I had an idea, and I wanted your guys' input on it: what about "Democracy by Accretion" ? What I mean is, all democratically appointed positions like the Senate, House of Representatives, or the Presidency are permanent positions, held for life or until the position is willingly vacated, but the catch is that elections still happen at the appointed times, and the newly elected people are just 'added' to the existing incumbency; and everyone in that incumbency therefore has to share all the powers with all the other members, with no privilege given to seniority.
So over the course of say, two decades, the Senate and House of representative would bloat to thousands of members and the President's office would have 6 people in it, and growing.
I'm thinking that it'd get big moneyed interests out, as politicians would no longer need to rely on them for campaign funding for re-election. People in permanent positions could finally have breathing room to implement long plans that they can actually follow through on and see to the end. Conversely, they would not have total control, the voting population can't replace them, but they can add people of differing temperaments and ideologies to counteract them, or to supplement them if they like them. The massive bloat of people in held positions would mean that no one person would have that much power, and getting smaller over time, making the corruption of the offices very unlikely. This would also force all officials to be very cooperative, and to work together to get anything done, resulting in legislation that serves the greatest number; which is appropriate for a very large nation like the United States.
The attitude of elections would be very different as well, knowing that whomever is voted in is going to be sticking around and can't be removed easily. There would be still impeachment procedures, though impeachment would probably be a much easier and less dramatic affair, considering how many officials there are, removing one or two wouldn't be seen as a big deal if they're demonstrably bad. The threat of assassination of an elected official is also notably decreased, because if you have 10 Presidents, and 10 Vice Presidents, with more on the way, it won't rock the nation if one of them gets gunned down by a crazed assassin.
Additionally, you could think of each election representing that specific time, the specific zeitgeist of the people, with the elected representative being the output of that zeitgeist; so the elected officials of 12 years ago are still representing the zeitgeist of that era, while the latest one is representing that latest zeitgeist.
Though of course, this might mean that eventually the various Houses will need to be renovated to become larger, much larger, probably bigger than a football stadium, in order to accommodate all these elected officials. That might just make C-SPAN more entertaining to watch however, with snack vendors yelling over whomever is giving a speech, and the midday's proceedings being paused for a scheduled halftime show.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4223536 times)