- Votes in the House and Senate used to be anonymous
- They then decided to make them public under the reasoning of transparency
- One side effect of making them public is that you got people like Grover Norquist and The Americans for Tax Reform who could see who voted for taxes and then use that to "name and shame" people (there was a pledge signing in there as well). For more details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
- This now means that it's MUCH easier for lobbyists and special interest groups to see where to spend their money as a Senator's voting history is public knowledge (which both sides are WELL aware of)
- As a sibling poster points out: you can easily see who receives money from defense groups vs not.
- This is probably good for us as voters in the short term but bad for the country in the long term (Due to the above)
I'm not convinced that this is a problem. Lobbyists and special interests already knew how politicians voted, they just knew via old fashioned grapevine methods. There was an information asymmetry between well connected lobbyists and average people. The fact that no longer exists is a good thing, in the long and short term.
“when private citizens are able to vote privately, it protects their ability to vote their conscience, rather than allowing some third party to explicitly buy votes or bully someone into voting in line with someone else”,
and the belief that somehow this doesn’t apply to congress members.
Additionally, on hard philosophical and policy qurstions, some bits of negotiation and dealmaking are bare-knuckled “the sausage gets made” affairs that are brutally hard on the ego and participants. Part of why nothing can get through Congress anymore in a timely fashion and without continual brinksmanship on important funding or to prevent shutdowns is because even if crossing party lines would very often be in the public’s interest, and to the public’s net benefit, haggling to make it happen or voting to make it so often doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of thousands of watchful eyes where an important deal may hinge on brutal haggling which the public couldn’t stomach seeing the intermediate steps and votes of.
One such example in practical terms: if the constitutional convention which replaced the articles of confederation took place in the internet age with modern real-time, to the minute reporting on how everyone was voting on every intermediate plan and how any compromise made was a betrayal of “party lines” on an issue, America as a country probably wouldn’t exist today.
Transparency has its own benefits, but it’s not without costs - you make a legislative body’s job more difficult, you get corresponding gridlock to match.
Sure there’s a tension, but one difference is that I know how I vote, but I don’t know how my representative votes unless it’s in the public record.
If you believe that electorates punish politicians for decisions in the public interest, and legislators’ jobs would be easier if they were less accountable to their voters, why support democracy at all?
There are a variety of differences between having representatives vote with your interests and voting yourself, such as practicality, time expenditure and access to advising and expertise, etc. That’s perhaps why many direct democracy systems (California, Switzerland, etc.) combine the two with direct democracy used for relatively few decisions.
There's no "THE problem." There's a ton of "problems." Just to be clear. Because many of the problems we face today are through interaction of different things, often in a complex chain, rather than a direct easy to follow causal chain.
> via old fashioned grapevine
Treat the problem as an adversarial problem. Yes, your adversary will always be able to break your defenses. Nothing is bulletproof. How you defend is through forcing adversaries to expend resources. It is very clear that forcing lobbiests to learn through the grapevine is a more costly method than simply looking at a public database. And if you aren't familiar with this concept, people lie. No one need know your vote unless you reveal it (which... might be a lie).
The point also is that it can also prevent inner conflict, among parties. You're not voting along party lines? You think you're going to get as much support from your party when it comes to your bills and campaign funds? So you have plenty of incentive to not reveal your vote, even among allies.
I agree with you in that switching to private votes won't solve the problems we have. But would it improve? I'd guess some and I'd guess it would take time for the real effects to be seen. But the other side is, would it do harm? I doubt it.
The continental congress itself was entirely secret with no notes taken and no existing journal, diary, or any other record of the proceedings - and this was a bunch of folks who obsessively recorded their lives and thoughts for posterity. They also thought pretty hard about the side effects of such things and congressional and senate votes were private until modern times.
I’m not one who believes the constitution is sacred or that the founding fathers were infallible, but I do think the chance for a person to vote their conscience vs their politics is an important feature. While the grapevine might be a route to learn, it’s also a route that doesn’t have to be accurate. I can tell my lobbyist whatever I want about my vote, but only I know what my vote was in private voting. This feels like a feature not a flaw.
The point of representative democracy is selecting a person whose judgement you believe in. Public voting records lead to populist and party strangleholds on outcomes with consequences for breaking dogma. Practically speaking it also gives lobbyists proof positive of whether their money was well spent.
The parties only have "disputes" on a short list of wedge issues, and either side winning on those removes the that issue as a cudgel that can motivate their base.
If you look at their donors, you'll see the lines. The people who voted for it make money from the defense and intelligence industries, and the people who didn't, don't. Voting for for something majorities of the voters of both parties are against is expensive (in terms of being re-elected.) That price is paid by donors, and the media control that those donors will exercise. Which again, is why the wedge issues are needed: you're going to have to vote for those people who voted against your civil liberties if you want Democrats to pretend to protect abortion rights for another 4 years, or Republicans to pretend to end them.
I mean, except that many people can’t get either an abortion or IVF. This affects people’s entires lives, it’s not “pretend” unless you are unaffected.
What would you have Biden do about exactly? Pack the Supreme Court? If Roosevelt couldn’t pull that off at the height of his power, there’s no way Biden is making that happen.
