dethBlog

If I were President: Part 1

So I've been doing some navel-gazing, trying to understand who I am. And so I got caught up in some nonsensical hypothetical political platform that I'd want to run on. So if I look back on this in 10 years, I might be able to steal some of my ideas to remind myself who I am and what I stand for and believe in.

I actually have a lot of wacky ideas, but I'll be focusing on political reform in this post. I'll try and cover domestic and international policies some time later (I hope).

Electoral Reform

This will probably never happen, because the powers that be have an investment in the broken system we have. So naturally, I want to blow it up.

Uncapped House of Representatives with Proportional Representation

So, if you didn't know this, once upon a time, the House of Representatives was designed to keep growing with the population of the United States. But in 1929 Congress decided, enough was enough, and they'd cap the size of the House.

The reason for this is that shifting demographics led to more representatives for urban voters which in turn would dilute the rural votes.

But let's be real here. Urban centers make up the bulk of economic power in America. It does make sense that they should have more representation.

The current system is broken because a single Representative needs to now represent nearly a million people (closer to 700k), which ends up diluting everyone's vote, making it also harder to hold Congressmen responsible for their actions. Reducing the number of people a Representative represents would make it more likely for them to be voted out.

Overall it'd balance the political landscape making the House demographically and politically more aligned with the will of the people.

Proportional Representation

You know what, screw the two party system. If we really want to break the power structures and make it so the third parties can bring actual new ideas and change, we need to have a platform that recognizes the political parties are a thing, and if the Green Party or Libertarians or whatever, rather than being lumped in with the two party system to simply exist, they can stand on their own.

Congress still needs to build some coalitions to get Bills to pass, but now it's a real debate and not just Red vs Blue.

Ranked Choice Voting

This is already trending. The idea is the bureaucracy of runoff elections is time consuming and expensive, so let's just do away with that and make a priority queue to determine the winners.

It won't kill the two party system, but it will at least make more moderate candidates, which will be less toxically polarizing and hopefully lead to better and quicker political actions to address modern problems.

You know what sucks. Gerrymandering. So you know how to make it impossible? Popular vote. Can't gerrymander if there ain't no borders. Likewise, it's more fair. One vote for one voter. All votes are treated equally.

You might have also noticed a small caveat, it's for Statewide or National Races, like Congress or the Governorship.

Some politics does need to stay local. But for the big stuff. Everyone's vote should matter the same.

Independent Redistricting Commissions For Local/District Level Races

Well, well, well. If it isn't my old friend, districting. If we need to keep it for some races, then it should not be done by politicians that have an incentive to make maps to keep themselves in power while destroying the representation of other groups.

I feel like this is already not unpopular, I'd like to think in the far future when I want to really run, this will be a non-issue. But for now, I'm listing it to revisit this idea if it's not the natural outcome.

Campaign Finance Reform

Get dark money out of politics. Money should be able to be traced back to the person or interest group funding it. Not hidden in layers of misdirecting shell corporations. If you are willing to spend money on an unpopular political platform, have the balls to stand behind it.

Also, to avoid plutocracy, we should probably look at capping or even removing money from politics, and turn it into a debate of ideologies and not have the results tied to who has the most money.

Now thanks to our very wise Supreme Court, they've ruled that money is speech with Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010). But there is nothing in the constitution or law that says money is speech, this is purely a judicial invention. It could easily be overturned like Roe v. Wade.

And I'm not trying to argue that money is inherently evil in politics, but it does distort political debate. If one side can saturate the airwaves and billboards, it becomes a brand, not a political stance. It actively degrades public discourse because the trade offs are not able to be actually discussed.

It's also a huge waste of money, as it arguably doesn't lead to actual productivity. Politicians have to waste 30% to 50% of their time begging for donations, we create a political apparatus that sees no results from its effort, and we get a bunch of useless bumper stickers that in a few months have no meaning.

We can get around some of this with a democracy voucher system. The idea is that everyone gets a small fund allocation that they can direct to causes of their choice. We also remove private money from politics and make it entirely publicly funded. This way politicians spend more time governing, debating, and meeting constituents, rather than fundraising.

Now since judicial ruling has decided that money is speech we do need to actually amend the Constitution to fix this problem, and explicitly say money is not speech, corporations are not people, and every citizen has an equal political voice. A radical concept I'm sure.

Congressional Accountability

The US Congress has seen a sharp decline in productivity. Fewer bills passed, more gridlock, more shutdowns, less bipartisan collaboration. We obviously need real political reform to actually make congress more productive and actually govern and do their job so here are some mechanisms to help with that.

No Confidence: Emergency Election If Congress Reaches Deadlock

We NEED a mechanism to punish Congress when they can't do their job. We shouldn't just accept that votes can be weaponized to hold bipartisan policies from being passed to artificially create a political talking point. We should not accept that government shutdowns are inevitable.

