual law [3]. This is the man behind the curtain, the curtain being..

- representatives: see previous as to why this nomenclature is a joke. Not that it would make a ton of difference if it weren't, because even if they did represent your interests (pro tip: they don't), they'd only rarely be able to act on it, because of:

- the Senate: do you live in Wyoming? Vermont? no? well those folks get to decide to kill bills from the rest of us. Even if they decide not to, and everything else works fine, guess what -

- the supreme court: may be staffed by a majority that was voted in generations ago and they're a) not leaving and b) desperately out of touch, so all the work you may it may not have accomplished by overcoming ALL THE STUFF ABOVE is moot!

.. and I've left out tons from this brief overview. The money / campaign finance cycle, the relationship of all this to the media, voter suppression, and so on and so on and so on. Another way to look at this, rather than a systemic analysis, is to look at the outcome, which has been done [4]. Generally, what is seen is that the more money you have, the more congruent your opinion and enacted policy will be. Notably, it's what doesn't get passed that the wealthy seem to have the most control over. This would make sense, because things are obviously working well for them now so why rock the boat.

1 https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerr...

2 https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo

3 https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...

4 https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20...

[tptacek]

How's explaining this been working out for you?

The people in Wyoming and Vermont aren't too happy about Chicagoans deciding things for them, either.

[pksebben]

it works out just about as well as people are willing to think about it.

The point about the Senate is that it's asymmetric representation. The Senate kills bills, and it can be done with a much smaller portion of the voting bloc than is representative.