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Could we replace the entire Congress with DP members and get better results?

DP members replacing our current Congress would yield better results?

  • Total voters
    36
Manc Skipper said:
It would never work. The creme de la creme here at DP are not Americans. :2razz::lol:
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"What we need is a better people, and a better congress".
I'll not tire of this.
The complexity of the make up of the DP crowd makes the usual Dem/GOP labeling impossible... And I even believe we have a "better people" right here at DP...
Something to do with education and youth, as opposed to our Congress...(older, less educated , IMO)
 
winston53660 said:
He could be in a supporting role.....maybe put in a dress and say he is Michele Bachman's mistress.....
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Sick and nasty.....lol.....
Many here think I am a Liberal....but I am not totally convinced that liberalism is the better way to go, that it produces better results..
 
Kal'Stang said:
You could take homeless people off the street and get better results than what our Congress has been getting for the last 30 years.
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Remove the huge amount of money from the process; make the Congressmen walk among the elite AND the masses...this may produce some improvements.
 
samsmart said:
Because it means they can still get the perks of being a member of Congress - namely kickbacks from lobbyists - without having to be responsible for what the government does since the President effectively is the government.
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Kickbacks from lobbyists are illegal, and therefore rare.

There are perks to being a member of Congress, but those aren't one of them.

The idea that Congress can get away with doing nothing, when it must approve funding for the government every year, is a little far-fetched.

Overall, though, you're right that the more polarized Congress becomes, the more it cedes power to the President, who can act without the need for compromise.
 
Andalublue said:
Run that past me again. A Senator will have a staff of 100? What for? Assuming a (very low) $30,000 average salary, that's 10,000 people, costing $300,000,000 just to service members of the Senate??? Are they paid for from the public purse, in which case... wtf? Or from the Senators themselves which either means you have to be very wealthy (plutocracy, or what?) to keep a staff costing $3,000,000 a year, or from campaign contributions, in which case half of that 100 staff are going to be spending their working lives fund-raising... in order that they can be paid... to fund raise!

What am I missing here?
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What you're missing is that Senators don't actually have a staff of 100.

According to this study, it's 35, including staff working in offices back home (often several offices to cover the whole state).

http://www.llsdc.org/attachments/wysiwyg/544/CRS-98-340.pdf

Campaign staff are entirely different, and aren't paid by tax funds.
 
The problem isn't that we don't have good people. The problem is that they have competing interests and ideologies, so compromise is hard. And they are more polarized than they used to be. Not many moderates left to bridge the gap and get something done. That's why Boehner can hardly get anything done - he's got Democrats on one side, and Tea Partiers on the other, and either group has enough votes to tear down a compromise, and it's hard to find a compromise to please both.
 
misterman said:
What you're missing is that Senators don't actually have a staff of 100.

According to this study, it's 35, including staff working in offices back home (often several offices to cover the whole state).
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I'm not great at maths, but still sounds like 3,500 people, costing at least $100,000,000 to service ordinary members of the Senate. What about the average Representative's staff? Your attachment says 15. That's 6,525 staff and $195,750,000. That's almost a third of a billion dollars your congress is costing, just for personal services to members. Doesn't that sound a little excessive, or even decadent?
 
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Andalublue said:
I'm not great at maths, but still sounds like 3,500 people, costing at least $100,000,000 to service ordinary members of the Senate. What about the average Representative's staff? Your attachment says 15. That's 6,525 staff and $195,750,000. That's almost a third of a billion dollars your congress is costing, just for personal services to members. Doesn't that sound a little excessive, or even decadent?
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Well...it's not really "personal service". It's not like the staffers are feeding them grapes and fanning them. They are normally the ones that are helping write bill language, interpreting the thousands of reports that come in to congressmen. I mean, if anybody works in a leader ship position they know the amount of studies/reports/papers they have to wade through are crazy. Multiply that by a 1,000 when you have every interest group sending you things, every government organization etc.

Those guys don't necessarily walk in and vote on stuff.
 
Andalublue said:
I'm not great at maths, but still sounds like 3,500 people, costing at least $100,000,000 to service ordinary members of the Senate. What about the average Representative's staff? Your attachment says 15. That's 6,525 staff and $195,750,000. That's almost a third of a billion dollars your congress is costing, just for personal services to members. Doesn't that sound a little excessive, or even decadent?
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No. It's service to the people, not just to the members of Congress. Much of it is constituent services - helping people back home get through the bureaucracy or whatever.
 
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Andalublue said:
You think that's a third of a billion dollars per year well spent, do you?
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There are 300 billion people in America. So that's not much money per person.
 
teamosil said:
But, even putting that aside, we have a whole process of elections. The people in office are the ones that we thought would be the best at it out of an entire country of 311 million people.
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WRONG.

