[abecedarius]

Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:

> I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent — the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Increasingly wishing for this from a fictional constitutional convention:

There's an interesting, one-time shakeup that we could actually accomplish. While it's true that there will never again be another constitutional amendment... there's already one out there that will never expire, partially ratified. Completely beyond Congress's ability to rescind it or cockblock it. Article the First.

Were it to be ratified, nearly immediately (whenever the next Census is), the House of Representatives has over 6000 seats. So many that the existing party apparatus wouldn't be able to vet candidates or manipulate. Lobbyists, even, would have a hard time allotting the slush funds to bribe them all.

And what would it take to do all of this? Maybe 10 or 12 people hammering (gently) on some state legislator in Nevada or Kansas. Convince him or her to pass the resolution to ratify. Nothing more than that. A single state even attempting to ratify it would start the ball rolling, and no one would be able to stop it.

[pc86]

I have long thought that capping the number of representatives in the House is the single worst thing to happen, structurally, to the United States government. Representatives should be as close to the people as possible, and spending millions every two years to represent nearly 3/4 of a million people isn't even close.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

If you're outside of New England (and Kentucky), your state could still ratify it. The quantity of effort needed to do that is bizarrely small. A dozen people focusing on a single state legislator might convince him or her to bring it to the floor.

The last time this happened (in the 1990s), it didn't even take that much.

[frogperson]

I'm not sure it really matters if the senate still exists. the money men will just move the bribes to the senators. winning a senate seat would mean you are a millionaire at minimum.

[solid_fuel]

> And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

30% of Americans would surrender every right they have if it meant someone who looks different would suffer slightly more.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Add money to politics - more accurately add even more money to politics - and see how this works out.

[abecedarius]

Concentrated interests want legislation favoring them at the expense of the easily-misled public. So what's your model by which repeal becoming less near-impossible makes the net damage from this dynamic greater.

[unethical_ban]

I love that book, and its teachings of cell structures for decentralized rebellion. But it is a libertarian fantasy. And we've seen in the US, particularly due to the voting-system-imposed two party cap, that bad faith actors will sabotage good government as a goal in itself. I'm not confident that we need to make it even harder to pass laws in the US. We need to have voting reform in the country to allow a real free market of political parties that accurately represent the will of the people, and hold true to the values that we have in our Bill of Rights such as freedom of speech and freedom to privacy and civil rights.

[abecedarius]

Really I'm not married to that proposal, I agree some voting reforms like approval voting should help, and I don't think any formal changes are enough on their own to get our political culture out of the current pit. What I like about this idea is bringing attention to the repeal problem as worth attention and imagination. Achieving a setup with some powerful people with a career interest in simplifying the infinite codebase.

> libertarian fantasy

You can see it that way... though the Prof was not expecting uptake for those proposals, he didn't get them, and the protagonist at the end is thinking of emigrating to the Belt. The U.S. was a libertarian fantasy before its founding.

[ClayShentrup]

approval voting would be absolutely massive in impact, i think far beyond what you're imagining.

[unethical_ban]

FWIW that's what I was getting at for "change the voting system". I don't like approval voting because despite every other election system advantage it has, I think most people have preferences in their candidates, and it would be better to allow them to express them.

[abecedarius]

There's score voting too. I believe approval is the best focal point for this kind of reform because it's the simplest one, simpler even than the status quo. (In UI terms it's switching from radio buttons to checkboxes.) Any complication or unfamiliarity is a problem in multiple ways. (Score voting goes from checkbox to a 1-5 stars or whatever.)

I was guarded above because even though system-level reform should be a bigger deal than object-level, I think putting a lot of hope on it is setting yourself up for disappointment. You need culture change or competition in governance.

[afiori]

This looks like something only a libertarian would like