If we hate all of our politicians, why do we keep electing them?

http://www.politico.com/...4_Page2.html#.U_QjkBN0wdV

Cuz many people are easily suckered into believing their bullfluff.

I've often wondered what would happen if we ended up electing a completely clean slate of legislators.

Ww3

A completely clean slate of legislators would just have to be bought by the lobbyists all over again. The problem is not at the personal level. The problem is with the system itself.

because of sheeple

Decentralised government pl0x.

the problem is not the system itself, the problem is the individual people in office that don't stand on principles. don't blame their lack of moral integrity and the balls to say "no" to being bought out on the system.

Because most of us have not had a politician that we really wanted to vote for in a long time.
Its always voting for the lesser of two evils, or just vote for the other guy.
Its sad when you have career politicians that just protect their jobs.
the easy way to fix it is term limits across the board.
You get 4 or 6 years then move along.

We have to chose someone, and if they are all retards then oneway or another we are going to elect a retard...what we truelly need is a total deterioration and abolishment of any andall goverment...let the strong survive and thin out the numbers...anarchy ftw...almost

because those are the people that get the campaign funding.

Because of the check-all boxes. "All Dem" or "All Rep"

Lazy.

I wanted to vote for Gary Johnson in the last presidential election, so I did. I made the conscious choice to stop choosing "the lesser evil" and start voting for "the best candidate." Unfortunately we in the US have collectively bought into the narrative that "third party can't win," and it will remain true as long as everyone allows that idea to influence their vote.

+1

seriously why dont you look at other political systems. If the US system is so bad who had a better one you could copy?

In the case of the U.S. Congress one common reason is the committee system. While you may not like "Congress", you may vote for your own rep/senator because they hold a key position that benefits your district/state. Examples include the Finance, Appropriations, Budget, Transportation, Ways and Means, Judiciary, Energy & Commerce, etc.

If you vote out your incumbent in favor of a newcomer, they won't have seniority on a committee and you could also lose a committee chair position. Since many of these committees act as gateways or paths for legislation that controls lots of money, they can be important for local economic reasons.

thought that most of us don't have enough time to go vote for them. except for the housewives and dead voters.

Congresspeople are too valuable. It's time to slash their pay and increase their numbers. Let's increase the congresspeople 10 fold.

Each state gets 20 senators

Each state gets 10 representatives for each current representative.

Each congressperson gets paid $17,400/year (part time job, part time pay) with no benefits.

The majority and minority leaders get $27,100/year (the congressperson's new pay + half the current difference between regular congresspersons and the majority/minority leaders old pay)

The speaker of the house gets $42,150 (congressperson's new pay + half the difference)

We build dorms to house the now 5,350 Representatives and Senators in which they can live for free. The dorms will be like college dormitories and include a communal kitchen. They will be permitted to live in the dorms while congress is in session.

I would prefer a parliamentary form of government.

Geographic representation has been consistently undermined by such forces as gerrymandering for years. Technology, going back at least as far as the Interstate Highway System and much more recently with the major advances in computing, et al, has continued to shrink the size of the country and even the world. The current system cannot accommodate a country where people and ideas are this mobile. Geographic representation is an anachronism.

It needs to be replaced by ideological representation.

Slash their pay and "gifts" by lobbyists become more enticing.

The real issue is that the electoral college effectively cements a 2 party system in the US, where neither party has any particular incentive to support reforms because they like the status quo where they're either in power or the only alternative.

People keep voting for candidates they hate because they're smart and realize that there is little chance of candidates not approved by the 2 major parties holding federal office. So, people make the best choice they can, which is to choose whoever they consider the lesser evil between the major candidates.

This has nothing to do with laziness or stupidity and everything to do with a flawed electoral system.

I like that. That's good. If you've ever read "Freehold" by Michael Z Williamson, he describes a system in which successful business and military leaders must donate the lion's share of their personal wealth to become Citizens, a council of which makes the decisions.

As long as people keep believing and saying this it cannot change.

I think there are a couple of easy tweaks that can past Constitutional and political muster.

One is to limit MOCs ability to fund raise while Congress is in Session. You can't really regulate it the other way around given SCOTUS rulings on campaign contributions as free speech, but you can do it this way. There was a great column in the Washington Post about this very matter: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...9-2cd6fa8da5c4_story.html .

Rather than pay less, I would seriously try to increase staff pay. The real revolving door is Congressional staffers. They come to Washington with big hopes and dreams, advanced degrees and tons of student loan debt. In return, they get long (and often weekend) hours, maybe $35,000 a year to live in an expensive city, and very little recognition. Promotion for them comes from either ass-kissing or being damn good at what they do and even then, the pay is subpar to what they would earn working for the federal government, let alone private entities. Then everyone acts so surprised when a legislative assistant on a key issue for a few years suddenly decided to quit and join a lobbying firm/association/etc and triple or quadruple his or her pay. I think you could keep half of the staff by simply paying comparable wages to federal government workers along the same education/skill set wages. Otherwise you are stuck with the revolving door, or worse, the trust fund babies looking for fancy titles who are the only ones left able to afford working on Capitol Hill.

