Looking Grim for Incumbents in 2012

Unfortunately, two of the best members of Congress Ive ever been represented by -- Jim Leach (R-Iowa) and Joe Schwarz (R-Michigan) -- are no longer in office, Leach having been defeated in the 2006 Democratic landslide and Schwarz having been knocked off by a primary challenger from the far right in 2008.

I'm sure there are some other good ones, though.

The polls always tell an odd story: Congress sucks, but my guy is awesome. If people are happy with the representation they chose, then the problem is not with individuals. It's systemic.

Many other developed countries have strong party systems and for a good reason. Governance involves a lot of work over many years, beyond the capacity of any individual. Legislatures by their very nature necessitate ruling as a bloc. Politicians are going to form alliances anyway; best to have them official and transparent rather than secret and in the back room.

Right now we have a “winner take all” system where 49% of the voters in a Congressional district can be left without their chosen representation. The very existence of the Congressional districts invites gerrymandering and corruption. It’s the reason for our deadlocked two-party system, in which we teeter between ideological opposites and moderates are shunned in favor of extremists. We need to do away with that system.

I don't have a problem with proportional representation per se, just the only way it's been implemented so far.

For instance, with modern (or even old) computers (and a Constitutional amendment, but that goes without saying), it would be entirely feasible to implement arbitrarily multi-member districts, where anyone who gets, say 5% in the polls, can go to Congress, and rather than 1-member-1-vote, each member's vote is weighted according to the vote % they received. The sum of all of the members in each district would have weight of 1/435 (or less, if we're talking amendments... I've thought 435 was too small for some time now) of the total.

Of course, the two biggest problems with this are physical space and salaries, but even quintupling of Congressional salaries is a small price to pay to break the two party system.

Place terms limits to a low level, and you run the risk of transferring "institutional memory" (i.e. how things get done around Congress) from elected officials (who can be held accountable for their actions by the voters) to unelected folks like aides, clerks, and other bureaucratic types. So you could vote for someone who actually is a decent politician, but because he's only going to be in power for a short period of time, he's going to have to get his office, etc., up and running as quickly as he can. The easiest way for him to do that is to hire staff, etc., who worked for the guy who held the office previous to him.

This will be especially problematic in the House, with its two year election cycle. About the time you get some idea of how to do much of anything, you've got to start campaigning for re-election. If you want anything to show for the year you've been there, then you can't take a chance at hiring some inexperienced folks, everyone has got to be experienced. Nor can you begin weeding out the experienced ones and replacing them with new folks once you win election, because you don't have the possibility of being in office for a long time, even if the voters in your district will never vote against the party you belong to.

The real danger of people being able to stay in office forever is not so much them getting corrupted, its that you end up with guys like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd, who're able to hang on to political office long after their mental faculties have begun to decline. Someone elected to office for the first time at age 50 will be out of office by the time they're 74 no matter what, instead of sitting around, soiling their diapers in a committee meeting discussing something like a technology which wasn't even invented when that person was in their 70s.

Exactly.

But what we need in place of it is not a system where the people have even less say in who their representative is. If you simply give parties the right to put in place the appropriate number of representatives, according to the number of votes they received in the whole state, you might get someone from "your" party that you don't particularly like, or a district that voted a majority one way might end up being represented by someone from the opposite party because it had to be done to balance out the state-wide proportion.

I don't want political parties choosing my representatives. I would much rather change the system we now have so it looks more like a stockholder election than the current "winner take all" system. If, in a district with 100,000 voters (to keep this simple), the Democrat gets 37,000 votes, the Republican gets 24,000, the Libertarian gets 8,000, the Wingnuts get 2,000 and the other 29,000 people didn't vote, then each of the candidates goes to Congress with a "vote" that is equal in weight to the number of people he represents, and the total "weight" of the district is reduced by 29% because of those who didn't vote. If they don't want to choose a representative, they aren't represented, period.

