drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/02/22/a-few-simple-points/index.html

I’m fast becoming bored with ironic protest signs that express our disdain and outrage for the administration. They make me chuckle or raise my blood pressure, but they’re not going to fix the problem. And it’s a small step from there to expressing rage at the voters who put them there, which again will not fix the problem and instead does real damage.

the broader point: the root of the problem is a dysfunctional Congress. A functional Congress has mechanisms to impose its will on the Administration. To that end, while everybody is looking the other way, it’s an opportunity to make whatever changes to Congress we need to make to enable it to function as a representative body.

That means identifying why it’s not working and then fixing those things. IMHO, it’s not working because: it’s captured by party politics, which is finely balanced between the parties and which is functioning like a parliamentary system where one party follows the PM’s lead and the other politely objects. “Captured”, in the sense that stepping away from the expressed will of the party leadership results in a primary challenge that means you lose your job, and captured in the sense that factional interests with lobbyists are overrepresented in their influence because of the power of money in elections. We have many instances of congresspeople making off-the-record statements saying they would have done something differently but for the threat against them by their own party.

You may not agree with these diagnoses. We, and our representatives, should take this time to analyze the root causes of this dysfunction and determine what’s broken and what can be fixed quickly. If, for example, we agree that these are the issues to be fixed, then we should be preparing the way with changes to our electoral system, things like proportional representation, banning of PACs, and other long-discussed and well-understood mechanisms, from the state level. We should make things like these the focus of our public demonstrations, our postcard writing, our calls to our representatives, pushing for radical change, not just against abuse they cannot, or choose not to do anything about. We should be focusing our representatives on reform from within their organization, to the exclusion of wasting time trying to create and pass legislation that will have no effect on the abuse imposed by the rest of government.

While all the action is with the administration and the judiciary, we have the opportunity to reshape the third branch, the one that actually represents us, to act powerfully in our interests.