My hot take is that IVF enables infertile couples to propagate their genes, which is bad in an evolutionary sense since it increases the population and decreases the fertility of the gene pool. Another way of putting it is, it increases the odds of people falling in love with someone who is infertile.
which is exactly why the vote went the way it did. they wanted it passed, they found the votes from senators that were safe, and everyone else was allowed to bail so they didn’t have to deal with it at reelection.
this is normal practice, to provide cover for your party members.
it’s divided by party line because it’s national security. they’re splitting the spoils.
On the republican side, those voting yea are almost always the old McCain crowd. What the right calls “RINOs” or republicans in name only. That’s not surprising, they’re also the group funding wars, voted for the initial spy bills, etc.
What’s more surprising is the split in IL between Duckworth (yea) and Durban (Nay). Usually you don’t see states splitting too much. Tennessee was all Nays for instance.
at least a bunch of the isolationist sentiment on the republican side recently has actually come from former veterans, since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had such questionable returns
Because in reality the two party system is not accurate. It’s rich versus poor, those with power versus those without. Nobility versus peasants. That’s just how it works.
The US federal government is already pretty weak compared to other countries. The federal government looks pretty bad at the moment, but I’m not sure further weakening it will help the country.
The US federal government is very strong compared to many countries, just limited in where that power can be applied... in theory. In practice, the insanity that is a precedent-based judicial system over time means that it's all just a disorganized mess where on one hand the Feds can straight up prevent you from boarding a plane, ever, without any semblance of due process (this is not normally a power you'll find in other countries), and yet can't regulate many mundane things like firearms.
However, there is a very solid case for a weak federal government, and it is simply that US is a country that's way too big for any coherent national policy on most matters that we've currently pushed there. It's such a vicious fight because it's half the country trying to bludgeon the other half into submission, motivated by the knowledge that, if you yield, the other guy will pick up this huge club and do the same to you. This will continue until the country breaks down unless we dial it down to state level and accept the fact that other states may have laws and lifestyle that is despicable or horrifying to us in some ways. Either that, or we might as well just break the whole thing apart now and not wait for it to happen in a more violent manner.
Other countries don't institutionalize the two-party system by law. Because it would be insane and antidemocratic to create a complicated network of laws that would have to be eliminated state by state in order to ordain that an entire country must be ruled by two intimately-linked private clubs in turn.
The two-party system isn't so heavily institutionalized "by law". The law generally gives advantages to parties that pull in more than x% of the vote, and it so happens that the first-past-the-post system of electing representatives makes it very difficult for a third party to take root.
Except our law is nothing like that. You can have a party take 45% of each district across the whole country and end up with zero seats in the House (because the other party took 55% of each).
The first past the post system is encoding a two party system into law. If it makes to hard enough for a third party to take hold, there might as well not be one.
I do not find it surprising that groups of people with many overlapping viewpoints do not have overlapping viewpoints 100% of the time. If anything, I find it surprising that they overlap so frequently.
Furthermore, I think the frequency of that overlap is a major problem for our political system, because it makes compromise impossible.
Really makes you think about whether there are some things that can still transcend partisan showmanship, like national security.
I still am a believer in digital freedom, I'm old enough to have seen the changes in the Internet, and it is a much more malevolent and fucked up force than it was even 15 years ago. Maybe, just maybe, the government needs the power to spy on international targets with oversight.
> crackpots talking about a uniparty, deep state vs the people, etc
It’s not controversial to suggest that the interests of the political class, the special interests that fund their campaigns, and Washington bureaucrats differ from the interests of the public at large. You don’t need to evoke deep state conspiracies to explain nefarious coordination because when career and monetary incentives align then bills like this one get passed.
Yep, this trend of dismissing undemocratic power structures as conspiracy theories is deeply troubling. Important issues such as surveillance, censorship, and the military-industrial complex have a long history and are extensively documented. Yet it's hard to bring these issues up today without being labeled a far right conspiracist.
It wasn't always like this. Many have agreed these were legitimate issues during the Iraq war. Where have all those people gone today?
It's definitely who you hang around with, but I think how the conversation is approached also dictates outcome. Talk about a political ruling class with most people, and they'll look at you as though you grew a third eyeball. Talk about the Dems and Repubs being out of touch with the average person due to the insulative effect of DC, and they'll usually agree.
You can generally convey the same idea gently as long as you hedge your phrasing somewhat. Making it sound like a wacky accusation comes off sounding, well, wacky.
You nailed it. This discussion would never have happened on HN if I hadn’t worded my original comment the way I did. It’s not how I wanted to word it ;)
The summary is this:
- Votes in the House and Senate used to be anonymous
- They then decided to make them public under the reasoning of transparency
- One side effect of making them public is that you got people like Grover Norquist and The Americans for Tax Reform who could see who voted for taxes and then use that to "name and shame" people (there was a pledge signing in there as well). For more details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist
- This now means that it's MUCH easier for lobbyists and special interest groups to see where to spend their money as a Senator's voting history is public knowledge (which both sides are WELL aware of)
- As a sibling poster points out: you can easily see who receives money from defense groups vs not.
- This is probably good for us as voters in the short term but bad for the country in the long term (Due to the above)