The only branch of the government that seems to be able to do anything anymore is the judiciary, and all they seem to be able to do is flip the same light switch on and then off and then on again. Congress has been effectively gridlocked and do-nothing for at least 35 years--all of my adult life. The last time a party had over 59 Senate seats was when I was a toddler. The executive branch's powers are being quickly eroded by SCOTUS.
So, net neutrality (and other policy) is going to be forever stuck in this loop of constant arguing over law that was written during the time of fax machines. With one court stopping it, another court reversing the stoppage, the next court reversing the reversing of the stoppage, another case happening with more clever lawyers and so the next court reverses the previous reverse, and then on appeal that reverse gets reversed, and then a random judge pulls out some wording from a 1807 law and reverses again, and this is basically going to be what counts as governance for the rest of my life.
EDIT: Mods, feel free to destroy this thread--I can't delete it anymore. I try to talk about the inability to resolve Net Neutrality and it just turns into another unproductive flame war. Sigh.
> only branch of the government that seems to be able to do anything anymore is the judiciary
The 117th Congress was very productive, particularly taking into account the scale of its acts [1]. The 118th was one of the most bipartisan in memory.
We’ve spent the GDP of medium-sized countries on infrastructure and onshore fabrication initiatives. What is the benchmark for doing something?
Yes, Congress can spend money. But it seems impossible to change the fundamental rules that govern society. Be it commercial, environmental or social. So the trajectory is a slow erosion through courts.
It’s almost as if social ideals change slowly. 30 years ago gay marriage was unthinkable. Now it’s common practice.
To say congress hasn’t accomplished anything in your adult life is to be in denial or intentionally uneducated about accomplishments. While the ACA for instance isn’t perfect, it was a major accomplishment.
That’s some revisionist history if I’ve ever seen it. Hawaii had a constitutional ban on same sex marriages in 1999. The fact there were some legal challenges before that doesn’t at all reflect the fact society wasn’t accepting.
The point is most people are dumb and think they are smart. These dumb people think that if they just change everything everyone's lives will be better. Making it hard for these dumb people to make sweeping changes to society without the support of a supermajority is a good thing.
We’re a big, diverse nation. The law should follow convention, not lead it. (Not for any high-minded reason. The War on Drugs is the law attempting to dictate convention. Simply put, it doesn’t work.)
Hardly. They've passed the least number of laws than any previous congress. Over the past 40 years the number of bills produced every year has fallen from around 600/year to 300/year.
> What is the benchmark for doing something?
What's baffling to me is that instead of holding committees, listening to expert testimony, then passing good laws, they're actually eager to go back to the previous unworkable status quo wherin administrative agencies just make up laws as they go.
> They've passed the least number of laws than any previous congress
I amended my comment between when you read it and posted yours. The number of bills is small. But their scope is massive, particularly across the 117th and 118th.
> instead of holding committees, listening to expert testimony, then passing good laws, they're actually eager to go back to the previous unworkable status quo wherin administrative agencies just make up laws as they go
What are you basing this on? The Capital is buzzing with committees investigating all manner of things.
> But their scope is massive, particularly across the 117th and 118th.
Are they just upwards wealth transfers disguised as bills or do they actually change administrative law? What's the "massive" part about them, exactly?
> The Capital is buzzing with committees investigating all manner of things.
This is easy to say and nearly impossible to quantify. I can only approach it with the obvious questions: "Then why do they want the Chevron doctrine back?" and "Why would such buzzing activity result in fewer bills?"
> Are they just upwards wealth transfers disguised as bills or do they actually change administrative law? What's the "massive" part about them, exactly?
Codifying same-sex marriage. Hundreds of billions on re-framing our transport system. (Like every major airport in the country is being renovated and expanded.)
What is your standard for meaningful legislation?
> easy to say and nearly impossible to quantify
It’s trivial to quantify; the minutes are public. The people I know on the Hill are busy as ever. The do-nothing months of total gridlock (or the speakership fight) were exceptions.
> I can only approach it with the obvious questions: "Then why do they want the Chevron doctrine back?
It was the status quo and made their job easier. With the CRA, the Congress never actually ceded any power. Just initiative. In any case, there is no legislative push to reinstate Chevron by statute.
Congress is lazy. But it’s powerful, and holds its own against the Court.
