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Closed Government
Cato
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A trend has emerged since late 60's/70's to open up the inner workings of government to public scrutiny and accountability. Sunlight being the best disinfectant and all that.
The downside of this has been that such open access, instead of empowering the public at large who are generally too preoccupied with the business of living their own lives, has empowered lobbiests and economic/ideological interest groups which increasingly dominate national government. Politicians face extreme pressure from them to support a position uncompromisingly and as a consequence the incentives are lined up such that real debate aside from slogan shouting is discouraged and compromise is widely condemned as selling out.
The government would better serve the public if it were partially taken out of the public eye. C_SPAN should be taken out of the capital building and committee votes and deliberations should be closed to the public. Elected leaders should be insulated in areas where open access has empowered special interests to pressure them but has not actually engaged the attention of the general public.
The downside of this has been that such open access, instead of empowering the public at large who are generally too preoccupied with the business of living their own lives, has empowered lobbiests and economic/ideological interest groups which increasingly dominate national government. Politicians face extreme pressure from them to support a position uncompromisingly and as a consequence the incentives are lined up such that real debate aside from slogan shouting is discouraged and compromise is widely condemned as selling out.
The government would better serve the public if it were partially taken out of the public eye. C_SPAN should be taken out of the capital building and committee votes and deliberations should be closed to the public. Elected leaders should be insulated in areas where open access has empowered special interests to pressure them but has not actually engaged the attention of the general public.
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Next question?
Let me ask you this: do you believe in public financing of elections and that the overuse of ballot initiatives are detrimental to the good government of California?
Because those are also part of the same principle.
Because I find the idea of reducing access to government to be stupid and simple-minded? If you want to fix things, let's start teaching people about their civic duties and help them understand government, not close the doors to us.
Edit:
Yes, elections should be publically financed. And no, I don't see the abuse of initiatives to be in their overuse, but in (a) how easily a targeted initiative can be passed and (b) that they are amendments, not just laws.
What evidence do you have that such lobby groups didn't exist and/or didn't have such influence in the "closed government" era before your 60's/70's trend?
Since the "open government" trend you are talking about also requires lobby groups to adhere to certain standards of openness, how would you prevent a reversal to closed government simply moving the entire spectrum back down the scale?
...and...
How do you even begin to define those terms or make a practicable law to enforce that?
Pffft. People are not going to come home and watch sub-committee deliberations on C-SPAN no matter how much you educate them. There isn't anything wrong with that. You have to form government to the people as they are, not people to the government. Obviously we should teach civics more, but that shouldn't be a substitute for sensible structures of government.
The government has no right to keep secrets from its own people.
Do you really need me to cite proof that bodies like the congress have become more ideologically driven and deadlocked than they were previously? I had thought this was a common observation.
That's clearly a statement of principle, not a concrete proposal.
However, closing C-SPAN from the capital building would be one proposal. I've read accounts from various retired congressmen stating that as soon as the cameras came into the room the representatives stopped talking to eachother and just made predictable ideological rants for the television audience. In fact, that was one of Newt Gingrich's innovations. The Democrats were always trying to convince the C-SPAN producers to zoom out to show that fiery rants enveying against socialism were being delivered to empty rooms.
Just because YOU don't watch C-SPAN doesn't mean other people don't, especially when you're dealing with something that might impact you. So no, you don't get to take away tools that other people do, in fact, use just because you think they MIGHT be abused.
Blah. I doubt you could even tell me what sub-committees your legislator is on without googling it, let alone what they say there. You know who can though? Every special interest down on K-Street that might be affected.
ITT: Cato forgets that correlation != causation.
Despite what you might think, FOIA is NOT the cause of the hyper-partisan environment of today.
Oh, I watch C-SPAN all the time. It's 70% of my television time.
I just realize that I'm one in five hundred thousand on that score, and that the net effect is to empower lobbying groups to scrutinize the loyalty of my legislator to them and their causes rather than enlighten the public at large.
I've worked for special interests. They care about nothing but their one issue. They will support horrendous policies as long as they are benefited. You can't have a real debate on gun control so long as the NRA is ready to pounce on you if you deviate from their party line. You can't be from Iowa or Missouri and intelligently debate on agricultural interests while the agrobusiness lobby is standing over your shoulder.
Read anything about Stalinist Russia.
