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Dianne Feinstein has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#261

Post by antasvara »

hedora wrote: post #149
flagrant_taco wrote: post #75

I know the easy approach here is for people to want an age limit in Congress, but I've always been more partial to a term limit. I'm sure there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this happens, but whatever the cause elected officials seem to have an extremely easy go of getting re-elected these days. The increasing average age in Congress is just a side effect of that in my opinion.

Instead of term limits, I’d much rather they be paid a 99% percentile wage until death, but be banned from accepting any other income or gifts, investing in stocks or owning any sort of business or investment property (again, for life). It might be better to lower the income to 90th or 50th percentile, so only people that actually wanted the job would take it. Ideally, the restrictions would extend to the kids. It wo…

Salary proposals always run into one issue though: independently wealthy individuals have a massive advantage. Even if you limit their personal contributions to their campaign, it's difficult to impossible to prevent a wealthy person from making themselves much more well known in a campaign race.

A wealthy person is also totally fine with whatever the salary is, because they already have a bunch of money.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#262

Post by bombcar »

jfengel wrote: post #106
panax wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone keep reelecting them? Vote for someone else. We also need a better voting system than first past the post.

All other things being equal it is in their best interest to re-elect the incumbent. Seniority and connections figure into what posts you get and what influence you have. McConnell's and Feinstein's constituents have an outsized influence on the proceedings. Why would Kentuckians cede control of the Senate in favor of a politician, no matter how skilled, who had zero seniority? I'm not especially in favor of short te…

Once you realize people vote for parties not persons it all makes sense.

Heck, California has gone so far as to have all their senate elections be between two members of the same party.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#263

Post by bombcar »

jpadkins wrote: post #100
alistairSH wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they cling to power? I imagine the personality type that seeks political power in the first place tends to want to keep it. It's good to be the king. At the end of the day, the people continue to elect them. If voters were unhappy with Feinstein's performance (or that of her key aides), the solution was as simple as voting her out. Name recognition is powerful. Seniority leads to leadership of key committees i…

> Why do they cling to power? Life or death. The mindset is that when they retire they have nothing to live for and will die soon after. The personality type required to get to a powerful position like Senator can also (frequently * ) not be able to conceive of a meaningful life after office. Quitting office is like giving up on life for these people. *Jimmy Carter is a good counter example. He found a meaningful pur…

Carter is also still alive, and only eight years older than Feinstein (and 18 than Biden).

Perhaps the "reason to live" is more important than people realize.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#264

Post by bombcar »

alistairSH wrote: post #71
bhouston wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If voters were unhappy with Feinstein's performance (or that of her key aides), the solution was as simple as voting her out. Often these incompetent people are in "safe seat" regions. Either heavily democrat or republican. Voters won't switch parties just because representative is incompetent. There should be another options.

Feinstein was a Senator and CA uses a "jungle primary" for state-wide elections - there's no "safe seat" in that model. In her last election, both final candidates were Democrats. Neither party could unseat her. Voters have been clear that they preferred Feinstein to anybody else. So the question is why? Was it her power in the Senate? Was she particularly good at bringing pork to CA? Or was it just money and the pol…

Let's not pretend that Feinstein wouldn't still win re-election even now.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#265

Post by HDThoreaun »

banannaise wrote: post #79
Enginerrrd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather see a proportional system.

A proportional system will still have one of the primary issues with the current system: the parties choose their representatives, and the two major ones will continue to trot out just the worst people they can find. (Yes, there are primaries, but the DNC and RNC hold an astronomical amount of power in picking the candidates and influencing the winners.)

But that's not a problem when you can just defect from the major parties with no penalty. The major parties are only able to continually put up garbage candidates because there are no other options.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#266

Post by edgyquant »

frob wrote: post #58
alexb_ wrote: post #3

Can someone give a QRD on all of the political ramifications that will come from this? I've heard things about judges being harder to appoint, what else is there?

From everything I could tell, one of the reasons Sen Feinstein was sticking around was that the GOP had indicated it would not allow Senate Democrats to replace her on the Judiciary committee. This would deadlock the committee, effectively stalling all judicial appointments and confirmations. That was in the case of a retirement. This is a death and reappointment. I am unsure if the new Senator would assume Sen Feins…

> Sorry, California, the 39 million of you only get 1.3 senators for the next 15 months.

No they get two. Just as Wyoming, which is how the country has always worked and is the only reason the country exists in the first place. I’ve no idea where you pulled “1.3” from but this has always been and remains such an insufferable talking point from left leaning people, the United States is just that, a republican union of states, larger states specifically should not be able to impose their rule on smaller states.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#267

Post by pnut »

tristor wrote: post #148
layer8 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it should match whatever we consider the retirement age to be. That would create wrong incentives for pushing the retirement age upwards though.

Then we set it to 65, means the last Senate term has them exiting at 71. People over 70 should not be running the country, and currently the median Congressperson is on social security. We have a problem.

Hard really to say that elected politicians are running the country though. They serve at the pleasure of their benefactors.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#268

Post by beej71 »

matt-attack wrote: post #234
iambateman wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem with RCV is that it doesn't intuitively make sense to an average person. I wrote a web app for RCV and spent months trying to build a user experience that would help people understand the concept and it just doesn't work. People come to the question of voting assuming it's easy to understand...We've never had to deal with complexity around the concept so we expect it to be simple. Introducing an algo…

How is it hard to explain: please put these names in a row from best to worst.

When I tested out of high school, one of the test questions gave you a list of planets and their diameters.

The multiple choice question was: which of these answers lists the planets in order from smallest to largest diameter?

This was for a high school diploma equivalent! I was stumped for a while wondering if I was understanding the question correctly.

Anyway, I passed the test, but the fact this question was on there gave me serious doubts as to the general skill of the populace. I'm a fan of RCV over the current system, but I know it's going to trip a lot of people up.

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#269

Post by Goronmon »

Zxian wrote: post #181
yardie wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with term limits is being a politician is a job like any other. You get a performance review every few years. But by the time you get really good at the job you're forced to quit. If there are age minimums for these federal offices there should be age maximums.

I don't think it's fair to assume that votes are representative of performance. Politics are a popularity contest first and unfortunately that means image is more important than actions.

Are term limits more representative of performance than votes?

Re: Dianne Feinstein has died

#270

Post by qsort »

iambateman wrote: post #218
pxx wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranked choice voting (the brand name for Instant Runoff or Hare voting) neither theoretically [0] nor empirically [1] has the outcomes for third parties that you think it does. This combined with its other flaws makes it worse than plurality. Not only that, it doesn't allow for distributed counts [2], it can wreck the secret ballot [3], and it is not monotonic [4]. Arrow gives us an impossibility result for elections…

The real problem with RCV is that it doesn't intuitively make sense to an average person. I wrote a web app for RCV and spent months trying to build a user experience that would help people understand the concept and it just doesn't work. People come to the question of voting assuming it's easy to understand...We've never had to deal with complexity around the concept so we expect it to be simple. Introducing an algo…

An additional problem is trust.

With any RCV method, you win because math says so. In a normal election you count.

It's basically 100% guaranteed that someone who won most first choices but lost the election will try to delegitimize the election with stupid populism.

The first and most important job of an election is to ensure peaceful transfer of power.

My favorite alternate system is approval voting. Vote any number of candidates rather than just one. Most votes wins. 5 seconds and no nerd required.

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