That’s a feature, not a bug.
There will always be some number of petty people who don't care what the costs are as long as "their team" isn't allowing the "other team" a win, and those who don't want the federal government doing anything other than war, but when our government shuts down most American's aren't very happy about it. Most have a list of things they'd like their representatives in Washington to be doing for them, and they don't view the obstructionists acting like toddlers preventing those things from happening very favorably.
In the end, a partisan pissing match doesn't actually help the American people and our government should be working for us, not sitting on their hands doing nothing while the American people suffer and backslide. As long as election results are entirely divorced from approval ratings congress has zero incentive to work for the people though and they can get away with preventing the government from being functional/useful for anyone but themselves and the people stuffing their pockets.
I think calling people who oppose your policy ideas “obstructionists” is a neat ad hominem, as if the only reasonable position is yours.
What you’re lamenting is that you can’t force an agenda without people agreeing — and when they refuse to agree with you, your agenda can’t happen. While you say “most Americans”, factually, you lack a majority for your agenda: you’re a minority trying to impose itself.
That’s democracy.
"I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this - it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done."
You can just say you don’t like democracy.
Again, from Mitch McConnell - "If I'm still the majority leader of the Senate after next year, none of those things are going to pass the Senate. They won't even be voted on. So think of me as the Grim Reaper: the guy who is going to make sure that socialism doesn't land on the president's desk."
He's the same guy who refused to even start the confirmation process of Obama's supreme court justice pick a year from the end of his term. The GOP rejects compromise as a strategy, and does not even pretend to secure coalitions.
It would be, except that I never actually said that. Plenty of people can disagree with me and not be an obstructionist. A person in congress can even vote against something I'm in favor of and not be an obstructionist. Obstructionists are something very different from just being "people I don't like"
> What you’re lamenting is that you can’t force an agenda without people agreeing
No, it's certainly not about "forcing an agenda" it's about functional governance which by necessity involves compromise and a willingness to give and take. It's not even always about "agreeing". An obstructionist will vote against their own policy ideas to prevent letting their opponent get their way.
> While you say “most Americans”,
I mean most Americans. Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans want congress to work and they don't like the government shutdowns obstructionists cause.
> but factually, you lack a majority for your agenda
That's incorrect too. While obstructionists can stand in the way of policies that divide the American public there are also situations where a policy has majority support but is still held up or prevented by obstructionists. If we lived in a country where the approval rating of senators indicated their likelihood of getting elected you might have a point, as obstructionists being elected and re-elected would indicate that the majority of the people support them and their tactics. That's not the country we live in however. For just one example, notable obstructionist Mitch McConnell is the least popular senator in the entire country. He has no reason to stop being an obstructionist though, because how the people feel about him doesn't impact his ability to keep his job.
That's not democracy, it's just what happens after many decades of efforts to weaken democracy and erode the ability of the American people to have a meaningful influence on policy and who gets into office.
Those same polls show they believe their own representative is doing an adequate job - which is my point:
There’s no “obstruction” there, just frustration that your faction doesn’t have the votes to achieve your desired policy because some groups don’t agree with you.
> there are also situations where a policy has majority support but is still held up or prevented by obstructionists
Policies overwhelmingly favored by the majority of Americans are generally blocked by establishment candidates — at a rate far higher than “obstructionists”.
> He has no reason to stop being an obstructionist though, because how the people feel about him doesn't impact his ability to keep his job.
People he doesn’t represent can’t impact this job — correct.
And again, we’re seeing that you’re just upset by democracy itself: that you can’t force representatives on people and accordingly, can’t achieve what you want without their support.
Your entire post was nothing but deranged bashing of political rivals when you can’t achieve you policy objectives due to their opposition.
California has spent over $100bn to build 1600 ft of high speed rail over a decade. And it wasn't Republican obstructionists who caused that.
There are too many regulations.
I'm not familiar with that specific situation. Was it taken to the federal courts and only allowed to happen because of Chevron?
> There are too many regulations.
I think many people cheering this ruling are just anti-regulation and they care a lot about that without thinking much about how this ruling will negatively impact their lives and the lives of their families.
I agree with you though. There really are too may regulations. That will probably always be true. As long as industry and corporations can write self-serving legislation and bribe people in congress to pass it, there will be regulations on the books that shouldn't be there. That said, regulation is the only reason you have safe electricity, clean air, and safe water (assuming you aren't one of the several millions of American's who currently don't have safe drinking water).
