Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

hightimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 583 posts

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#331

Post by wing-_-nuts »

petsfed wrote: post #316
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues. I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become inform…

I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of government, but we should take all the highly partisan crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#332

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mmoustafa wrote: post #233
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress). I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the spee…

> We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy

We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.

The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)

In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.

The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#333

Post by rootusrootus »

lazide wrote: post #322
rootusrootus wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like a hybrid system like we have in a number of states. A mechanism for nationwide initiative petitions would be nice. Then we can get nationwide consensus on the high-level issues and leave the rest for the people whose job it is to work out the details.

The worst laws come from direct amendments and petitions because only the stuff no lawmaker actually wants their name on (or could pass) goes there - and it gets gamed to hell. See the CA propositions - they turn into insane population wide gaslighting competitions.

So then it boils back down to 'most people are stupid' and the reason we have representative democracy is so we can cultivate a class of elites who are smart enough and have enough skin in the game to make good decisions for the rest of us.

People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#334

Post by mothballed »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #326
cheschire wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely think so. Can you imagine if voting was influenced directly by whatever memes were on Tiktok?

Given how Mamdani won in NYC I think we are already at that stage.

That one definitely reflects that the founders tended to limit voting to those with higher level of stakes in society (usually land owners).

While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#335

Post by johnnyanmac »

edbaskerville wrote: post #76
adamors wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 individual democrats, the exact number needed for the vote to pass, all of whom are either out the door or safe from reelection in 2026. Quite the coincidence.

You can blame Chuck Schumer, but I agree that it's wrong to blame the rest of them.

I blame the rest of them because of their reaction. House is torching the ones who caved. Not much commentary from the actual colleagues who "opposed" this maneuver.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#336

Post by [deleted] »

lazide wrote: post #234
mmoustafa wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress). I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the spee…

As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.

[deleted]

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#338

Post by teraflop »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #318
whimsicalism wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in case you didn't notice, everything we are stating is opinions. I absolutely reject the notion that the senator from Wyoming should have equal political power to the senator from Texas or California, I think it is absurd, I don't doubt that some people in Wyoming disagree. I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and…

> I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time. I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reaso…

I think it's completely fine to renege on deals that were made with people who have been dead for centuries, actually, if there's a good reason to.

Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th amendment. Maybe those people would have made different life choices if they knew that their slaves would be freed in the future. Tough luck.

In other legal contexts, we recognize that allowing people to exert control over things long after their deaths is a bad idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#339

Post by smileysteve »

mmoustafa wrote: post #233
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

The Senate is fundamentally a ridiculous way of representing 350 million people and we’re going to continue to get absurd unrepresentative outcomes for as long as it remains a relevant body. There’s no getting around this and it will structurally just get worse and worse. Simply no way something like it exists 200 years from now, it is probably the biggest flaw in the US political structure right now.

We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress). I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the spee…

It's worse than the founding though because Congress has artificially capped its growth. If the house of representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.

Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.

Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.

Re: Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill

#340

Post by alistairSH »

danudey wrote: post #119
Y-bar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Non-American here). Couldn’t it also work by guaranteeing each state X seats and then the rest Y seats are set according to census data on population? For example a single house with 100 reserved seats, and on top of that one seat per 500k citizens?

The goal isn't about guaranteeing that all states have X number of votes; the house and the senate vote separately on things. For a bill to pass the house and the senate requires: 1. A majority vote by the house whose members are allocated by population and therefore (ostensibly) represent the general population 2. A majority vote by the senate whose members are allocated by state and therefore (ostensibly) represent…

Additionally, the Senate in original form was actually selected by the states (or rather, their governments). Direct election of Senators only came about in the early 20th century with the 17th Amendment.

And this whole discussion gets further complex when you consider the US uses an antiquated indirect system to elect the President (who in our government is more akin to a Prime Minister in many parliamentary systems than the ceremonial president in those same systems).

In the US, each state gets a number of electors who elect the President. The number is based on the number of Sentators plus the number of House members. So the smallest states are guaranteed 3 electors no matter how out of proportion that count may be.

The consequence of this is in my lifetime, Republicans have won the Presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote (and thrice with a majority)...

2000 - George W Bush won with 47% of the vote to Al Gore's 51%. 2016 - Trump won with 46% to Clinton's 56%.

Reagan, Bush Snr, and Trump (2nd term) won with majorities of the popular vote.

Notably, a Democrat has NEVER won the presidency with LESS than a majority.

For those of who are both residents of moderately sized states, and also lean left on political issues, this certainly feels like a massive structural problem.

Post reply on HN