I'm not sure money in the form of campaign contributions is quite as powerful as it used to be and I've seen it from the inside plenty. The reality today is that you can leverage dollars and social media to generate as much or more buzz than paid media. People fast forward through commercials, ignore banner ads, and using the mail, ha, good luck. So instead the real value is in peer-to-peer relationships, moving or becoming what everyone is talking about, and reaching your electorate where it hasn't been reached before.

Multiplying the number of legislators will never happen because it requires Congressional ascent. UNLESS you can get it through Constitutional Amendment. Even if you did, i'm not sure where they would meet. Or how they would be staffed. And I don't think you diminish special interests power. Quite the contrary, I think you increase it because now less money is needed to take down an enemy or prop up a supporter. Independent Expenditures gain in value.

Enough from me.

Why pay them at all? If you love this country and want to see it succeed in every way possible, you would do it for free!

You would certainly do it for free if you wanted to get your hands on power and influence and exploit it for all you could get.

when it comes to politicians, i still experience that decision problem about which is best method of dealing with them. a deli meat slicer or a guillotine? probably a good thing that i don't run out of meat often.

Wood chipper.

Why would we want over 5k legislators? They would never agree on anything. This system of government is the best available as it is balanced for the most part. If you want to fix the problems. You enact term limits, eliminate lobbying, and require that the legislature be made up of a diverse experience base rather than 100% lawyers. I'm tired of people complaining about not getting an average citizen into office. With the cost of an election now a days, an average citizen can never be elected.

I agree with pretty much everything Trumper said.

H4 is a lie reveal your real name!!!

You misunderstand what I'm saying. As long as there is no constitutional reform that breaks the two party system, there will be little meaningful change to address the you raise in the original post, of electing hated representatives to government. I see lots of talk here about addressing superficial issues while ignoring that being locked into the two-party system is the root of the problem.

I have a novel idea. Fire all the Congressional staffers and make the Congress people do the work themselves....

I am curious why you believe the Electoral College cements two-party rule? Personally I think it's more the active tipping of the scales by the "major parties" themselves (for example, by rigging debates to ensure that so called "third-party" candidates will always be excluded), and the apathy of the American voters and unwillingness to think for themselves that maintains two-party rule.

If Libertarian or Green or Socialist or Whateverist secures enough votes to seat the electors for a State, is that candidate not going to win that State? The problem is we throw so many obstacles in their way to that crucial first step: securing enough votes.

BACK TO CAPS!
HA!
BILL

It is true.

I don't vote for the two major parties, but you have to admit if you don't do so, you're sitting out, effectively filing a "protest vote." Which is fine with me, I don't want to give my approval to the system.

Here in my district we voted out the house majority leader in the primary. Change is possible.

You know, now that you ask me that I'm less sure about my reasoning. I think I once had an argument that I liked that involved the electoral college cementing the two-party system, and so I remembered that I previously liked the argument and so attempted to restate it without checking to see if I still liked it. I can see where I was going with it, but I don't think I like it as much as I used to.

The argument used to go something like this:
The electoral college, where a lot of states have winner-take-all elector selection, tends to push the field down to two choices as having multiple candidates with similar positions makes it more likely that a candidate with a differing ideology will win. So, the field gets reduced to two candidates supported by two parties, helping to cement the two party system.

I'm not sure I like that argument as much as I used to, as I said. It isn't a huge difference from first-past-the-post, and there are lots of FTTP systems multiple parties survive, even if they're often 2+ (like Canada from CCF founding to PC collapse, and the UK) rather than real multi-party democracies.

Voters aren't idiots, though. Many are undereducated about a lot of the political choices they face, sure, but not spending the time to educate yourself is a reasonable and valid choice if you don't have any expectation that your vote really matters. And, most people's votes don't actually matter (at least federally): unless you're in one of the few congressional districts that hasn't been gerrymandered to hell and back or a swing state your vote is effectively worthless. Even in cases where your vote isn't worthless, you'd have to have some expectation that there'd be a difference between the candidates on issues you care about in order for it to be worth it to vote, which isn't a given (both parties have similar stances on a lot of issues).

The two biggest things that prop up the two parties currently in power are incumbency and the media. The parties have had decades to put systems in place to help them compete electorally, they've got their own pet think-tanks to come up with policies, they've got supporters that have been born and raised saying they're Democrats and Republicans, and they've got track records that they can point at when trying to sell the public on the idea that they should be the ones in power. On top of all that, some media outlets have explicitly picked their favourite side and campaign for them relentlessly, while even the more neutral voices tend to favour horse-race style coverage that focuses strictly on winners, losers, and creating a narrative rather than on issues of substance. It is hard for an alternative party to find a way to compete in an environment like that.

I'm only scratching the surface when talking about problems as there's a lot more than that, but I honestly don't have much to say about solutions at this point. I suspect that there will be little movement towards reform until one of the two major parties collapses (and I think this is a real possibility in the coming decades) and the system completely breaks. Until there is some kind of crisis, there is absolutely no incentive for the powers that be to do anything that threatens the status quo, as the people with power tend to want to keep it.

No it isn't

http://www.opensecrets.org/...m&utm_campaign=buffer

and that's the problem