Replacing definitions. Important but not "massive."
> Hundreds of billions on re-framing our transport system.
They spend hundreds of billions most years. It's part of the FY budget, is it not? They included a few billion dollars for additional grant projects.
> (Like every major airport in the country is being renovated and expanded.)
Like ATP. Are you referencing ATP? It's a grant program.
> What is your standard for meaningful legislation?
Look at all the places where the lack of a Chevron doctrine is being decried as a tragedy. Perhaps, start there?
> It’s trivial to quantify; the minutes are public.
That they meet I'm sure is a recorded fact. You said they were "buzzing." Compared to previous years? With more than just reauthorizations?
> With the CRA, the Congress never actually ceded any power. Just initiative.
Once the initiative is taken through a court and precedent some measure of power is lost until congress finds the initiative again. Which is not always a guarantee given it's political structure and lengthy vacations.
> there is no legislative push to reinstate Chevron by statute.
Per the article: "Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) introduced a bill in the upper house seeking to codify the Chevron Doctrine under a law duly voted by Congress."
Your link doesn't support that the 117th Congress was "very" productive. It shows a list of the number of bills passed from the 101st Congress to the 118th Congress, and the 117th Congress doesn't have a particularly high number of bills compared to other Congresses. Other than that, it doesn't talk about the 117th Congress.
You're arguing that considering the scale of the bills, they were productive. That's fair; because of increased partisanship, they load more things into huge bills to be voted on. But, your link doesn't support this argument.
That's recency bias though. When talking about the last 35 years (or even the last 25 years) the power of the executive has massively expanded. Even the Chevron defense doctrine itself was only 40 years old.
In some ways the executive branch has gained power, in other ways SCOTUS has gutted it through the novel "major questions" doctrine to peel power away from the executive under the guise of handing it back to the gridlocked legislature. For example, see the recent overturning of Chevron in Loper.
Sure, the executive has a lot of power to exercise military power without needing Congressional approval and minimal oversight. The courts have been happy to help expand and uphold that power. But power to regulate industry and other internal questions has generally been eroded since the 80s, and in accelerated fashion with Trump's further entrenchment of a more extreme right-wing ideology on the court.
They had a very brief time window when they had a 60-vote super-majority though. Al Franken wasn't seated for months, and then Ted Kennedy died. Scott Brown won the special election.
Harry Reid opposed filibuster reform at the time, which I think was a mistake but there might not have been enough votes in the Senate to pass any reforms.
Also, the "blue dog" Democrats were a pretty big block in the House, and would have opposed a lot of things that would be considered mainstream Democratic positions now.
Do folks not remember the impact of Lieberman on the Affordable Care Act?
The person with the 60th vote has a ton of policy influence. This is why we don't have a public option, or at least an awfully public example of how "having 60 votes" during that short window didn't get much done.
Not that I want to apologize for the democrats or anything, I just agree that no one has had a meaningful 60-vote majority in my lifetime.
Young people genuinely may not remember. Being born in 2003, I was 7 years old when the Affordable Care Act was passed, and I wasn't paying much attention to politics. I didn't keep much track until shortly before the 2016 presidential election, although I picked up bits and pieces before then. It's only because I read about politics online that I know about Lieberman's impact on the ACA. Someone else said they were born in 2001; that would have made them 9 years old in 2010.
Although, because little kids nowadays have access to smartphones with social media, I suspect that 7 and 9 year olds are now paying more attention to politics than they used to.
Thats overstating it. Minnesota was held up in court, Ted Kennedy was dying, the GOP became totally intransigent, and they had help from a few corporately owned Democrats.
Seems false. They did quite a few things. They passed the Affordable Care Act. They oversaw the recovery from the 2007-2008 crisis that engineers talk about to this day. They got two SCOTUS justices confirmed too.
you've pointed out the problem with the contemporary american two party state.
it's a see saw of nobody does anything but blame their systemic rival
either USA party system gets more than two parties because they're on a steady stalemate, like other poster was saying, 35 years of gridlocked congress because of two way ties.
or look at china, my prediction is that soon enough a ballsy european monarchy is gonna go full-blown one-party democracy or something clever like that
And temporary allies. Maybe with more than two parties we could move past the idea that the platform of one party has to be the exact opposite of the other on every issue. Then, maybe, not every effort would result in a gridlock. Perhaps a nice side effect could be that people stop seeing others who disagree with them as evil.
