association-list

I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to remove the human ele­ment from pol­i­tics entirely. Imag­ine this as an alter­na­tive to cur­rently oper­at­ing systems:

• Every three or four months, people get a notice from the office of party reg­is­tra­tions. They can elect to stay with their cur­rent party or join a new one at this time. Not reg­is­ter­ing an opin­ion keeps you with your cur­rent party, but only for four or five con­sec­u­tive peri­ods. Then you’re moved into the unreg­is­tered cat­e­gory. Cur­rent run­ning tal­lies and pro­jec­tion data are always avail­able from the reg­is­tra­tions office.
• Every party is required to get some per­cent­age of sig­na­tures of its desired sphere of effec­tive­ness to count an an offi­cial party, per­haps 3 – 7%. Party per­cent­ages are refig­ured every other year, to allow laws with short-​​term costs but long-​​term ben­e­fits to not sink a government.
• Every party is required to reg­is­ter short, easily under­stood ver­sions of their planks, their over­ar­ch­ing mis­sions, and their posi­tions on the most salient issues of the day. This should have sharp length and com­plex­ity limits, and be stan­dard­ized by the reg­is­tra­tions office. These should be brows­able in the selec­tions pack­ets or web page.
• There is a uni­cam­eral ‘leg­is­la­ture’, com­posed of the lead­er­ship of all of the par­ties with more than the 3 – 7% of the vote above. The PM-​​equivalent pro­poses new laws, which are then ana­lyzed in a strictly for­mal­ized way and made avail­able for all to see. Part of the analy­sis must be a ren­der­ing of the bill into formal lan­guage and an analy­sis of its antic­i­pated bud­getary and social impacts. Amend­ments can be pro­posed by any party, and must be ger­mane to the matter under review.
• Each party has its per­cent­age of the reg­is­tered pop­u­la­tion to one sign­f­i­cant digit of ‘votes’. A simple major­ity passes and the law moves imme­di­ately into judi­cial review, then into law.
• Laws are struc­turally dic­tated by the party or coali­tion in power and the amend­ments thereto, but are writ­ten by a class of pro­fes­sion­als whose job it is to write laws and advise the politi­cians in a non-​​partisan manner about their construction.
• All majority-​​rules laws expire in 5 years. Each addi­tional 5 year term requires an addi­tional 5% of the vote. A law that is meant to be per­ma­nent must be passed as a change to the writ­ten con­sti­tu­tion, which should require a 60% leg­isla­tive vote, rat­i­fi­ca­tion by 60% of regional gov­ern­ing bodies, and per­haps a 60% bar pop­u­lar referendum.

This way we’re spared all of the lame pos­tur­ing and unpre­dictabil­ity of indi­vid­ual leg­is­la­tors who occa­sion­ally don’t vote for their par­ties. In the US, most of this stuff is an arti­fact of elec­toral pres­sures that make mul­ti­ple par­ties dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble. So instead of a more socially con­ser­v­a­tive Mid­west­ern Demo­c­ra­tic Party, you get Democ­rats like Nelson, who’d lose as too con­ser­v­a­tive in a Repub­li­can race on the east coast. I think that get­ting mul­ti­ple par­ties through voting reform is another way to get this, but mostly am propos­ing get­ting the people out because shit-​​stupid fac­tors like height and per­sonal attrac­tive­ness often swamp things like ide­ol­ogy, elec­torally. With­out all of the pos­tur­ing and drama, there would be less inter­est­ing news, but we’d get more respon­si­ble and account­able gov­er­nance by smarter people.

Just in case you’re a Cal­i­forn­ian and wanted to write her a letter, here’s the URL: http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe

Below the break is the letter I wrote. Feel free to borrow as much as you need:

Dear Sen­a­tor Feinstein,

In my morn­ing troll of the news, I was dis­turbed to notice report­ing which said that you had taken a posi­tion against reform of the fil­i­buster. As one of your con­stituents, I would urge you to recon­sider that stance. Already, the Senate is markedly unde­mo­c­ra­tic. The minor­ity obstruc­tion enabled by the fil­i­buster only makes the sit­u­a­tion worse.

Per­haps you’re think­ing strate­gi­cally, look­ing for­ward to the next time your party is in the minor­ity, but I believe this think­ing to be short-​​sighted. While it is true that an obstruct­ing minor­ity ben­e­fits from the fail­ures of the ruling party, in the longer term these fail­ures and com­pro­mises hurt the coun­try by obstruct­ing the true costs and ben­e­fits of the poli­cies favored by each party.

Apart from strate­gic con­cerns, there is the real harm that the fil­i­buster causes and con­tin­ues to cause, each and every day. In the side­bar of the page where I am writ­ing this letter, there is a link to your state­ment about stop­ping global warm­ing, pos­si­bly the most impor­tant issue of our time. Yet the fil­i­buster, and prac­ti­cally noth­ing else, has stopped the Senate from even con­sid­er­ing an effec­tive bill to com­ple­ment the bill passed by the house last year.

Once again, I urge you to recon­sider your stance and to raise your voice in sup­port of return­ing the Senate to its tra­di­tion of major­ity rule.

Sin­cerely,
< My name >
< The place in Cal­i­for­nia I live >