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There are too many career politicians. People who would struggle to hold down a position in any other profession.
They join a party, learn how to get nominated and elected at college/university, find themselves in office the just grift until they die.
Really need some term limits and total service years. Pick your numbers, something but like 6 for congress, 4 for Governor, 20 max in public office.
Also their salary is based on their represented area. For a Congress representative, the national average is their base pay. If the area they represent is below average, a 30% of the difference is deducted. If it's above average, 30% of the difference is added.
After 1 year, the percentage increases by 10 every year you're in office.
So by year 6 if your doing a shit job your pay will be -90% the difference. If the national average is 50k, and your area is at 20k, the difference is 30k, 90% of that is 27K, so your salary is 50k-27k, which is 23K.
I'll do you one further - their pay is no more than 3x the minimum unemployment benefit. This means maximum 3x the minimum wage, minus whatever unemployment doesn't normally pay out.
(Federal for federal congress and executives, state for state congress and governors, etc.).
Their healthcare plan must be basic medicare (or their district's minimum socially provided healthcare plan, if it covers more and they are not federal)
They must divulge past 5 years of tax returns to be on the ballot, and divest all stocks and blind-trust all assets to take office. Failure to do so defaults ownership of the illegally held asset(s) to the Treasury. No statute of limitations.
Merge medicaid into medicare and provide it universally for free, and wow, a whole lot of problems disappear like magic. It's a pipe dream, and still nowhere near enough to fix everything, but the transformation would be dramatic.
If their lives genuinely, directly depended on the quality of the social safety net, and their healthcare was no better than the minimum provided to everyone, a lot of "impossible" and "unaffordable" initiatives would get passed overnight.
I firmly believe, for every politician, when they reach a certain level, there is a period of discovery. I'd bet money even the ones who join politics with good intentions get to a point in their political career where there are absolutely no good choices .
I know this because I live it in my own life. For the politician, though, they have to settle into it, reject it and defect, or gamble. A good politician, one people mostly admire, is probably just a gambler that won the jackpot. They were in the right place at the right time and pulled the right lever. A bad politician is someone we see as bad only because we see them constantly making safe bets. Like a drunk who spends all day at the horses they bet the 2:1s and try to beat the house.
Its crazy to me that logic, reason, and decency arent very good political tools. They cant sway the masses. They always need to be propped up by some underlying moral structure that no one ever agrees on.
Anyway...
could we have a bare minimum tho? like, a civics test, because I'm really getting the impression these conservative fucks don't understand the basics. At all. And when you only have vague knowledge of what's right and wrong, allowing tyranny to slip by is just a lil' ooopsie. But if we test incoming pols for the basics, when they violate their oaths to the constitution they can then be held accountable.
Now it's just open season for any moron to come bumbling through the senate/house at state or federal level and claim they interpreted things differently while grifting the fuck out of what few freedoms remain.
Conservatives are the most morally bankrupt of them all. Don't let them trick you into believing they dont know civics. They know, and actively subvert it. At the end of the day regressives regress all the way down to authoritarians. Authoritarians derive morality from within themselves. So its basically Calvin ball but they want you to think its liberty.
well, your bitch mcconnels and flimsey grahams do, fo sho... your fetal-alcoholism green and handjob boeberts were more what I was thinking for the basics civics tests...
Alright, thats true.
depressingly, yep.
I think what concept you're trying to point at is compromise.
At a political level, compromising is never fun. "a good compromise is one where neither party is happy" and all that.
Compromise is fine. Im talking about gridlock.
If you think they are equivalent, thats fine. I dont agree.
I wonder if we need a multicameral legislature with several smaller bodies segregated by purpose.
Have a house of politicians, career folks who do things like treaties and appointment of diplomats, that sort of thing. This probably needs to be no term limit or lifetime appointment because the purpose here is to be a member of the boy's club, you're the guy the chancellor of Germany has a rapport with. If you're caught taking bribes, foreign or domestic, your death will be humiliating and uncomfortable.
Have a house of professionals, open only to doctors, engineers, folks like that. This body handles industry regulation, this is where anything from highway construction to food and drug laws to aviation regulations will be written. I would be tempted to eliminate voting here and make it like jury duty. If you've got a professional degree or license, (in fact I'm favoring licenses; I don't care if you have a medical degree, I want a license to practice medicine. I don't care if you've got an AeroSci degree, I want an airline transport pilot certificate, I don't care if you have an engineering degree, I want a certified PE) you might be called to serve a term. It might be that this year the body is made of ALL medical doctors as health, wellness and medicine related laws are reviewed and updated, then next year it's all civil engineers and they review highway and building codes, etc. Maybe mixed sessions happen for things like occupational safety where industrial engineers and medical doctors both weigh in. May also need to include folks with technical certifications like nurses, A&P mechanics, folks like that. This body doesn't touch social issues, only things like standards for mineral content in municipal water supplies and testing standards for fall arrest gear.
Have a house of businessmen, who are given fake microphones and staff that pretends to do what they're told, with actors making fake news broadcasts that make them think they're policies are enacted. I think a core problem with democracies in the modern day is they don't feature such dummy loads, so we shall install such a thing.
A house of lawyers whose job it is to maintain things like contract law.
What else am I missing?
what you're describing is known as "expert agencies". non-elected experts work together to suggest courses of action for the government on their assigned topic. since they are not elected, they can not make decisions, but they can draft bills for parliament to vote on. hey also do studies on request of other branches.
you may have heard of some of these agencies, like the FDA, EPA, CDC...
Yeah, the thing is I want to remove the possibility for the likes of Ted Cruz to have a say in anything technical.