It's hard to make progress with temporary allies. They're going to expect some kind of mutual benefit. That is easiest when you've got trust, and the belief that you will have my back in the future. It's hard to have faith in temporary allies, and less opportunity to make compromises and trade-offs.
It's far easier when your allies are long term. Which functions a lot like a single party even if you don't call it that.
Yes, and the OP's understanding (and in fairness, many people's understanding) of how the US government is supposed to work is at odds with how it works in reality.
> Congress has been effectively gridlocked and do-nothing for at least 35 years--all of my adult life.
Gridlock is a design feature. It literally means there isn't consensus on whatever the topic may be. Do you really want a government that rams through unpopular policies constantly, then 4-6 years later whiplashes back again? What people often express as "congress not doing their job" is in reality "they aren't passing the policies I want!".
> The executive branch's powers are being quickly eroded by SCOTUS.
OP means "restored" instead of "eroded". POTUS was never supposed to be as powerful as they have become. Executive Orders are the worst way to run a country, yet we've had several presidents in a row that have abused EO's to get whatever they want done... only for the next person in office to undo it all with the stroke of a pen.
The only take-away one can have here is we need better civics classes in our schools...
> Gridlock is a design feature. [...] Do you really want a government that rams through unpopular policies constantly, then 4-6 years later whiplashes back again?
Speaking as a Brit, it's really not as bad as you make it sound.
In the UK system there is basically only one elected body - parliament - and if we elect a party that pledges to X, they have the power to X - meaning they can be held to account if they fail to deliver it.
And generally that means X gets done - that sounds pretty democratic to me. It has the downside that if people vote for Brexit you get Brexit, which ain't great, but I much prefer it to if people vote for Brexit and we don't get Brexit.
Whereas in the US system, as far as I can tell, you can elect a party that pledges to do X, then gridlock blocks them from doing it, then everyone just says "oh yeah that's understandable" and re-elects them?
As a Brit, it seems obvious to me that the legality of abortion is a political question. Isn't the whole point of the political process to have a national conversation, figure out what the public want, then representatives to represent that? The fact that America made this obviously political decision by... just handing the decision to a load of unelected judges? Then spent about 50 years not legislating on the matter, not amending the constitution, but instead giving judges the role of unelected pseudo-politicians who rule for life? And the legality hinges on when these elderly judges die?
To me that doesn't sound like a system that was designed at all.
The main reason why this is different for the US is the language of the Constitution effectively forces a two-party system, despite several of the framers really not wanting political parties as we have today.
The US doesn't have the same concepts of coalition building as many other types of governments do (coalitions being a way for many smaller parties to compromise with each other, reach consensus, and pass policy).
In the US, if you don't quite fit into one of the two major parties, then your "say" is effectively nullified. This is why the two parties have a huge range of voices - but are compelled to rally behind a singular set of views (usually their presidential candidate's) in order to gain power and accomplish anything.
For example - Bernie fans have been snuffed a few times, and their voices effectively silenced from the mainstream discussion. Even if you disagree with those viewpoints, they should get representation. Coalition building would force their voices to be heard in a meaningful way via compromises with other similar-but-not-quite-the-same parties.
Another example - Democrats held a primary election and chose their presidential candidate, which later dropped out of the race. Now Democrats are being told who they must vote for otherwise they will lose power. Many Democrats will hold their nose and vote for the new Democrat candidate, despite not liking the candidate or their policies, because they don't really have another choice. The wide range of views held within the Democrat party will be boiled down into whatever the candidate's views are - everyone else loses their "voice". Many smaller, more focused parties would help solve this issue as well.
That's not actually a difference between the UK and the US - we in the UK have a two party system as well, in effect.
For the last 100 years, every elected prime minister has been either Labour or Conservative. Occasionally at the head of a wartime coalition or propped up by a minor party, but far more often not and always from one of the two main parties.
Nice job paying lip service to a general issue as a spring board to push nonsensical partisan talking points. The general argument would have been much stronger had you analyzed the party that's been taken over and lobotomized by radical extremists, yet you just skipped right over that whole elephant in the room. "Many Democrats", as well as this libertarian, won't be needing to hold our noses as we vote for Harris out of a sense of overwhelming conservatism. I don't agree with the majority of her political views, but at this point in history you can consider me a single issue voter in favor of bureaucracy, which we have come to take for granted far too much.