Regulations, like all laws, are just tools and they can be used to help improve our lives, preserve our health, promote the safety of the American people, and increase our freedoms or they can be used to stifle competition, funnel tax money into the pockets of private corporations, or restrict our freedoms. Like laws themselves (which there are also too many of) it would be foolish to abolish all of them because some of them are bad.
We should be paying attention to who is writing and passing regulations and who those regulations serve, then hold people accountable when they don't represent our interests. That's hard to do in our current system where people's votes don't mean much, so we might want to try fixing that situation first but being "anti-regulation" makes about as much sense as being "anti-laws". Laws are a good thing. Regulations are a good thing. Let's just try to make sure they are both serving the public good.
I know a lot of them. And it's how the system was designed, by the way. Congress was supposed to generally be weak and deadlocked unless an overwhelming majority of people wanted something.
> The overwhelming majority of people do want a lot of things.
While the language is close these aren’t the same. Specifically the parent is saying that people need to want the same thing. Claiming that people want lots of things with no consideration of what they are or even how the things are done falls far short of the goal.
> the fact that the Senate gives Wyoming and Vermont the same power as California and Texas prevents that.
Have you considered that our founding documents/government was structured this way on purpose? It was a major incentive for encouraging small states such as Wyoming to join the union. Without this mechanism for giving smaller states an equal influence relative to other states many would not have joined the union.
The senate was modeled on the house of lords and the expectation was that the country would be mostly ruled by the representatives in the lower house, with the senate handling special things like impeachment.
The senate disproportionately representing smaller states was a compromise necessary to get smaller states to ratify the constitution. Wyoming and Texas didn't exist. Senate rules that turn it into the place were legislation goes to die (like the filibuster) are rules created by the senate to give itself more power.
It was not. Rules that make congress "weak and deadlocked" are mostly not in the constitution. For instance, the filibuster is part of Senate rules and could be changed at any time.
Party-line votes and deadlock in the house are mostly driven by partisan politics and party discipline.
The constitution specifies a few things that require a super-majority (impeachment conviction, overturning a president's veto, and constitutional amendments). Everything else is supposed to be a majority vote of 535 independent representatives.
You're assuming a lot more agreement WRT "doing their jobs" than actually exists.
I want X, you want not X. We both want Congress to "do its job", but what, exactly is that job?
Deadlock is when I don't get my way.
To govern. That means compromise. Maybe we disagree on X and our representatives decide to do Y instead which doesn't full satisfy either of us. Maybe they pass X which I want while you don't, and in return they pass Z which you want while I don't.
It's not as if the idea of a congress that can work together is an impossible dream. The situation today is the exception and not the rule. For all the problems congress has had we're seeing historic levels of dysfunction and that shows in the total lack of productivity https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/118th-congress-track-become-...
Also, this feature also works the other way: If Congress were to pass, say, abortion guarantees or Chevron Deference into law, then good luck trying to get them repealed. See also Obamacare, which hasn't been repealed after it was passed despite hell being raised.
Instead, they basically give the side that controls parliament the ability to pass legislation, and if they fuck it up, they can get thrown out and another party has their turn - this is essentially exactly what is happening in the UK with the Conservatives getting kicked out of power.
The problem with this "eternal gridlock" is that, since Congress can't pass anything, basically the executive branch and the Supreme Court take over legislative roles, which I'd argue is worse. I.e. the executive branch makes a ton of executive orders, which if challenged get decided by the Supreme Court, basically leaving Congress out of it nearly entirely because that legislative body is so feckless.
Let's see how long that lasts now. Overturning Chevron was a step to that very end. It puts the Department of Health & Human Services on the chopping block.
If you optimize for seat count then a wave election can easily turn many of those seats over to the other party, and with them control of the House.
If you optimize for seat safety then a wave election need only turn over a few of your seats to switch control of the House.
We have had lots of wave elections in the past 100 years: 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010. Three of those are in the past 20 years. Four in the past 30 years.
Gerrymandering isn't all it's cracked up to be. It cannot make any party impervious to wave elections.
This, anyways, only as long as all House districts in each state have roughly the same population.
I think the last 15 years of elections would seem to contradict you.
