Sleepless in Midland

Sortition -- Replace Politicians With Random Citizens

So I was station surfing on the car radio and stumbled on an interview with Brett Hennig on NPR's Ted Radio Hour. He had an idea that is tantalizingly simple. In a word, it's Sortition, defined at wikipedia as "the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates."

Here's an example of how it works. (From the the NPR show found here: Brett Hennig: Should We Replace Politicians With Random Citizens? Link goes to transcript.) To wit:

HENNIG: This seemingly absurd idea is actually based on hundreds of experiments worldwide where this actually happens and happens well. Ireland is the most recent country to have randomly selected 99 people to talk about their constitutional ban on abortion, to talk about how they can tackle climate change, to talk about other things like fixed-term parliaments.

This 99 randomly selected sample of people went through weekends of deliberation informed by experts with public input into that process, and they came up with the proposal, supported by around two-thirds of them, to abolish this constitutional ban on abortion, which was then put to a referendum, and about two-thirds of the Irish people agreed with them. If these people are so good at it, why do we still need politicians?

He explained the weak point common with currently existing democracies:

HENNIG: Elections produce people who are good at winning elections. And to be good at winning an election, you need a massive war chest of money. You need to be charismatic. You need to be able to inspire people with ridiculous tweets - I'm not sure. But it doesn't mean that you're good at making policy, at lawmaking.

So I would actually argue that a random representative sample with good process informed by experts who, of course, don't have power - they just have the power to give information - would result in better policy. Of course, you would potentially need these people to go through an induction process where they learn about how the system goes or how lawmaking is made, et cetera.

The other option - that we hand over the running of our country to a group of experts - is exactly what authoritarian regimes argue. China, in theory, is run by groups of experts.

Federalism in the U.S. provides us with 50 laboratories. California is renowned as the great experimenter, so there's a good project for them to try. Unfortunately, it would require the politicians currently in power to relinquish some of that power. And that's difficult to imagine.

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5:54 AM 10/14/2018

State law should preempt local traffic ordinances re texting while driving

Ordinarily I'm all for federalism, local rule, and all that the founding fathers envisioned. But they couldn't have imagined how fast we could travel in the future. And given how widely Texans travel in their own vehicles, the prevalence of local laws that vary from the state law merely set up traps for unwary drivers -- like speed traps of old, which were merely revenue raising devices mainly targeting non-locals. And the most horrendous part of most traffic laws is that a violation requires no intent whatsoever. Common sense should tell us that traffic regulations should be uniform to the extent that they don't create some undue burden due to some unique local situation.

So it's nice that Texas Governor Abbott has included in the current extended session a request that the new state law against texting while driving preempt local ordinances. Will they hand the preemption bill over to the governor for signing? With only a few days left in the special session, we should know soon.

While we can still vote with our feet and move to a jurisdiction with laws we like to live under. Local traffic laws give municipalities to much capacity to become highway-robbers targeting travelers. I would like to think our founding fathers would approve giving the state priority.

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2:05 PM 8/4/2017

Mike Lee has a rational suggestion for the BCRA

The Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017 (BCRA, i.e., Son of Obamacare) is hanging before the Senate, and as we noted the other day, five senators have come out against it. Let's take a look at one of them, Mike Lee of Utah. See The Missing Ingredient in BCRA: Humility. Here's the meat of that sammich:

And so, for all my frustrations about the process and my disagreements with the substance of BCRA, I would still be willing to vote for it if it allowed states and/or individuals to opt-out of the Obamacare system free-and-clear to experiment with different forms of insurance, benefits packages, and care provision options. Liberal states might try single-payer systems, while conservatives might emphasize health savings accounts. Some people embrace association health plans or so-called “medishare” ministry models. My guess is different approaches will work for different people in different places – like everything else in life.

When we last talked about Mike Lee he was discussing Iroquois Chief, federalism, and the founding fathers. You know, I like that cut of that guy's jib.

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12:50 PM 6/26/2017

Iroquois Chief, federalism, and the founding fathers

Mike Lee is making the rounds on his book, Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government. The C-Span interview (beginning at about the three minute mark) shows Mr. Lee telling the interviewer that Chief Canasatego, spokesman for the Iroquois Confederation, helped introduce federalism to the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin in particular, who influenced the others that this was the best plan for the new nation.

Federalism, you'll recall, is the principle by which the states were given most of the power to govern, while the national government retained the power necessary to protect the states from outside forces and such other things that would require a unified authority. A good source on this would be the articles at thefederalist.com tagged federalism.

Meanwhile, Historian Ellen Holmes Pearson tells us this:

Those who support the theory that the First Peoples influenced the drafting of the founding documents point to the words of founders such as Benjamin Franklin, who in 1751 wrote to his printer colleague James Parker that “It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.” Native American Studies Professor Bruce Johansen and American Studies Professor Donald Grinde, among others, argue that American colonists, in Johansen’s words, “drew freely on the image of the American Indian as an exemplar of the spirit of liberty they so cherished.” These scholars argue that the framers of American governments understood and admired Native American government structures, and they borrowed certain indigenous concepts for their own governments.

However, she says not all historians believe that the concept came from the Iroquois Confederation but that it could have come from Europe.

Other scholars are not convinced. Anthropologist Elisabeth Tooker, for example, argued that European political theory and precedent furnished the models for American Founders, while evidence for Indian influence was very thin. Although the concept of the Iroquoian Confederation may have been similar to the United States’ first efforts to unite alliance, the Iroquois constructed their government under very different principles.

The idea of several tribal governments agreeing to cooperate to protect themselves from outsiders seems like a very logical concept and not especially profound. But maybe Ben Franklin simply wanted to point to a successful application to make his point -- much like some Supreme Court Justices like to point to foreign precedent to support their positions. But what do I know? I wasn't there.

In any event, it's a good principle, and it's nice to know there are influential people who would take us back in that direction.