> Nice job paying lip service to a general issue as a spring board to push nonsensical partisan talking points.
> the party that's been taken over and lobotomized by radical extremist
> won't be needing to hold our noses as we vote for Harris out of a sense of overwhelming conservatism
> I don't agree with the majority of her political views
> at this point in history you can consider me a single issue voter in favor of bureaucracy
You have unintentionally proven every single point I've raised in this entire thread. I could not have imagined a more perfect demonstration of what is wrong with US politics. The worst part - you probably felt vindicated writing this, failing to realize this behavior is exactly the problem.
Gridlock, or the inability to adapt to changing times and keep up with technology that itself is shaping society, is one of the USA's government's biggest and most embarrassing design flaws. How much of the regulatory environment we are subject to today was written before the IBM PC debuted, by people who used to travel on horse-drawn carriages? This is not a design feature. Taking a civics class does not mean you lose your ability to identify a dysfunctional system.
> the inability to adapt to changing times and keep up with technology that itself is shaping society
None of that changes the basic principle that the US government was supposed to uphold, namely, that the role of government is not to solve whatever problem someone thinks should be solved, but to protect everyone's basic rights and make sure there is a level legal playing field, and stopping there.
The problem is that the US government has gone far beyond that, the current regulatory megastate being only one aspect. To the extent the US government is dysfunctional, it's not because it doesn't do enough; it's because it does far, far too much.
Net neutrality is a case in point: it's only necessary in the first place to undo the effects of all the government-granted privileges that ISPs have. In a US that was run according to the way the US was supposed to be run, ISPs would have to compete in a free market and none of them would have monopoly privileges over particular areas, and none of them would have been able to get huge government grants supposedly to build infrastructure and then pocket the money instead. In that US there would be no need for net neutrality because nobody wants to buy Internet service that gets throttled depending on what website you go to. The only reason ISPs can even think of offering such a non-service is that they have monopolies granted by the government.
> None of that changes the basic principle that the US government was supposed to uphold, namely, that the role of government is not to solve whatever problem someone thinks should be solved, but to protect everyone's basic rights and make sure there is a level legal playing field, and stopping there.
Where is this said in the constitution ? Or any papers that isn’t the Federalist papers?
> Net neutrality is a case in point: it's only necessary in the first place to undo the effects of all the government-granted privileges that ISPs have. In a US that was run according to the way the US was supposed to be run, ISPs would have to compete in a free market and none of them would have monopoly privileges over particular areas, and none of them would have been able to get huge government grants supposedly to build infrastructure and then pocket the money instead. In that US there would be no need for net neutrality because nobody wants to buy Internet service that gets throttled depending on what website you go to. The only reason ISPs can even think of offering such a non-service is that they have monopolies granted by the government.
The only means in which these infrastructures can be built is either: Companies with enough capital to do so without governmental assistance, the government, or not at all.
The later is at odds with your first point (unless you believe the restriction not to apply to state and local governments) and the first leads to the same issues since competition is impossible for an eventual finite resource
"Protect everyone's basic rights and make sure there is a level playing field" is mainly in the Bill of Rights. (Some aspects of it are in the original Constitution.)
"Stopping there" means the government only doing the things the Constitution specifically says it can do. For example, it would mean Congress only passing laws that are actually within what Article I, Section 8 says Congress can do. And it would mean the other branches of government holding Congress to that. It would also mean Congress not delegating legislative power to Executive branch agencies; Article I says all legislative power is vested in Congress. It doesn't allow Congress to delegate it to any other body.
Of course we have long since stopped holding the US government to such standards. But that just means we've stopped holding the government accountable for actually obeying the Constitution.
> the first leads to the same issues since competition is impossible for an eventual finite resource
Not at all. If a local municipality builds, say, common use fiber optic infrastructure that the municipality owns, sure, that's technically a finite resource, but it's still perfectly possible for the municipality to make companies compete to provide services using that infrastructure. There is nothing forcing them to give monopoly privileges to any one company--except that in the US as it actually is, ISPs sue municipalities into oblivion when they try it, on the grounds that higher levels of government (mainly state although there are Federal fingers in the pie as well) have granted them exclusive access to that particular region.
