Posted on 07/05/2011 10:11:00 AM PDT by danielmryan
The last time I visited my congressman (when I was 12 years old), he was both drunk and senile and I couldn’t understand a word he said. His administrative assistant had to translate everything he said. And then he got re-elected four more times before finally dying. Did he really represent my interests?
I’m the most apolitical person I know. But I do like to think of things that can improve the country. Let’s forget July 4th for a second, which was a war fought mainly between the values of the East India Company and the values of colonial tea smugglers that cost the lives of the children of 35,000 mothers. Note we tried to invade Canada twice to get them to help us but they would have none of it. Now they are our biggest supplier of oil. Go Canada!
Most importantly, lets not view the Constitution as gospel. Countries, people, systems, technology evolves. As they do, its important to see what from the past is good and what can be discarded.
I’m talking about the Legislative Branch in our system of checks and balances. It costs us billions a year, its fully corrupt, and is taking perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars out of our economy through inefficient allocations.
Time to Replace the Legislative Branch with Mass Internet Voting on the Issues
But don’t we need it? Don’t we need to Check the President? Of course! So lets YOU AND I do it!
I’m not going to rant. I hate blogger rants. So here it is:
1) The Founders, who were all male, white, landowners, didn’t trust the servants. Several were on record saying the servants (and certainly not women or slaves) should not vote since their votes would just go the way of the landowner. (Noted HBO star, John Adams said, “…men who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own”.) So they wanted to set up a system where even if the masses were against an issue, the landowners could force it through. Hence, Congress, since it was almost certain that a landowner (at that time) would have the means, money, and wherewithal to be elected (it’s still true).
2) Congress was needed because information was slow to travel. Everyone had to be gathered in Washington DC to communicate with each other (there were no phones, telegraph, or Internet then) to get the information about laws that needed to be passed and then to vote. This is obviously no longer necessary since we now have the Internet.
3) It wasn’t until 1919 that people were even allowed to vote for their Senators (Senators were selected by state legislatures) so half of the legislative branch was two levels removed from the masses until recently anyway, ,which again shows the original inclinations of the Founding Fathers.
So what should we do:
1) Get rid of the whole thing. Shut down Capitol Hill and make it a museum. Get rid of Congress and replace it by a true democracy. In a democracy we each have a vote and get to vote on the issues important to us.
2) Every single citizen should have the right to directly vote on laws via the internet. Only 19% of Congress admitted reading the healthcare bill last year. Which is probably why the courts keep overturning parts of it and its hard to implement. So Congress is probably even less informed then the masses. Get all the information online. We’ll vote directly from our homes, thank you. No help necessary by our Senators.
3) How would laws get introduced? Most major legislation is introduced by the President anyway in his State of the Union address and then is put together by whoever his stooges are in Congress. Now people can submit laws based on a Digg-like system and the laws that are voted to the top are the ones we’ll vote on. Chances are the President’s suggestions would still rise to the top but instead of being voted on by a basket of his friends, it would be voted on by “We the People”. In most cases, we don’t really need new laws. The first law passed in 2011 was the “Polar Bear Delisting Act” that took polar bears off the endangered species list? Do you really need to spend billions of infrastructure to get that law on the table and passed.
4) The President and Supreme Court are still there to provide checks and balances on anything outrageous. But my guess is this would get millions of people more involved in the political system than are currently involved.
5) The costs of lobbying would go up astronomically. You no longer can just buy dinner and a prostitute for your local congressman to corrupt him. Now you’d have to spend tens of billions on TV and newspaper advertising/manipulation to convince the masses of a law. Would probably save those industries from extinction.
6) The House & Senate costs tens of billions to maintain and they can hardly be considered to represent us anymore in an information age where access to all information on laws and bills are at our fingertips anyway. The legislative branch should be made up of you and me, not the incumbents that get elected year after year automagically.
7) No more earmarks. No more deals for “bridges to nowhere” in exchange for “highways to hell”. This will save billions in inefficiently allocated capital.
How much fun would this be? We’d all get to really vote. We don’t currently live in a democracy, by definition. We live in a republic where we chose others to represent us on important issues....
