The public has increasingly soured on Congress — and now, some House lawmakers are starting to agree.
With legislating all but brought to a halt and partisanship at an alarming high, members of Congress in both parties are running for the exits, opting out of another term on Capitol Hill to vie for higher office or, in some cases, leave politics altogether.
It is a trend that skyrocketed in recent months — amid a tumultuous 10-week stretch on Capitol Hill — and one that is likely to continue through the end of this year, highlighting the challenges of navigating a polarized, and oftentimes chaotic, era of Congress.
“Right now, Washington, D.C. is broken,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said in a statement when announcing that she would not run for reelection. “[I]t is hard to get anything done.”
“politician” should not be a career.
No. It definitely should be a career. I for one prefer political experts to do their jobs instead of random millionaires who buy their way in on a lark because they’re bored. I want my lawyers to be career lawyers, my doctors to be career doctors and my politicians to also know what the duck they’re doing and be career politicians. It’s ridiculous how politics is the only important job where people want amateurs.
Political experts are making policy decisions about things they are not knowledgeable, let alone experts in. This is a problem. Healthcare, privacy, infrastructure, defense, right to repair, isp monopolies, etc. I don’t want actors. I don’t want celebrities. I don’t want career politicians. I want people who actually understand problems working in government to get those problems solved for a brief time, not in place of being engineers, scientists, educators, and tradesmen.
I want people who understand government working in government. Because government itself is complex and requires experts to run it correctly.
I would prefer an engineer make engineering decisions, a doctor make medical decisions, and a teacher make education decisions and not someone who’s good at playing the government game.
Our founding founders were first architects, engineers, scientists, and inventors. The government being complex is a result of who is running it. Lawyers and politicians. Want a new law? Repeal 2 others.
Mindless platitudes like this accomplish nothing but to trivialize the legitimate complexity of the large scale organization.
What does that even mean?
sortition.
Absolutely fucking not. Random assignment is ridiculous. All it’d take is one or two bad assignments with crackpots to ruin the country forever. Imagine if enough Trumpers got assigned by chance. We’d have a dictator the next day.
Not to mention no one would ever trust if their methods were accurate as everyone would call foul.
And with people who are mostly not wealthy and only serve a single term the ability to totally bribe would be a foregone conclusion.
Don’t we basically use this process for juries?
Even that’s not purely random. Voir dire is a process to ensure the jury is selected intentionally by prosecution and defense attorneys (ideally to have an unbiased and effective jury).
Granted, but it’s miles away from having professional narcissists who campaign and accept lobbying money to be full time jurors for 30 years.
There’s lots of problems with the current system, I agree, but unless we can have a body of people who can act as national fiduciaries to “voir dire” the randomly selected politicians, I don’t see how it would offer any improvements over the current system.
It would get money out of the initial political process, but it wouldn’t necessarily create substantively better lawmakers.
It would come with a different set of problems, but they don’t seem any more difficult than those we already have. Not that it matters today, it’s perhaps more of a concern for some future society that has the courage to devote itself to democracy.
Oh. You’re one of those people. Nobody here is interested in your accelerationist bullshit.
I’m just a passing pleb who apparently wandered into the angry part of lemmy. Sorry to intrude.
If I mischaracterized you, then I apologize, but accelerationists and naive anarcho-libertarians have been trolling Politics with points exactly like yours for weeks. They think allowing fascism to happen now is the only (or at least inevitable) solution, and they imagine some future revolution will allow a better society to rise from the ashes, some “future democracy” for those “courageous enough” to make some kind of ideological stand now.
Nevermind they have no plan to get there except “burn it all down,” and there’s no way to know with any level of certainly what comes after that.
Oh right. I just meant it’s a pretty far-out idea and not really relevant to practical politics right now, interesting though it may be. Thanks for the explanation.
He said nothing about allowing fascism to happen now, though.
I like sortition, and I appreciate you bringing it up. If a position has so much power a random person could screw things up that bad, that position of power needs eliminated or divided.
It’s a perfectly reasonable career. The fact that you’re even saying this just shows how successful the American right’s undermining of the government has been.
Hiring non-profesionals for a job is not a recipe for successful execution of that job’s responsibilities.
Yes, this. I want to see the people decrying expertise in governance sign up with a non-expert to have their teeth drilled.
Why not?