You know what? No. If a right to privacy doesn't exist because it's not explicitly spelled out, and "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" gets shaved so thin you can see through it, then vibes don't count and neither does "some aspects".
> If a right to privacy doesn't exist because it's not explicitly spelled out, and "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" gets shaved so thin you can see through it
I'm not sure how this relates to what I was saying.
>Where is this said in the constitution ? Or any papers that isn’t the Federalist papers?
From the preamble of the Declaration of Independence:
>We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ...
> Do you really want a government that rams through unpopular policies constantly, then 4-6 years later whiplashes back again?
Yes. Because people will realize the next the Other People get in they'll repeal anything that (they think) is truly awful, so there's not much passing it in the first place. Or if there's anything that is (thought to be) 'only' kind of bad it will be tweaked/corrected.
A negative feedback loop tends to increase stability.
That's not the way it's supposed to work, but it is absolutely the way it is working right now (especially if you happen to live in the Fifth Circuit).
What? We constantly have this embarrassing song and dance where the government faces a shutdown because they can't pass a budget, and they literally can't do their job.
> We constantly have this embarrassing song and dance where the government faces a shutdown because they can't pass a budget, and they literally can't do their job
It's congress' job to write a budget, and it's the president's job to accept or veto it, after-which it's congresses job to amend or override the veto. The dance you're referring to is all posturing to compel one of the sides of that equation to compromise. In the end, they always compromise.
To be clear - it is not congress' job to write a budget the president will accept. Congress is a separate branch of government and is as-powerful as the president. This process was designed to compel the two branches to compromise with each other - and it works (admittedly after a dog and pony show).
"Shutting down the government" is a stunt designed to get people riled up - and it apparently works.
You're forgetting one little detail in this entire argument:
One side of the chamber has complete contempt for the idea of an administrative state. Not being able to pass a budget and shutting the whole thing down would be great in their minds.
Well, they think so, at least. My family's got a few of those people who would probably feel differently once the EPA stops being able to regulate the emissions of the coal-fired power plant that's upwind of their $600k+ home. But until that actually happens it gives one side of the chamber a "dysfunctional government entity enforcing job-killing regulations" to rage against.
Congress and the Constitution give wide latitude to the executive branch to administer laws.
Furthermore, this is a bad faith argument: there is no administrative state that these people would agree with when it comes to regulations that causes them to earn less money. None. There's a belief that any function provided by the administrative state can be resolved with markets. If you can't participate in those markets, that's on you. And by "those markets", I mean things like clean environmental resources (water, air, etc.), food, medicine, safety, and housing of a habitable standard.
> Congress and the Constitution give wide latitude to the executive branch to administer laws.
Depends on what you mean by "wide latitude". Article II says that the President shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed. But it doesn't say the President or any Executive branch official can make laws. And most of what Executive branch agencies do in our current administrative state is making laws. Sure, they're called "regulations" and everybody waves their hands and says Congress makes "laws" that give guidelines on how the "regulations" are written, but that's just playing with words. You can be fined or sent to jail for violating the "regulations", and that makes them laws. Which means they are supposed to be passed by Congress using the process given in the Constitution.
> this is a bad faith argument
I'm not sure what argument you are talking about here, but it's not mine. My argument is simply that the current administrative state is unconstitutional. That is not the same as saying our current administrative state makes bad laws--in fact I do think many of the laws it makes are bad, but that's not the argument I'm making here. The argument I'm making is that if as a democratic society we decide that the best way for our government to run is as an administrative state like the one we have now, we need to amend the Constitution to allow that. Otherwise we do not have a rule of law, because we're ignoring what the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, says. Claiming that we need these regulations because safety, environment, blah blah blah does not change that.
> Which means they are supposed to be passed by Congress using the process given in the Constitution.
And Congress passed laws granting those executive departments some latitude on what it is they are allowed to enforce. It'd be one thing if most of their regulations were widely overreaching, but "don't dump fertilizer in the Missouri River Basin so that we don't have mass die-offs of aquatic life" seems fairly reasonable.
> Otherwise we do not have a rule of law, because we're ignoring what the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, says. Claiming that we need these regulations because safety, environment, blah blah blah does not change that.
It's absolutely rule of law. The people elected Congress, Congress passed a law, people elected electors for the Presidency, who hired bureaucrats to carry out the law within reasonable latitude.
