Tag: ideas

Eight Ideas for Reform

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Kyle Mathews shares eight steps he believes would produce a more functional congress at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. It is an interesting list including ideas I’ve heard before and a few new ideas. There is also some good discussion in the comments. I thought it would be worth sharing here in the order that he presented the ideas.

Resolve the electoral status of D.C.

I’ve made my position on this issue clear in the past. Kyle agrees with me that it is important and that the current legislation is the wrong route.

Limit campaign contributions to those who will be represented in the election.

Again, I’ve already shared my thoughts on that (multiple times) and I agree with this idea. I like the term Kyle uses – electoral carpetbaggery.

Water down the filibuster.

This is one I don’t think I have written about. I agree that the filibuster is overused but I also agree with one of the comments which said that placing a time-limit on filibusters would effectively remove them completely. As one who believes that the filibuster mechanism provides an important check on the system I think I would rather put up with its overuse, than do away with it entirely.

Eliminate anonymous holds.

I had not considered this before either, but as a believer in transparency and accountability I agree that holds should not be anonymous. If I put a hold on a bill I should be willing to admit it and explain my reasons.

Increase the size of both houses.

Once again, I have made my position on this quite clear, and once again I agree. I had never considered increasing the size of the Senate, but the way that he presents it – three senators per state – would be workable and would still allow the Senate to function in the same capacity that it was originally designed to function. I especially like the way the three senators per state idea would give each state a chance to bring a fresh face to the Senate in each cycle.

Increase the capacity and role of the Congressional Research Service.

This was another idea that was new to me, but it sounds like a good one. One comment argues that members of congress only use the CBO information if it benefits them. That argument is fairly weak because whatever hurts one side of the debate will benefit the other so the information will almost always be used. More information is almost never a bad thing for the governing process.

Restructure the committee system.

This is another idea I have never addressed, but I agree that the committee system is broken. Committees tend to turn committee members into industry insiders (if they weren’t already) and thus minimize any objectivity that should exist between government and industry. One other idea I once heard related to this was random committee assignments and regular rotation. I think there are lots of ways the committee system could be altered and most of them would be improvements over the current system.

Make all elections non-partisan.

Once upon a time I might have agreed with this, but I now believe that this would actually make it more difficult for voters to get truly informed about candidates and would further discourage voter participation in the political system. I could be wrong about that, but that is what I would expect to happen.

Out of the eight ideas I had addressed three directly in the past and I agree with six of the ideas in principle – some details would still need to be worked out on some of those. If I had to choose all or nothing I think that making all eight reforms would be a positive change overall in our system despite the drawbacks of the two ideas that I disagree with.

Tags change congress, civic participation, connections, ideas, thoughts, voting

General

Hit Them Where it Hurts

[quote]As Congress finds new and ever more inventive ways to spend money (both real money and imaginary money) more and more voters are waking up to find themselves becoming fiscal conservatives. First off, I must say that there are not nearly enough of us among the voters and secondly I feel compelled to add that we would be in a much better position to be taken seriously if there had been many more converts to the cause while Bush was still in office.

Earlier this week a friend of mine asked for my thoughts on an idea he had to slow and/or reverse the growth in government spending. (I feel compelled to state that said friend was awake to this issue well before Obama was elected – lest anyone mistakenly think that he just woke up to this in the last week.) His idea consists of two parts and boils down to this:

Have states set the wages for their Congressional delegation.

Have each member of Congress pay for 0.00001% of the federal budget out of their own paychecks. (That’s one out of 10 Million dollars for each member of Congress.)

My initial response was to point out the fact that it would take a Constitutional amendment to make the first part legal due to the provisions of Article I Section 6 that their salaries be paid out of the U.S. treasury (not that state money is not already mostly from the U.S. Treasury).

After thinking about the proposal more I recognize that it only works if both parts are enacted because if only the second portion is enacted it would only take about 30 minutes for the House to pass emergency legislation (or simply attach it to that proposal if they want to be efficient) in which the calculation for Congressional salaries is changed from it’s current “$170,000 plus an automatic annual cost of living increase” to “0.000012% of that year’s annual budget plus $169,999.99 plus an automatic annual cost of living increase.”