I'm not quick when it comes to critical thinking, but it did occur to me that this proposal would make a mess of the Bill of Rights. What's he's advocating is making the rights and duties of Congress into a right of the people. Makes the First Amendment difficult to parse, doesn't it? Not to mention the Ninth and the Tenth.
One of his selling points is that it would be more difficult and expensive to lobby, which demonstrates that he knows nothing of the history of Tammany Hall. Or, Website promotion services offered by the little people for the little people...like this item. Think of how easy it would be for the purveyor of that ware to offer legislation-bumping services. ["See your bill bumped to the top! 100% American bumpers!"]
Let's assume that laws [passed and therefore repealable by?...] make it impossible to game the system and make it much more difficult to get a bill introduced to the electorate. What about a bill of impeachment? Aside from the fact that the Senate is supposed to hold a trial of the President, which would be impossible under direct democracy, how would future Presidents act if impeachment were far more difficult to implement? How would the present President act after being "liberated"?
I'm not going to go into mob rule, as that part's easy to see. To be honest, he's completely unaware of how the potentiality for mob rule will bite him and his friends right in the arse. Try reading the rest of his post and singling out the opinions that could be easily spun as "offensive to the people." The First Amendment would be bent just like the Fifth already has.
True Confession: High-tech direct democracy was a neat-o idea when BBSs were the rage. I first heard of it from a fellow member of the U. of Toronto Investment Club twenty years ago. Like the young students that we were, both he and I thought it was a great idea....
Then he should stick to discussing subjects with which he's at least somewhat familiar. ....whatever they are. Perhaps reality TV voting.
“Time to Replace the Legislative Branch with Mass Internet Voting on the Issues”
Would make those few hackers that would control everything under that plan very happy.
I read some of his crap. He’s a typical “I’m smarter than you” leftie who makes (and loses) money shuffling papers. He looks like all the “smart-ass little Jewish friend” characters on sitcoms (Seinfeld, Raymond, etc.), and apparently has the same personality.
I'm not going to go into mob rule, as that part's easy to see.
But that is really the point. The Founding Fathers were educated in the history of democracies. They knew the dangers of mob rule. This jackass knows nothing about human nature.
The guy is an dork. The 17th Amendment is a large part of how we got to this poor level of government. Taking the staes out of the law making process has allowed the feds to steal more and more power and control every year.
You may need to apologize to the J_A community. Considering the stream-of-conciousness blather, he is a LOT dumber that J_A
Surprisingly. He's a gamesman at heart, but he didn't put any thought into how a political gamesman would work that system.
This guy wants mob rule but we already have “Mob” rule, Chicago style.
I say we go back to the original founding fathers vision. State legislators appointing Senators and voters being limited to landowners.
We don’t currently live in a democracy,..The only thing that made sense to me.
The War of Independence was largely the result of the Colonies wanting to expand their frontiers westward, and the Crown, which was expected to protect them from the French and the Indians, not wishing to bear the extra cost of doing that on a larger scale. The Crown was short of cash as it was standing against the French in Europe.
I think there were a couple of reasons. Basically the colonists were conservative in the sense that they had to retain an English identity in a non-English context. And yet the colonists were self-selected for misfits in England, that's why they left in the first place. And then there is the consideration that, as you say, America was a lot more country than Great Britain, but with a lot fewer people. IOW, it was a startup with huge growth potential on track to eclipse Great Britain economically and ultimately, therefore, militarily. In the 1770s that was half a century in the future - but eventually Great Britain was fated to be the "tail wagging the dog."A book about the War of 1812 made the point that the Americans blundered by declaring that war - the statesmanlike approach would have been to absorb the British abuse for one more decade. After that, the shoe would be on the other foot since Britain would be in no position to defend Canada against the Americans any time after 1820. The census numbers on the youth population in America had already baked that outcome into the cake by 1812. Statesmanship would, in 1812, have been to make sure the British ambassador knew that the census numbers were real, and that the time to start mending fences with America was before more American boys grew up dreaming of marching on Canada.
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