ITT: AngelHedgie equates a rather limited proposal with ALL GOVERNMENT SECRECY OMG.
Yes. I seem to recall how we were a Bolshevik dictatorship before C-SPAN.
I really need you to cite proof that special interest groups are the major cause, and that open government is the one-and-only access route for special interests.
Statements of principle aren't much use if they cannot somehow be converted into concrete proposal. And yes, I realised your C-SPAN point was a proposal, which is why I didn't include it. Your statement of principle is still utterly vague and open to all manner of different interpretation, so you might want to try again.
Well that's the most amusing non-sequitur argument I've seen today. Also you want to be careful about challenging him on politics, he used to run Cheney dontchakno.
Actually I think the balance of insults and anger in this thread are more on the side of the people who disagree with me. Count up the number of times I've been called an idiot and how many people I've called an idiot.
The Federal Reserve is way behind on that and needs to be less secretive.
Also, fuck California ballot initiatives. I hate populism.
Also my idea of you as the angry man is more based on a hunch than anything else, but I've seen these types of slightly-whacked deeply-held-belief arguments before, and I bet I'm right.
I disagree. Abstract principles are discussed in the abstract all the time. We don't need to talk about the early 90's elections in Nicaragua in order to discuss the merits of centrist politics.
Well that's the most amusing non-sequitur argument I've seen today. [/QUOTE]
If I'm making the argument that the public is not enlightened by certain information, but special interests are empowered, and I point out that a certain member of the public is not, in fact, enlightened by the information in question, that is not a non-sequitur. Your objection to it might be though.
Unbiased access to your own goverment is a fundamental right and an important part of democracy. Removing access to the goverment from the people, would remove their ability to participate even more than is already the case.
So, according to your twisted logic, we ought to toss Roll Call and the Congressional Record too.
And you're wondering why we're all looking at you like you have three heads. Any special interest that's worth it's salt compiles records of how the congresscritters vote - if they didn't, well - they should get out of K Street due to gross incompetence. The issue is that some of these lobbies get insanely powerful to the point that their presence becomes distorting. But even then, there's always a counterbalance. For instance, let's take the NRA. Out in the Western states, they're bleeding members, especially among the hunters that had always been loyal members. The reason is that they've been so fixated on their "guns at any cost" mantra that they forwarded candidates whose stances on conservationism were rather disgusting. Hunters finally realized that these candidates were hurting their passion - and responded in the expected manner.
So no, there is no such thing as an invincible lobby.
The Federal Reserve performs its job very well and consistently enjoys roughly 50% higher ratings of public confidence than congress. This is because it is insolated from political pressures. The Supreme Court is another body that benefits from being insolated politically.
Uh huh.
Actually I'm just a student of political science who read an interesting book by Fareed Zacharia and has had some interesting talks with his professor.
In theory, if you remove cameras from congress, what happens?
If the lobbys have insiders as is (presumably, you buy more than one congresscritter), and one isn't being loyal, the loyal ones already rat him out to the lobby. So they have an inside scoop, but the people lack the same inside track (unless you propose we do transcriptions of everything said in congress, which would be effectively the same as a CSPAN camera..)
What's it really gain us? The concept of Open Government isn't that everyone will watch everything the government does. It does mean that if something interests a person, they can go watch just that, and chime in on it with their reps. Or after something wonky gets passed, you can go back and find out what lead up to it. I don't think anyone expected everyone to tune into CSPAN 24/7 and try and understand what everyone did during a law, any more than someone's expected to watch every ATM transaction on an ATM security camera.
My twisted logic eh? You're such a peach.
It's cool that you point to one lobby that may be marginally losing net members, but this does not exactly counter my point, nor does this somehow render lobbies as a whole adequately accountable to the general public will or bind them to the national interest.
...except that your 'statement of principle' includes dodgy assumptions that aren't widely accepted, and an impractical suggestion for a solution. I could make the following 'statement of principle':
"Flying pigs are attacking London, I propose we shoot them down with laser guns"
But it is still bullshit.
Yes, you point out that a certain member of the public is not, in fact, enlightened by the information in question as if it means something. Hardly a statistical sample, no? Even if you did take a statistical sample and likely found that most people weren't aware of what their congressman did, none of that goes anywhere towards proving your fundamental assumption, that special interests have some kind of unparalleled access and influence.
