this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
146 points (98.7% liked)

USpolitics

633 readers
1 users here now

founded 1 year ago
146
Mitch McConnell’s ‘sandbag’ moment stokes anxiety over US gerontocracy (archive.is)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by SpringMango7379@lemmy.world to c/uspolitics@lemmy.world
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Edit: Thanks @Jearom for providing the paywall free link!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Jearom@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/UozLV

In my view, the gerontocracy is a side effect of deeper, systemic issues: too much power in incumbency, too much power placed in the hands of the hands of too few, too much power given to money. I would prioritize these three changes to fix our democracy:

  1. Publicly funded elections
  2. Uncap the House
  3. Term limits on the Supreme Court

That’s it. Everything else flows downhill from there.

[–] SpringMango7379@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the paywall free link. I didn't realize it had a paywall as it worked fine for me, it must have a certain number of "free" views.

[–] Jearom@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Happy to! Thanks for posting it originally. FT does good reporting, their paywall is obnoxious.

[–] McNasty@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

We need a constitutional amendment to place term limits on the Supreme Court.

We do not need an amendment to increase the number of justices or to impeach them.

[–] Bitswap@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you expand on 2 (uncap the house)? I'm not familiar enough to know what that refers to.

Fully agree with 1 and 3 though.

[–] cassetti@kbin.social -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I still would love to see a new political party which represents the people's interests - call it the direct democracy party. Use blockchain technology to create a general ledger of polling for every vote inside the party - everyone would have a copy of the polling data so it couldn't be hacked/changed. Every party member would have one single vote in every poll, and their elected politicians would be bound to follow the polling data in how they vote, or they are immediately replaced under the party rules.

Of course that'll never happen - too expensive to implement and the campaign laws are setup to ensure a two-party system while preventing a third party from challenging them.

But damn it would be nice to have a party which represents the voice of the people, directly.

[–] Yendor@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

We’ve had parties like this in Australia, but they’ve never won a seat unfortunately.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(political_party)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Direct_Democracy