The real kernel of the idea was to hit Congress in the wallet – where it hurts – for the egregious budgets they pass from year to year like kidney stones in the national economy. For myself I have long believed that we should make congress feel the pain of their overspending by having them be responsible for a portion of their deficit spending – say 3 times whatever portion of their budget is financed by deficits. (In other words, if 15% of the budget is deficit spending then members of Congress lose 45% of their salaries – and probably the same portion of their budget for staffers etc. for the year – to help offset their budget.) This only works if there are no exceptions (“oops, we had an emergency and had to overspend – but our regular spending didn’t include a deficit so we should not pay a penalty.”) On the other hand they should also receive some incentive for wise management by offering a bonus of one tenth of any percentage surplus they run for their personal salaries. (That would be, if 10% of revenues were in excess of the annual budget they would get a 1% bonus on their salary for the year.)

Theoretically this would have the downside of encouraging them to raise taxes to cover their spending priorities thus causing citizens to bear a greater cost for their government. Personally I think that would be beneficial because people would spend less time clamoring for more government handouts because they would almost universally feel the effects of any spending increases. Such a change should also have the side effect of having people be more engaged in the process of removing representatives who ignore them because they would be more likely to feel the effects of whatever votes their elected officials cast.

Tags change congress, connections, deficits, ideas, money, taxes

National

Annapolis Convention

It was not so long ago that I became aware of the Annapolis Convention of 1786. Though I had started reading the resulting report before I got my pocket Constitution I was very excited to see that it was included there. It was there that I finally sat down and read the report through. I found it interesting that the major theme of the convention proceedings was that a Constitutional Convention should be called precisely because the remedies necessary for the defects in the Articles of Confederation exceeded the scope of authority that had been granted to the delegations from the states that attended the Annapolis Convention (5 state delegations were at the convention, 4 more had been commissioned but were not at the convention, and the final 4 states had not commissioned delegations for such a convention). With that background it becomes very hard to consider the argument that the members of the Constitutional Convention exceeded the bounds of their authority. Having had this report published I would think that every state would have sent delegations to the Constitutional Convention with fairly open-ended authority.

Sometime after reading these proceedings I began to wonder what might come out of a similar convention today. Of course the delegations to the Annapolis Convention were charged with addressing a specific issue (the regulation of commerce) and found that no viable solution was forthcoming which would not affect many other issues as well. I do not imagine a convention charged wtih fixing an issue, only one charged with studying our government and comparing what our government is doing with what was written in the original Constitution, what is written in the succeeding ammendments, and poosibly providing their perspective on where our practices are improvements from what is written and where they should be brought into conformity with our established Constitution.

Because all three branches of government would be under review, the delegations should not include those who are currently holding political office at the federal level (I was at first inclined to think that such a review could be conducted by judges from around the nation). Instead, I think that such a convention should consist of people chosen from the local people from each state – for the sake of variety and balance I would imagine an ideal convention to consist of three Republicans and three Democrats from each state (and probably D.C. as well). Some people might think a convention of 300 participants would be too large to be effective in such an undertaking, but considering that there are over 300 Million people in the country it seems reasonable to have that many representatives. (Besides, it’s still smaller than the House of Representatives.)

Those who argue that the large states are being underrepresented (as some undoubtedly will) should be reminded that the convention would have no power except to study, publish their findings, and possibly make recommendations. I believe that the voters of our nation would be very surprised by the findings of such a convention.

Tags Articles of Confederation, Constitution, documents, history, ideas

National

Rethinking the Electoral College

Post author By David
Post date September 16, 2008
2 Comments on Rethinking the Electoral College

I have long been a staunch supporter of keeping the electoral college despite the weaknesses I see in having most states take a winner-take-all approach to their electoral college votes. The calls to abolish the current system in favor of a national popular vote have been growing for as long as I have been interested in politics. Today I started to wonder if we could honor the purpose of the Electoral college while using the support for a popular vote to institute reforms for the weaknesses that have grown in the current system.

The idea that I had in mind would be comparable to the way the BCS chooses a national champion for college football. (Stick with me here, I know the BCS is unpopular.) Consider our current system to be like the pre-BCS method of choosing a champion based on who the polls ranked as #1 at the end of the season. With the BCS, those polls become only part of a broader equation without resorting to a playoff (the equivalent of a national popular vote in my analogy).

