If they see themselves first as Members of Congress, then they should try to seek more power for Congress, not for their parties.
> requires a candidate for President or Vice President to provide copies of tax returns for the 10 most recent taxable years to the Federal Election Commission.
> establishes a program to support states and localities transition to ranked choice voting systems.
While things that I support, it frustrates me that congress can't propose bills that are hyper focused on one issue.
The real elections for those seats happen in partisan primaries, where hyper-partisan ideologues are over represented. The electoral danger for most members of congress therefore comes from primary challengers catering to those ideological primary voters, and so incumbents have to defend their seats by being more partisan than the primary challengers. And so the partisanship keeps ratcheting up and up.
The Republican party has been totally consumed by this and is now just a hollowed out cult of personality. The only way most Republicans can keep their seats is through total loyalty to Trump. Otherwise they get primaried.
The extreme filibuster we have today also makes most legislation impossible - so the job of a member of congress has become more and more performative.
At the same time, the population as a whole is sorting itself into like minded enclaves. Red areas are getting redder and blue areas are getting bluer.
If we could somehow get rid of partisan primaries, the filibuster, and expand the house by several factors, we could improve the situation. But it's all so broken already, I don't know if we can get there.
Honestly, just fixing the absurd gerrymandering (on both sides) would help with this. In basically every other developed country the governments have no powers to draw the electoral boundaries, which seems to work better.
It always has been. Even back in Rome there were the plebeians and the patricians. Demagogues rose to power based on party lines, corruption grew, and then Rome fell.
What we are seeing today is what naturally happens when you fail to teach future leaders history, and instead they are taught, but this time it will be different.
The House passed this Act in 2021 to reduce the presidents power, but Biden never asked the senate to act on it. Reducing his own power wasn’t a priority for him, he spent his political capital on pushing for other laws.
The article alluded to a Republican filibuster as the barrier to passing the senate.
