2007-02-06
How The House Works and How to Fix It
This week's "This American Life" episode was titled "Houses of Ill Repute." They covered an accidental brothel/drug house, an apartment complex that was a haven for post bar-scene promiscuity for gay men and the United State House of Representatives. I'm focusing n the last house.
The story focused on the power breakdown between the majority and minority parties. I was amazed, shocked and then really pissed off. I've had more involved, fair debates with my 7 year old child. The complete abuse of the majority was appalling. Chairmen turning their back on speakers to chat with their buddies, talking over presenters, pushing rules to the absolute extremes. And it is so partisan.
Shamefully, the new Democratic majority is doing the same crap. And while idealistically I disagree, it serves the Republicans right. Hearing the manner of people from each party change when their position of power changed is phenomenal! Just night and day. The Democrats said that after their "first hundred hours" push they would work to instill more fairness. I sure hope so.
None of them focused on the wishes of their constituents. Just lots of party pandering. All of this time and energy completely wasted on making friends in the house and sticking with the gang. It just makes me sick.
So I've come up with some things that would help out:
Make all legislation require a supermajority (two-thirds). I think it would be very hard to do without balance to the warring parties. Anyway, if two-thirds of the country has representatives of one party, that party must be doing something right
All bills should be single issue. Cut the crap out, the useless addendums, ear marks, angenda pushing cruft. This does nothing but waste time and money and allows amazing abuses of power.
Set up a uniform polling system for all representatives. I know that many will not go through the trouble to set up a system to hear from their constituency. Personally, an online system would be preferable to me. Just a way for the people to weigh in. Then we can have some hard numbers on how representative they really are.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