The system takes away all advantages to gerrymandering, guarantees representation to those who are in a minority in a district, and makes sure that minority parties are not simply "squeezed out" entirely by the "winner takes all" rule.

I would set the "salaries" of the representatives proportionally as well. If you want to be a "professional" and live in Washington, then you better have enough people behind you to finance that. Otherwise, you can still represent them and vote for them, but you do it from a distance (it really wouldn't be hard to set up an appropriate system with today's technology) and you stay in your district, where you might actually be aware of what's going on, and continue with your job and your life, so you might actually be a part of the people instead of a Washinton elitist.

I see no advantages to the party-based proportional system you propose over this one, but I see lots of disadvantages.

^Under my plan, there wouldn’t be any districts at all, so I’m not sure how the voters therein could end up with a guy they don’t like.

What is the importance of having “your guy” in the legislature, anyway? You want to be proud of the way he looks, his career, that he’s from the town next to you? Individuals in the legislature have zero impact on policy. It’s all about bloc voting. I don’t see how it’s relevant to governance.

It would be the burden of the parties to make sure their lineup makes their constituents comfortable. Otherwise, they lose seats. That’s accountability.

The problem with your plan is how much it expands the number of people in Congress. You think it’s hard for 435 people to solve problems, but you want to quintuple that number? Even if their voting power is cut down by proportion, their ideas will still have to be given fair time on the floor and in committee. It’s simply way too many people to have in a legislature. If anything we need fewer people bickering on Capitol Hill.

Perhaps we could take O2C’s idea and apply it to one race, statewide. You’d still get to vote for “your guy,” and if he has the minimum of, say, 5%, then he gets assigned an equivalent fraction of the state’s voting power. This would actually cut down on the number of Congressman, although each state’s composite voting power in the House would remain proportional to population, as it is now.

Why not simply allow citizens to vote on each issue themselves? We do have the internet now.

Direct votes are fine for big things that don't happen frequently, like constitutional amendments or seceding from the union, but not for everyday legislation. Let the people vote on everything, they're going to vote themselves an endless amount of free shit while also providing themselves enough tax cuts so there's no way to pay for it.

That's even worse. You completely remove any possibility of voting for a person you like, approve of and/or agree with. You just vote for parties, and which parties run the country.

I like your system less and less, and would never want to live in a country where it was implemented.

It would be interesting to see a system in which the following happened:

The House is locked at 450 members

The 450 congressional slots are apportioned to the 50 states by population

In each state, candidates run for one of the 'slots', not a 'district.' Each slot is worth X number of votes, based on divvying up the 'votes per slot' by the number of registered voters in the state.

Voters still only get one vote- the election runs over a week. They choose the candidate they like best, and vote for him/her. Once that candidate has enough votes to win their slot, they are in. People from Modesto, San Diego, and Chino could vote for a single candidate- or reject him.

Eliminates gerrymandering and forces congressional candidates to be a candidate for the state, not their own neighborhood.

Kind of convoluted and goofy- I'm not even sure I like this idea myself, but what do you guys think?

Like in Missouri, where the candidates would represent both St. Louis and Kansas City! Maybe even Springfield or Columbia if they had enough spare time!

And that's different from now... how?

As messed up as Congress is, things would be even worse if everything were done by plebiscite.

You think there's a problem now with Congress not reading or understanding the things they vote on? Imagine if they all had full-time jobs to distract them and had to queue up at the local elementary school every time a decision needed to be made.

If you look at states that allow legislating through ballot referendum, the resulting legal codes are a mess. The current fiasco with medical marijuana in Michigan is a perfect example.

In addition, turnout would end up being terrible. Instead of congresspeople being chosen in elections with 40-50 percent turnout, you'd have laws decided directly by a much smaller number ... probably dominated by cranky senior citizens and a handful of hardcore activists.

You want term limits? Voter against every incumbent. Problem solved.