And have been since the '80s
I had to think about that But seems about right. Thinking about it don’t more have the democrats really given or clarified and questions on rights? Seems like most rights issues are solved at the courts. So Supreme Court could take away 100 years of progress if they wanted to. Go as far back as reinstate separate but equal and Jim Crow laws.
Problem is? It's impossible to be a bleeding-heart neoliberal. Things the Democrats have done since Kennedy: - Civil Rights Act of 1964. Cost LBJ the presidency, cost the Democrats the South ever since. - Watergate hearings. Cost Democrats Iran, which ultimately cost Carter the presidency. - Robert Bork. Created Mitch McConnell, cost the Democrats concealed weapons laws, roe v wade and government bureaucracies in one fucking weekend. - Obamacare. Cost the house and senate. I would argue that Nixon blowing up Breton Woods crushed British and American labor, created trickle-down economics and nudged the Gini Coefficient on a trajectory towards feudalism. The Democrats opted to be the "party of civil rights" in the '60s and then utterly failed to do anything with it for sixty goddamn years.
This is the vicious cycle. Liberals use the courts to expand rights, so conservatives do everything they can to stack the judiciary against the liberals. Congress can fix a lot of these problems summarily, but they won’t, because they lack courage to make choices. It’s much easier to vote that air should be clean and then delegate the mechanism of how to clean the air than it is to craft a meaningful law that will inevitably piss off some constituents.
Liberals use culture to expand rights. Culture always belongs to the liberals. That's why every judiciary in every country everywhere is more conservative than the culture: it's a conservative backstop and always has been. The problem is that you can't run for congress without spending half a million dollars and you're going to earn a salary of $174k a year for two years while you fundraise half a million dollars to protect your right to earn $174k a year. The democrats don't even hide it anymore. Where's my dead horse? There are 435 representatives. Electing them cost $1.13b. Limit a representative to 60,000 constituents and suddenly there's 5500 of them. If the funding doesn't change? That's a $20k investment for a $174k job. Does that change the demographic any?
Can we also reduce the compensation to something like $90k/year? It shouldn't be almost 3x the median U.S. salary. Maybe that would further help attract people who see it as a public duty instead of folks looking to profit. I know it's a demanding job, though, or it should be, so I dunno. It's actually not much of a concern, in terms of costing the taxpayer. You could fund 5,500 reps at $175k/year for less than a billion a year, which is peanuts, in the grand scheme of things, considering the benefits of expanding the House. Abolish or at least reform the Senate, end the electoral college system, and institute an impartial algorithm to handle re-districting. I liked mk's idea about placing limits on the ratio of district perimeter to district area. Invite international oversight in making the U.S. objectively more democratic (not that American exceptionalism would ever allow for that). We can dream, right?
Although Yang has done/said some kinda boob-ish stuff in more recent years, he did have some interesting ideas. And he wanted to institute term limits, I'm guessing? Is there something about banning former politicians from the labor pool intended to target revolving-door-style corruption, or is it solely to offset the negative implications (at a personal level) of instituting term limits?
I think he launched a third party because the Democrats refused to take him seriously. I don't think it was the right move. He was probably four years behind Pete Buttigieg, now I'm not so sure. Yang didn't have any problems with career politicians. He just wanted that career to be their career. His argument was that if you made the job itself pay enough that people wanted to stay in it, and that if the retirement was cushy enough that they were not permitted to lobby at all afterwards (I misspoke - he didn't require them to never work again, he wanted them to never be able to register as a lobbyist), you would get more "pure" politicians and fewer people leveraging the revolving door. I've seen term limits come up for forty years. I've yet to see a legitimate mechanism whereby term limits could be instituted. Shit's obviously broken but even if term limits did fix it, I don't know where we'd buy the glue.
It is. That's the whole point. You don't spend $500k to get a $175k job, you spend $500k to get on the board of directors of Dropbox and to end up at a sweet, sweet K-street lobbying firm. Which is utterly ineffective if you cease to be the representative from Dallas and instead become the representative from 87629.
100% correct. Yes, we absolutely need to get lobbying money of politics, and you'd think it'd be a bipartisan thing, but notsomuch. Expanding the House would also help with the lobbying problem. It would complicate the logistics and reduce the amount given to each politician, making them less betrothed to lobbying interests, generally. Unless companies spent about 10x what their current lobbying budgets are. Some might? The idea of this SCOTUS re-interpreting the Citizen's United ruling is hilarious though. sobbing intensifies I know you know all this, but for posterity. People do apparently lurk.