The technical term is sortition. And it is my pet unorthodox political position. The legislature should be replaced with an assembly of citizens picked by lottery.
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Now, the idea of electing a few thousand representatives and having sortition determine who is actually selected is something I could feasibly get behind.
Since the linked article is to a substack called “Assemble America” I feel I should point out that if the apportionment House of Representatives had not been capped at 435 reps, the House would indeed be several thousand strong by now.
So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?
We just passed that "big beautiful bill" and it was quite clear nobody knew or cared what was in it, beyond it being "trump's bill he wants". I'm guessing staffers and lobbyists had a far more detailed understanding of their portions than any elected official did.
It's a reasonable guess that 100 randos would actually write a better bill.
Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.
In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
- A randomly selected lower house with an elected upper house (or the reverse)
- policy juries which deliberate only on one specific piece of legislation, which then must be approved by a separate oversight jury before taking effect
- election by jury, where candidates are chosen by "elector juries" who interview and vet the candidates before selecting one
- multi-layer representative selection based on the Venetian model where randomly selected bodies elect representatives, of whom a random subset are chosen to then appoint officials
Right now the lottocratic/sortition-based bodies that exist are purely advisory, though in some places like Paris and Belgium they have gained a good amount of soft power.
It wouldn't be that hard to implement a conservative version of one of these in certain US states though. For example, add "elect by jury" to the ballot, where if it wins the plurality, a grand jury is convened to select the winner (counties in Georgia already use grand juries to appoint their boards of equalization, so there is precedent).
1. A filtering mechanism after the selection process. E.g., basic civics questions like how many states are there, a background check, and so on. To make sure you don't pick anyone that's compromised or incapable of serving.
2. A training program that acclimates new members to the system. If terms are say, six years long, then the first year can be entirely devoted to training.
There are some strong outliers but most are way below the bar of random selection. Do-nothing political nepo babies who are nothing but loud and in a gerrymandered district.
Our political system effectively selects for sociopathic con men. So would you prefer your laws to be written by those people vs a random group?
“I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” - William F Buckley Jr
“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams
- modest proposal: yes, have X random people in government, but have a Y-month paid training period before they serve for Z years; ALSO ensure their families want for nothing (read, a decent non-luxurious lifestyle), but prohibit receiving money from lobbyists, PACs, gifts, etc... AND, ensure they get reintegrated into society in a nonpolitical field (with some exceptions) by also offering Y-month long paid training in different fields.
The corruption costs reduction would significantly outweigh any increase in payroll and training.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Bases_and_Starting_Poin...
Getting your team control of a branch of government is way more important than having a 'good' rep in your district, because if you don't, they won't have any ability to do anything for it anyways.
If you couldn't get someone you wanted in the primaries, you just have to hold your nose, close your eyes, lie back, and vote for whomever made it through.
Whether this results in long term problems is a bit of an academic question, given that every election in the past decade is one where you either get to vote for the status quo, or an insane cult of personality.
The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
Here in the US, we use randomized groups of citizens to determine who gets locked away potentially for life or executed. Does a jury of peers also scare the heck out of you?
Those are screened.
Someone like https://youtu.be/00q5cax96yU?t=60 could be selected without some additional constraints than plain sortition. Ofc then those constraints are politicized.
Not selecting absolute random people, but people who have established their ability to intelligently handle responsibility, and avoid breaking the law. E.g., once you have achieved a certain level of educational attainment (3.0+ at well-ranked college, managerial-level at established biz, certain mil leadership rank, etc.), pass security clearance, pass citizenship test, etc., you are in the qualified pool, and may be called upon to serve in a legislature. The always-a-newbie problem could be solved by allowing legislators to serve 2nd or maybe 3rd terms by re-election/confidence vote. Same for POTUS, possibly selected by sortition out of the existing legislators who pass a confidence vote.
There is no way a reasonably and responsibly selected random group of achieving responsible people would do worse than a corrupt or craven group, especially worse than the selected-for-corruption — i.e., selected for loyalty-to-leader — currently seated.
Accept anyone from Jebus University with its miraculous 100% graduation rate, exclude anyone with a record of "Disrespecting an Officer", and the pool is quickly skewed, a reinforcing feedback-loop in favor of the groups doing the skewing.
Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.
Honestly, yes. In the case of criminal culpability, it just happens to be the least scary of the available options of who gets to send someone to jail.