My idea would be to implement a national popular vote where every vote counts equally and where the results weigh in as 82% of the final choice. Each state then has two representatives in the reduced electoral college with the electoral college votes accounting for the remaining 18% of the final tally. The reason for the 82% weight for the popular vote is because that represents 441members of the current 541 member electoral college which are supposed to be comparable to the representation in the House of Representatives. The states are represented as sovereign entities with the remaining 100 votes with the ability to apportion those votes as they see fit – winner-take-all or with a representative split (such as one vote for each candidate with more than 40% of the vote or both votes if one candidate exceeds 60% of the popular vote in the state).

The 18% weight from the reduced Electoral College would decide close elections, but it would do so in a way that would virtually eliminate any value in selective recounts for disputed elections. Recounts would not materially affect the 82% weight of the popular vote and would only be able to swing up to one vote of the remaining 18%.

I have not had time to consider all the nuances of this idea but I would love to hear what others thing of such a plan.

Tags elections, electoral college, ideas, questions, sports

culture

Transit Oriented Development

Post author By David
Post date June 19, 2008
10 Comments on Transit Oriented Development

The idea that we need more transit friendly ways to develop our urban and suburban areas is nto new to me. I have long believed it. The idea that government restrictions hinder as often as they help is also easy for me to accept. That’s why I was interested to read about the ways that existing zoning laws often impede smart development.

Many of us will abandon our big gas-guzzling vehicles and forsake new land-guzzling, auto-dependent suburban developments in favor of commuter hubs and “new urbanism” communities clustered near mass-transit stations.

We’ll live sensibly for a change. . . We won’t go kicking and screaming, either. Just give it a little more time. Let the air pollution and traffic congestion and gas pumps that ring up $50, $60, $70 in a blur sink in, and we’ll embrace smart growth and new urbanism and commuter hubs like grandmas hug babies and babies hug puppies.

It’s already starting to happen . . . But there’s still one big obstacle . . . If commuter hubs and bus stop/train station developments are going to become the norm, if we’re going to change our wasteful ways and ease the burden on our environment and pocketbooks, local governments have to lead, or at least get out of the way.

“High density” can no longer be dirty words. Commercial and residential zones must be melded. Those tired old requirements of two parking spaces for every doorstep have to go.

My ideals for my family living situation include a large yard and I begin to wonder if that conflicts with my ideals for smarter growth and a more transit-centric lifestyle.

I think I’ll try to tackle that issue with some ideas of how to meld the two ideals – not just for me, but in general municipal planning. Any thoughts for me to consider?

Tags community, economics, ideas, transit, transportation

National

Many Primary Ideas

There are a variety of ideas for how we can fix our primary election process. They range from a lottery system proposed in comments and a post earlier on my site to more authoritative proposals such as rotating regional primaries as outlined by Trey Grason (go to page 25 of the PDF – hat tip the Senate Site)

Unfortunately, it is too late to fix the process for 2008, but steps can be taken for 2012. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) is hoping to generate support for rotating regional primaries as a step toward that goal. The association’s bipartisan proposal, created by the nation’s chief state election officials, divides the country into four regions and establishes primary windows in March, April, May and June.

I was also interested in the proposal published in the New York Times by Jonathan Soros suggesting a national primary day where individual voters could opt to vote early.

There is, however, a simple way to establish a national primary and yet still allow retail politicking to meaningfully affect the course of the campaign over several months: allow early voting, with regular reporting of the tally.

Here’s one way it could work. Set a national primary date of June 30 and create a window for early voting that opens on Jan. 1. The early votes would be counted and reported at the end of each month from January through May. . .
If we began counting and reporting the interim results in advance of a national primary, the voters who cast early ballots would play the same role as voters in Iowa and New Hampshire do now: they could signal viability or create momentum for their favored candidates. These early voters would be self-selecting, trading the opportunity to watch the campaign unfold for the ability to demonstrate early conviction.

Most important, every voter, no matter where he or she lived, would have the freedom to make this choice. Right now, when one votes is determined by where one lives.

The national primary day has drawbacks, but I’m sure there are detractors to the rotating regional primaries as well and I know there are those who gripe about the lottery idea. I’m not ready to advocate for one idea over another, and I’m sure that all of them would offer an overall improvement over the current mess. What I would really like to see is an widespread, active, and public conversation now – not sometime after 2009 – to decide how we would like this system to operate because the current setup is going to lead to perpetual campaigning (like having candidates declaring six months into the four year cycle) unless we take steps to rein it in.

Tags elections, ideas, issues, media, New York Times