169
Congress is getting less productive
(www.reuters.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
169 points (98.8% liked)
News
23267 readers
3297 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
If Congress isn't doing its job as a whole, the voters will vote out their individual Congressman, even if they're not the cause. If you know you're gonna lose your job because your coworker is fucking up you're gonna police them. If things get bad enough the entire Congress could be replaced for incompetence.
Voting transparency also allows those backroom deals, but this time the Congressman can show that they did what they were bribed to do. So even if a vote fails the person giving the bribe got what they paid for. Or, to put it another way, are you really gonna try to bribe someone if you can't verify that they're going to do what you paid them to do?
If voters want to be informed of their Congressman's positions, they can look at the records of debates and committee meetings. Votes are not the only way to know if your representative is doing their job.
These are the same reasons we have blind voting as individuals - so that voters can't be intimidated or paid to vote a certain way. I think Congress would work better if they went back to anonymous votes.
I think getting Congress back to anonymous voting is a far more achievable goal, and might actually help with that.
Makes sense. It's a shame when these should be fundamental principals and accountability of the person's elected.
The concern for me is there would be those that act without conscience or care, the 'wreckers' that don't have any current policy or engage in rational debate, they're in plain sight already today and not being held to account?
I think the reason they're not held to account is because everyone else can just point to that individual and say it's not their fault. But with anonymous voting, acts of Congress would be blamed on the entire Congress, and would incentivize Congressmen to police themselves lest they lose their jobs along with the at-fault party.
Also, there's a lot of other bad behavior that individual Congressman can engage in that would be firmly pinned on that individual. Their words in committee or on the floor, would still be available, and their voters could vote them out on that.
Down-under, we have some other mechanisms to try to preserve democracy:
Mandatory voting and preferential voting. This provides opportunities for third parties and independents who engage with voters.
Ethics Committees, used at state levels but pushes for a Federal Ethics Committee. "They allow Parliament to scrutinise the Executive more effectively, making it more responsible to the people"
Caps on political donations is another measure, supported by progressives but not yet by the conservatives.
Canada has similar safeguards, except we allowed third-party political funding into the mix a few years back (similar to the American super pacs) ... which was snuck in under the radar so many Canadians are unaware of it.
I am still pissed about that crap migrating up here.