What isn't rule of law is when some company gets to roll into a working-class town, dump a ton of chemicals, make people empty their savings to treat chronic illnesses that said chemicals caused, and tell the victims to take a hike because the EPA no longer has any authority because of regulatory capture. That's the rule of market, and that gets messy. Really messy.
If you want people to take the law into their own hands, by all means, continue decaying the system that was set up because of a myopic view of some document written by a bunch of slaveholders.
> Congress passed laws granting those executive departments some latitude on what it is they are allowed to enforce
No, the current administrative state goes far beyond that. Executive branch agencies are writing "regulations", which are actually laws, directly, not just exercising discretion about how to enforce the laws that Congress writes.
> It'd be one thing if most of their regulations were widely overreaching, but "don't dump fertilizer in the Missouri River Basin so that we don't have mass die-offs of aquatic life" seems fairly reasonable.
If Congress thinks that's a reasonable law, it needs to write that law. It cannot Constitutionally delegate the power to write that law to an Executive Branch agency. The Constitution would need to be amended to allow Congress to do that, and it hasn't been.
> What isn't rule of law is when some company gets to roll into a working-class town, dump a ton of chemicals, make people empty their savings to treat chronic illnesses that said chemicals caused, and tell the victims to take a hike because the EPA no longer has any authority because of regulatory capture.
In other words, the government regulations you applaud, in addition to being unconstitutional, do not actually work. Yes, indeed regulatory capture is a thing--and it happens because we have ignored the Constitutional limitations on what laws Congress can pass and allowed legislative power to be transferred to unelected bureaucrats who are much easier to capture than elected representatives and whose activities are much harder for we the voters to control.
> If you want people to take the law into their own hands, by all means, continue decaying the system that was set up because of a myopic view of some document written by a bunch of slaveholders.
If you don't want to live under the US Constitution, go move to some other country. "Rule of law" means you can't just ignore laws you don't like. The Constitution, whether you like it or not, is the supreme law of the land here in the US, and it does not allow Congress to pass any law it likes; it puts restrictions on what laws Congress can pass. To change those restrictions the Constitution needs to be amended, as it already has been twenty-seven times--one of which was to abolish slavery.
But "works as designed" isn't the end of argument; things can be working exactly as the founding fathers expected (though only Scalia, with his powers of divination, could tell us for sure what they would think of today's world), and it can still be a bad thing. You advocate for better civics classes, but better classes would teach people to question things and act for the changes they see needed in today's world, not to accept a historically frozen government.
The disconnect with reality is people often find themselves inside "information bubbles" where it feels like everyone thinks the same policies need to be enacted. Then they are dumbfounded when the policy doesn't actually get passed. When this happens, it's easy to fall into the propaganda and believe "the other side" is actively trying to subvert the country/constitution and destroy everything.
Reality is there is not consensus for those policies. It's that simple.
I promise you, there aren't any congress critters that are actually trying to destroy the country. They are each doing what they believe is best, and what they were elected to do... even if personally we don't favor those viewpoints.
I'm sure Viktor Orban thinks he's doing what's best for Hungary, too. It doesn't really matter whether they think they're justified when their values are so alien that you can't reconcile your ideals with theirs. You may as well tell a sick patient that they're being unreasonable because the virus isn't actually a sentient being trying to destroy your body's cells, it's just programmed to reproduce like that.
Can we lay down the propaganda for a minute and actually debate using our brains? This ridiculous propaganda is super exhausting and very unstimulating.
I've been warned multiple times against participating in flamewars on HN, so I'll pass, thanks. Civil discourse has effectively been rendered impossible by the partisans in Congress and elsewhere that I'm referring to.
> Civil discourse has effectively been rendered impossible by the people I'm referring to
> The system wasn't designed to tolerate an entire party of saboteurs.
I'm missing something here, because it seems you are the flame war you speak ill of, and when I asked you to tone down the rhetoric you throw your hands up and say you're not going to participate in said flame war.
You are right though - it is impossible to have a productive conversation when one person is determined to only believe their flavor of propaganda and not find any common ground.
I said it elsewhere in thread: "Sit down with a friend that has the opposite political viewpoints and discuss some hard issues for an hour. There's a 0% chance the two sides don't find common ground..."
