Why Congress Ignores Voters
Why is Congress so useless? And how to fix it?
With Voter ID crashing and burning under the neglectful eye of the RINO establishment, it’s worth asking why Congress fails to deliver what voters want in our supposed democracy.
By margins of almost 2 to 1 -- cross party -- voters want a secure border and foreign aid slashed to basically zero.
By 3 to 1 they want less federal spending.
4 to 1 want less federal federal debt, lower taxes, lower immigration and tougher crackdown on violent crime.
Voter ID is 5 to 1 -- including a strong majority of Democrats.
Smaller deficit is 9 to 1.
Yet none of this happens.
Instead, voters are the tax donkey, inflation sponge, and designated villain who gets hit in the head with a brick by a homeless crackhead while both parties fight over who gets to apologize.
Why Congress Doesn’t Care About Voters
Now, the Filibuster gets blame -- the Senate rule that laws needs 60% of votes. Meaning only uniparty laws get through.
But we’re talking stuff with 3 to 1, 5 to 1, 9 to 1 support cross-party.
These should blow through Congress like 97 to 3.
The answer’s simple: the voters get outbid by special interests in both parties.
A widely cited paper by political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern analyzed 1700 policy issues over a 20 year period and found popularity among voters had zero influence whether something becomes a law.
So a policy with 80% support stands no better odds of becoming law than a policy with just 30%.
So what did matter? Preferences of donors, special interests like unions and NGO’s, and the richest voters.
In other words, this is not a Democracy. It is an oligarchy.
How to Fix Congress?
Term limits are popular, although the data’s very mixed -- newbie’s in congress become more dependent on lobbyists and permanent staffers eyeing future lobbyist job offers.
Campaign finance reform is also popular, but the trick is the left is very good at playing the system so the lost influence of oil companies and manufacturers is captured by in-kind left-wing donors like NGO’s and unions.
So what would fix it?
60 years ago economist Mancur Olson summed up the problem: Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs.
In other words, a given policy is a small impact for the typical voter -- pay 3 bucks a year for the sugar cartel. But it’s a very big deal for the sugar cartel.
Multiply across every industry, every NGO issue, every teacher’s union and it becomes a straitjacket.
So you’ve got to change that ratio.
The easiest way to change the ratio is move stuff from federal to state or local, where voter benefits are 50 to 500 times more concentrated by population alone. And where special interests can’t benefit from national scale — they work in millions in local contests, not billions like federal contests.
Even today, normies can defeat special interests on a homeless encampment down the street or getting porn out of their local school in a way they have trouble organizing against the sugar lobby or bank bailouts.
Even better is get government out altogether -- end the honeypots so there’s nothing for special interests and crony companies to bid on.
End the Fed. End the Administrative State. Let Wall Street fund its own bailouts and let the Learing Centers raise donations or shut down.
What’s Next
If you break the special interest oligarchy you get a Democrat party that doesn’t lock it’s most faithful voters in Detroit hellscapes. A Republican party that does fewer bailouts for Wall Street and fewer wars — and Patriot Acts — for Lockheed.
And voters who no longer see government as a predator.
Of course, Congress will fight tooth and nail to give nothing to states or -- God forbid -- taxpayers. But if voters can break through one time, it resets the game.
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Without all the fluff, what you are describing is to revert to the Constitution setup of strictly following the enumerated powers defined therein. Over the 250 years that the Constitution has been the law of the land, all of the politicians have sought more and more power by extending the reach and depth of the federal government to the detriment of voters and benefit of the special interests. We formerly thought that an honest politician was one that worked in the public interest within the limits set by the Constitution and social values of honesty and character. Today, the honest politician is the one, once bought, stays bought. We have expanded the federal government to the point that special interests are willing to bribe and corrupt those politicians because the stakes are so high with a federal government that spends in excess of $6 trillion per year. Where over 60% is spent buying votes with social welfare spending and the largest single expenditure is interest on the debt, and expenditure that is purely inflationary making control of the money supply impossible and significantly discourages capital accumulation through saving.