I was thinking of ways to allow for senators to vote their conscious without having to worry about alienating their base or their lobbyists.
I think it was Susan Collins who was threatened that if she didnt vote against Kavanaugh, some groups would donate 1 million dollars to the campaign of her opposition.
You also have lobbyists, like various unions and even the NRA who buy and pay for their senators.
So what if at the start of every vote, they handed out a senate ballot to each senator present. He voted Yea or Nay and folded it and dropped it in a Plexiglas tub that was monitored tv cameras and shown on live screen. Then after all present senators casted their ballots, the senate bill clerk would remove one ballot at a time and show if it was a Yea or Nay, and then tally it on a board. After all senate votes were tallyed, the vote is shown to pass or fail.
If this system were in place, you may have more republicans voting against Kavanaugh, but more Dems voting for him. It seems to me like this would be a great way to restrict the effectiveness of money and party in politics. It may also encourage some bipartisanship.
Ahh the ole, “they are threatening me if I don’t vote the way they want” thing. Good Senator, that’s how it is supposed to work, if you don’t represent your constituents they are entitled to try and keep you out of office. You work for them, not the other way around.
But it is not their constituents doing the threatening. It is pacs that are being set up that are able to come up with more money than the constituents are.
Who are PACs comprised of if not people? And since what people in congress do affects everyone in the country, no it doesn’t bother me if they are from out of state.
I was kinda thinking that this was a good thing.
Collins is being told that if she votes against these particular constituents then they will support her opponent.
Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?
Aren’t those “threats” exactly what is supposed to happen?
How can a person be a representative of the people when you don’t know what they are doing?
We already suffer enough from a lack of sunlight. I’d rather our reps wear body cams live streaming all day and that I have read-only access to their emails and texts.
How can we make it so senators can do what they want without their constituents knowing about it and protect them from what happens in a democracy? This is truly a problem that needs solving.
One way you could look at them is that they have special knowledge and information and you are entrusting them to make a decision on your behalf that you are not qualified to make.
The other way to look at them is that they are simply a representative of their constituents to the fed, and they should be required to vote for what the majority of their constituents want.
I tend to think of them in the first example rather than the second. If the second is in fact the case, why not do away with them completely? With the internet and the speed of communications in the modern era, every citizen could vote their own mind for every bill.