The ridiculous thing is that your views on special interests aren't exactly groundbreaking or disputed, but the weakness of assumptions elsewhere in your argument demonstrate the lack of evidence even for the obvious points.
Does it have decent ratings because it's secret, or because it's doing things right?
I can have a shoddy web application with loyal users that crashes twice an hour as long as I lie about it and make sure the crashing has as little visible effect as possible. It doesn't make my application any good, it just means it's problems are a secret.
Given the choice between a good application and one with a good PR team, I'd prefer the good application.
More importantly, I don't even think this would work. I don't think we'd see politicians throwing off the shackles of special interests and voting their consciences. i think we'd see them voting the exact same way and then lying about it to the public. "Oh, fuck no, I didn't vote to legalize automatic weapons, in spite of all the money the NRA threw at me."
At least the way it is now, when politicians vote at the behest of special interests, we can see it plainly. We can hold it against them. Transparency is the one tiny thing that keeps politicians sometimes-kinda-honest, and when someone votes for stupid measures because they were paid to do so, we can try to vote them out of office.
Seriously, though, if we had no access to their voting records, on what basis would we even try to decide whether or not to keep someone in office? Go based on what he claims he did?
There was public exposure of government before C-SPAN.
Transparent government is good unless you're in favor of dictatorships.
We got patch notices from up on high, and had to report compliance. We'd go patch things, and say what we couldn't patch for X Y or Z reason.
Almost every site reported 100% compliance on every patch note. This was Great News. Until one site got hacked. Nothing major, but they had to go do all their lovely forensics to make sure nothing left a rootkit or took anything major.
In doing so, they found not a single patch note for 3 years had been applied to this machine. Even though it's sheet said 100% compliance.
What did I learn? If I can't verify information, it's not to be taken as true. Transparency entered the organisation after this, and we started doing verification of other sites for compliance. Turns out all the sites reporting 100% had been lying, and the whole IT setup was a festering sore that just looked nice until someone actually tore off all the secrecy and looked at the reality.
Additionally, since you are advocation the removal of CSPAN, you must also be advocating a sealing of voting records, since lobbiests would be going over those with a magnifying glass. And, if you are advocating those be sealed, why would we ever bother to hold elections?
Your characterizing it as dodgy and impractical isn't really an argument on behalf of your position. The actual situation is that you don't like me, don't like the idea, so instead of really addressing it you just want to run it down in a long, dull pseudo-discussion about how the discussion should take place. Bleh.
Are you really going to contend that the average member of the public knows what goes on with their representative in sub-committee hearings? Because with assumptions like that I guess it would be pretty easy for you to characterize anything as a non-sequitur.
Doesn't make my post a non-sequitur though, does it. I don't recall trying to prove my fundamental premise all in one response post. In fact, that would be a ludicrous thing to do. I think your objection here is pretty much empty of value.
We don't want public officials to vote their consciences. They're supposed to vote in a manner representative of their constituents. Special Interest groups are not inherently bad. They allow opinions to be heard. The problem is when special interest groups become too powerful and, say, oil companies help right legislation.
The point of judgement is in the outcomes. It isn't like supreme court rulings are secret, nor does the Fed hide the fact that it is adjusting interest rates.
And congress's approval rating isn't because they're being watched on CSPAN, it's because they were voted in to reign in Bush, and their outcomes are pretty much just rolling over on everything. Regardless of any actual ability to complete a task, they just appear to be doing a lot of nothing and non binding resolutions.
Kind of like the Fed just constantly putting out public notices saying they think Pennies are Shiny.
If you look my posts, I believe I'm rather more restrained in my tone than suggesting that we should go back to smoke filled rooms. I'm not against all government accountablity, that would be madness. I simply think that contentious issues would be better debated out of the hot light of public scrutiny.
This problem is one of the reasons that the government has moved towards a heavier reliance on appointed commissions to analyze contested issues like tax reform, social security reform and the Iraq War. It is impossible for the politicians to do their job of debate and compromise so they have to appoint proxies. In reality though, this just means that actual governing is moving further away from the publically elected representatives.
Just the sub-committee and maybe committee votes.
A lot of the power of lobbies is in killing legislation before it reaches the floor, at which point it does force itself into the public consciousness and their insider advantage is countered by real public engagement.