For lawmaking, this isn't the case: the work for lawmakers is much more detailed and gameable than a binary question of guilt.
Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...
* Expand the Supreme Court
2. Canadian Liberals aren't US MAGA, when they win an election they don't spend six months in caucus to figure out how they can do their best to punish the provinces and people that didn't vote for them.
There's a lot of far-right propaganda in Alberta that implies #2 is happening, but it's not actually factual. Its oil & gas sector has reached record output under the Trudeau government, and Carney is not exactly looking to kill it, either.
Transfer payments are really the only legitimate grievance Alberta should have with the federal government. All of its other problems are either imagined, self-inflicted, are caused by other provinces, or are caused by the US.
A more organic version of this would be to select at random from people who already served at a lower level. Pick random citizens for city council, then for state you pick from the pool of people who have been city councillors in the past, then for country you pick from people who have already served at the state level. You could, in addition, add past picks to a "veteran pool" to ensure a small percentage of the legislature has been there before and can suffuse their experience.
It is a method to help maintain a balanced distributon of power, not created it when already gone awry.
In democracies, the branches of govt, legislative, executive, & judicial, and the institutions of society including the press, academia, industry, finance, sport, religion, etc. are all independent and serve to distribute and balance power. In autocracies, all of those are corrupted and/or coerced to serve the whims of the executive.
So, of course, an already-powerful centralized executive would be able to corrupt it as you describe.
But it seems much more difficult to make it happen in a well-balanced system, particularly when some have the responsibility to ensure ongoing fairness.
Do you have a better solution?
If we want to be very careful about a reform like this, we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance. We can start without any criteria and see if that works well enough. If it does, no need to overcomplicate things.
I disagree with your example, but things like deciding supreme court justices over the population of judges or department heads over the population of professors seem quite ok.
For lawmaking in particular, it looks like a bad idea. There will be lots of people trying to con the uninformed representatives into behaving badly.
This is a famously bad idea for U.S. politics.
Like, if you started a grass roots organization with this as your #1 idea, you'd have to eventually dismantle the entire edifice as 100% of your time would be spent answering questions about how this is different than tactics of the Jim Crow era. You'd also make yourself radioactive to any future grassroots efforts: e.g., "Citizens for an Educated Congress: wait a sec, is this that Jim Crow Guy again?" :)
I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.
Interesting. Looking in from a country with a smaller lower house, I think members in the US are already so numerous they seem to fade to the background and their survival becomes mostly about party politics not making a good impression on their district. It's not like most of them could make a good speech while most members are present and listening. Only senators seem individually important enough to make a name for themselves (with the exception of the speaker etc).
But I've never lived and voted in the US so maybe I'm missing something important here.
Well seems even the "home team" cant do anything either, so why not go for better candidates.
When I was in 4th grade, we struggled with public education, healthcare, etc. Now I have 4th graders of my own and they struggle with the same issues. No progress in a generation.
It is not merely adding qualifying criteria, it is setting qualifications AND sortition to select legislators and executives.
>>solve a problem that hasn't been demonstrated to exist ...The main threat to a well-functioning society are people acting in bad faith.
Your second sentence there is entirely correct, and specifically disproves the first. We have a problem
>>we should test it at a smaller scale, such as a city for instance
100% agree, we should test and adjust any changes before scaling up
>>start without any criteria and see if that works well enough
We've pretty much demonstrated that it doesn't
>>uneducated people may not be very effective in coming up with solutions, but their presence is important to remind educated people of their existence.
We do not need to hand uneducated people the keys to power to be reminded of their existence, any more than we should give loaded handguns to toddlers to be reminded of their existence. Intelligent people suitable for leadership can remember the existence of both just fine, thank you. Moreover, with qualified sortition, the selection is random so it is highly likely that qualified, educated, accomplished people who are adjacent to people with issues will be p[ut in power and able to do something for them
One very thorny issue is the fact that our system of government is built on respect for the law and the institutions, but the current regime has learned they can just do whatever they want with virtual impunity. They brought tanks, drones and nukes to a knife fight, and the other side is completely unarmed and trying to talk them out of the fight.
We are so fucked.
IIRC it's actually somewhat rare to have a bicameral legislature where both houses have roughly symmetrical powers.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainabilit...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism#Deprioritization_o...
But I don't see how this fixes the problem currently plaguing US politics which is that elected representatives are passing bulls designed by lobbyists that the representatives don't understand well.