If Congress cannot do their job, they need to be removed from office and not be allowed to run again, maybe forever, but at least for the immediate emergency election to replace everyone.

This is the "nuclear option,", if you truly cannot compromise to do your job, the American people shouldn't put up with deadlock and we should just get better representatives that actually can govern to replace them.

Minimum Duties Performed Per Month Requirement Or No Confidence Is Triggered

We need a reasonable time to confirm appointments, judges, cabinet positions, etc. What a reasonable time is, I still need to work out and probably debate a bit. But it makes sense, Congress's job is to confirm people, and if they cannot, they should be punished for it.

Likewise, we need to make Congress actually govern and pass laws. So they should pass a minimum number of bills every month or maybe week. The large omnibus bills are absolutely asinine, because there is no way members of Congress can read the entire bill to know what they're voting for. And a lot of things are just common sense and bipartisan, it doesn't make sense for both sides to agree on a policy but delay it until we get large omnibus bills to pass it.

Government just straight up needs to be more agile. Smaller, quicker, and more experimental bills need to be able to be tested to help inform larger policies. So having a mandate for Congress to steadily pass bills so they can keep their job makes sense to me.

Term limits

No more than two consecutive terms, with a mandatory 1 term break before returning.

It gives a break for politicians to return to their home states and live among their constituents to help inform their worldview and shape policy. The idea is also to break the incumbent advantage and allow for fresh new ideas to be propagated into politics while also not destroying institutional knowledge.

I also think it might make more interesting races where two incumbents might go head to head.

Lifetime Cap On Total Terms

I'm not clear what would be a good limit. Maybe 10? That's like over 60 years. That's like a long ass time to be in politics. It's not like they can't be in politics anymore, they can still run in local races at the state level or run for President or something. But you know, there should probably be an end date for being in Congress other than death.

Executive Reform

The idea is to dismantle the Unified Executive Theory that has clearly done a lot of harm to American politics.

Dual Presidency

What if we didn't have one President, but two Presidents?

So I come from a Pair Programming background, and honestly two people working on a problem, that can debate the problem in real time often come up with a stronger solution. Also helps keep in check bad behavior.

We technically already elect two people to the Presidency. The President and the Vice President. But, what if we roll back things a bit. So the Founding Fathers, in their odd wisdom, intended for the runner up to be the Vice President.

What if we go back to this style? With a caveat. So the problem is that Jefferson spent his entire Vice Presidency undermining Adams. And obviously having an actively hostile executive branch fighting itself is not exactly going to lead to a productive government. So dual POTUSes need consequences for not getting along.

No Confidence Deadlock

We need a No Confidence mechanism, just like for Congress, that ejects both Presidents and either leads to the next line of succession or an emergency vote.

The problem is that the minority party feels like they have no power, but if we do give them some say, we can probably avoid the hyper polarization that we currently see.

Purely hypothetically, if we had a Obama/Romney or Obama/McCain, we’d likely have had a highly functional government and without the backlash that led to Trump and the obvious chaos that we are currently putting up with.

The point is if we want a functioning government and avoid partisan politics, we need to give both sides representation with actual compromise and a way to punish both sides.

Constrain Pardon Power

This seems pretty obvious. President should not be able to pardon themselves and people closest to them. It creates a bunch of bad incentives for bad behavior.

Enforce War Powers Act

We literally have a law that is meant to prevent the President from getting us into pointless wars. It seems obvious to just enforce it.

Expert Agency Heads Have Expanded Autonomous Authority In Emergencies

To prevent the Executive from acting too slow in the case that the Dual Presidency is unable to respond swiftly to emergencies (which I find impossible to believe to be the case, as emergencies are pretty bipartisan), we'll empower heads of agencies to be able to act with authority to address crises.

Representation

Citizen Assemblies

For complex or politically toxic issues, like rural/urban divide problems or culture wars, we create Citizen Assemblies, a lottery to draft random citizens, who probably will be more moderate and willing to see past politics to make actual policies and debate and compromise for politicians who are politically too cowardly to take a stance.

This way, the Citizen Assemblies can make a policy recommendation and the politicians defer to the Assembly for policy and can avoid taking heat for their own cowardice to make a decision.

As a real world example, Ireland broke a decades-long deadlock on abortion with a Citizen Assembly in 2018. It is held as a successful example of deliberative democracy and shows that the public's views are more progressive than political consensus.

Conclusion

This is the start of a few wild political ideas I have. The system we currently have is clearly fucking broken, and the fact that we see reverse incentives to push the polarization over finding compromise does show that we need some drastic political reform in the USA.

I mean, I guess we could also solve this problem with a Civil War 2, but let's be honest, sequels are so derivative and we won't even be fighting over anything as meaningful as slavery. We'd just look like a bunch of idiots in the history books if we don't do something to prevent the obvious bloodshed.