My guess is that if gerrymandering were completely outlawed, Democrats would easily maintain control of the House, with a healthy margin, more or less permanently.
Wave elections are a thing, but as we've seen, they don't give a the waved party a massive margin.
> We have had lots of wave elections in the past 100 years: 1920, 1932, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010
2010 is a bit of a magic number, because that was the point when Republicans started their concerted, coordinated, country-wide gerrymandering campaign. So I don't think elections prior to then can support or refute any points about gerrymandering.
They already had done that, and they lost two big wave elections. (E.g., Texas redistricted in 2004.)
It'd be better if the electoral boundaries were drawn with a polling-naive algorithm, but that isn't how it works in practice - you've probably noticed that every election is knife edge and there are regular upsets. This is because if one party is guaranteed to lose it will change its policies just enough to attract marginal voters from the other party.
For example, there were confident predictions of a similar nature that the Republicans would be unable to win elections because of the shrinking white demographic. We can see in the polling that what actually starts to happen is Trump still on the ballot but they've been in a long strategic process of picking voters from non-white demographics. The elections themselves are still knife-edge.
There'd be a different policy mix, but one thing we can predict about the future anyway is that there will be different policy mixes. Gerrymandering just privileges minority incumbent policies.
The republicans would then find it necessary to change the constituencies to which they appeal. Anyhow, a few states are horribly gerrymandered by the democrats. The problem is that democrats did so horribly during the Obama years midterms that most states ended up in control of republicans for the 2010 and 2020 census.
You do know that, in the seven House elections since 2010, republicans won the congressional popular vote four times: https://ballotpedia.org/Proportion_of_each_party%27s_nationa.... They won 1-6 million more total votes. Republicans will almost certainly win the House popular vote this year too.
I’m deeply curious how you formed the belief that democrats would consistently win without gerrymandering. That’s obviously not true even if you look at polling, which obviously isn’t affected by gerrymandering. Democrats are 0.5 points ahead on the generic congressional polls, but republicans were 2.5 points ahead last fall. RCP clocked them 2.5 points ahead in 2022 (actual was 2.8).
It really isn't. It's self-perpetuating. A gerrymandered state might _eventually_ switch sides, but far more likely it'll become more red (and yes, gerrymandering is predominantly a Republican tactic).
Here's a nice overview: https://medium.com/rantt/the-top-10-most-gerrymandered-state...
Democrats before ‘67 were racist as hell. Their southern strategy in ‘67 destroyed the party. Non racist republicans merged with the non racist democrats into the DNC. Racist democrats, pushing the southern strategy, left the DNC and joined the Republican party.
However, now it's pretty much only Republicans who rely on computer-aided models to gerrymander the districts.
There _are_ Democratic examples, and the worst ones are in Maryland and Illinois. But they pale before the Republican gerrymandering.
On (1): needing the approval of the senate, house, and president makes it very hard to pass laws.
On (2): the senate rule requiring 60% approval has already been repealed for appointments and for budgetary legislation, but it really needs to thrown out. The first two years of Biden’s presidency were mostly lost to obstructionism because of this rule.
On (3): this will most likely be banned if democrats get a trifecta federal control, and repeal (2), since gerrymandering primarily just benefits republicans.
Did you miss the hundreds of billions of dollars of legislating the Congress did this year?
When everyone is in agreement, congress is not being held hostage by obstructionists and some things can pass. When obstructionists are in disagreement, they can prevent anything from passing.
The list of acts of the 115th United States Congress includes all Acts of Congress and ratified treaties by the 115th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2017, and ended on January 3, 2019. The 115th Congress enacted 442 statutes and ratified 6 treaties.
The 116th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2019, and ended on January 3, 2021, enacted 344 public laws and zero private laws
The 117th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2021, and ended on January 3, 2023, enacted 362 public laws and 3 private laws.
The 118th United States Congress, which began on January 3, 2023, and will end on January 3, 2025, has enacted 65 public laws and zero private laws
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_115th_Unit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_116th_Unit...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_117th_Unit...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Unit...
Congress can't actually legislate anything while it's held hostage by obstructionists and there's effectively zero chance that a bunch of republicans who want to dismantle the already inadequate regulations that keep entire communities from being poisoned will vote to remove their power to do exactly that through the supreme court.