> But "works as designed" isn't the end of argument; things can be working exactly as the founding fathers expected (though only Scalia, with his powers of divination, could tell us for sure what they would think of today's world), and it can still be a bad thing.
But first things first-- one ought to have an overview of the specification for the form of government, why it was designed that way, and how it's been implemented over the past 200 years. The OP who saw gridlock as an unexpected and undesirable attribute of the federal budget process appears to not yet possess this knowledge.
I'd say knowing things is a recommended dependency for questioning them. Otherwise the changes you think you want to see might as well be chosen by a random number generator. (But then at least random() isn't subject to filter bubbles!)
> act for the changes they see needed in today's world
The Constitution provides a process for amending it, and that process has been used twenty-seven times. That is the proper process for "acting for changes" if you think they are needed.
> The Constitution provides a process for amending it, and that process has been used twenty-seven times. That is the proper process for "acting for changes" if you think they are needed.
That is the process for amending the Constitution, which neither is, nor should be, the only way to effect change. It is surely a ludicrous claim that our system of government has changed only 27 times. I doubt anyone even believes that the amendments record the 27 most consequential changes!
Further, there is absolutely no way that I, or any individual (including any individual in government), can get a Constitutional amendment passed alone, so either there are steps between individual action and amending the Constitution, or there might as well not be an amendment process.
> amending the Constitution, which neither is, nor should be, the only way to effect change
Sure, if you can "effect change" by following the processes described in the Constitution as it is, you don't have to amend it. But my point is that much, if not most, of what the US government currently does is not following the processes described in the Constitution as it is--those are just being ignored, and nobody even talks about having to amend the Constitution to, for example, allow Congress to delegate legislative power to Executive branch agencies.
If you are offended by this remark then you are exactly the person it was aimed for.
We need better civics lessons in schools. The evidence is prevalent right here in this thread. Too few people actually understand government - and that's a serious issue. An issue that enables the masses to be manipulated and controlled by political junkies. People need to be better educated on government in general.
No I think OP was pretty clear in what they actually meant and it wasn't what you said.
This current GOP led circus known as the 118th Congress is widely considered one of the most (if not THE most) unproductive, dysfunctional Congresses in history.
And when all they do is sit around and whine about how one side is "weaponizing" the government (ignoring the fact that the side in question is them) or Socialism this or "Biden bad", its really not hard to understand why.
Judging a legislature by how many bills it passes is like judging programming productivity by lines of code produced, and has the same issue that Edsger Dijkstra identified with the latter: it should be lines spent, not produced. "The current wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger."
>By one-sided political propaganda
Yea because things are only factual if they agree with your chosen team policies.
Metrics on how many bills this congress has passed by this point in term vs previous ones are not hard to find. But you'd just dismiss that as "political propaganda" because it disagrees with you.
The problem is that they are also not able to ram through popular policies that a majority of both liberals and conservatives in the general population are in favor of.
I am not sure why you're downvoted. I assume it's people who took offense at your last paragraph or who believe that the US Constitution is an antiquated document with no relevance to the troubles of today.
Ted Kennedy was dying of cancer at the time and couldn't come in to vote. Then he died and got replaced with a temporary Democratic replacement which didn't have that availability issue, then the special election occurred and a Republican took the seat.
False, they had 58 and two independents who usually cooperated with them. One of the 58 Democrats had also endorsed a Republican for president only a year earlier, so they were hardly a party loyalist.
I believe in the existence of consensus bridging representatives, and that means dropping party line stuff that will never gain consensus for a focus on things that will
This is the consequence of the living Constitution nonsense, where every day is a new day and it's interpreted according to the "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."
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People like new interpretations that give the outcome they like (Obergefell vs Hodges) but not the ones that don't.
So, net neutrality (and other policy) is going to be forever stuck in this loop of constant arguing over law that was written during the time of fax machines. With one court stopping it, another court reversing the stoppage, the next court reversing the reversing of the stoppage, another case happening with more clever lawyers and so the next court reverses the previous reverse, and then on appeal that reverse gets reversed, and then a random judge pulls out some wording from a 1807 law and reverses again, and this is basically going to be what counts as governance for the rest of my life.
EDIT: Mods, feel free to destroy this thread--I can't delete it anymore. I try to talk about the inability to resolve Net Neutrality and it just turns into another unproductive flame war. Sigh.