The people in office are the ones that RAN FOR OFFICE. These people have characteristics that are not always good.

Charismatic yet vain.
Shallow and appeasing.
Greedy.
Power seeking.
People pleaser's instead of problem solvers.
Feelings of Entitlement.
Rich (so not in touch with the people.)
I could go on...

And the people are not bitching because they do or do not have any of the skills you mentioned, many of which are completely irrelevant to voting on an issue and represent the very issue that people are disgusted with anyway (big partisan entrenched government), but that average people can see an issue and have a valid opinion and/or make a valid and often times BETTER decision than the greedy, power seeking, charismatic yet vain and rich politician that they had to vote for because to vote for the opponent was to vote for the exact same type of person just carrying a slightly different message.

A crock of **** and a total joke...
 
misterman said:
There are 300 billion people in America. So that's not much money per person.
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I think you might want to revise your population estimate down by a factor of 1,000. There are 300 million Americans. That's $1 per person per year. That's quite a lot.
 
Bodhisattva said:
WRONG.

The people in office are the ones that RAN FOR OFFICE. These people have characteristics that are not always good.

Charismatic yet vain.
Shallow and appeasing.
Greedy.
Power seeking.
People pleaser's instead of problem solvers.
Feelings of Entitlement.
Rich (so not in touch with the people.)
I could go on...

And the people are not bitching because they do or do not have any of the skills you mentioned, many of which are completely irrelevant to voting on an issue and represent the very issue that people are disgusted with anyway (big partisan entrenched government), but that average people can see an issue and have a valid opinion and/or make a valid and often times BETTER decision than the greedy, power seeking, charismatic yet vain and rich politician that they had to vote for because to vote for the opponent was to vote for the exact same type of person just carrying a slightly different message.

A crock of **** and a total joke...
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A majority of voters chose them. That's democracy. Deal with it.
 
Andalublue said:
I think you might want to revise your population estimate down by a factor of 1,000. There are 300 million Americans. That's $1 per person per year. That's quite a lot.
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Oops. The old b vs. m. I meant million. The point remains.
 
misterman said:
A majority of voters chose them. That's democracy. Deal with it.
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If they are the only ones running for office you can vote or not... I choose not to vote many times or I choose to vote for a third party nominee that would be better but has no chance of winning simply because I will not waste my vote as the majority do. What we have is democracy in name only... you need to accept that and deal with it yourself.
 
Bodhisattva said:
If they are the only ones running for office you can vote or not
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That's why you can also vote in primaries. You should watch the news.

What we have is democracy in name only... you need to accept that and deal with it yourself.
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Waaaaaaaaaaaaah.
 
misterman said:
What you're missing is that Senators don't actually have a staff of 100.

According to this study, it's 35, including staff working in offices back home (often several offices to cover the whole state).

http://www.llsdc.org/attachments/wysiwyg/544/CRS-98-340.pdf

Campaign staff are entirely different, and aren't paid by tax funds.
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That surprises me. I had the privilege of interning for a senator once and between the home office and the DC office there definitely were at least 80 folks working there and I think more like 100. That said though, quite a few of them were unpaid and quite a few others were paid by the committee the senator worked on rather than the senator's own budget, but they report to the senator. Could be those two things together explain the difference.
 
Andalublue said:
Run that past me again. A Senator will have a staff of 100? What for? Assuming a (very low) $30,000 average salary, that's 10,000 people, costing $300,000,000 just to service members of the Senate??? Are they paid for from the public purse, in which case... wtf? Or from the Senators themselves which either means you have to be very wealthy (plutocracy, or what?) to keep a staff costing $3,000,000 a year, or from campaign contributions, in which case half of that 100 staff are going to be spending their working lives fund-raising... in order that they can be paid... to fund raise!

What am I missing here?
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As noted above, many of them are volunteers, and yeah, they get paid very little. You often have like Yale Law graduates and who would easily be making $500k/year or even $2m/year in the private sector working for senators making $45k and whatnot. You can find the lists of staff and total cost for salaries by senator here- Congressional Staff Salaries by Senator

The average seems to be around $2.5 million/year.

As for what they do, tons. You can divide the staff into three groups- administrative, communications and legislative. The administrative staff is what you would expect in any office- the receptionist, the IT person, the office manager, etc. The communications staff includes people that respond to constituent letters, people that meet with groups and individuals in the home state, press people, etc. Usually the communication staff is half in DC and half in their home state. Between admin and communications, that is usually the majority of the staff. Probably around half of the folks working in those roles are unpaid, maybe a little more than half.

Then you have the legislative team. That might be say 20 salaried people and maybe 3 unpaid law clerks. Each of them will have an area of responsibility or multiple areas. For example, one might have health care and education, another might have defense, others might have foreign relations, economics, science, agriculture, etc. Every day something in the neighborhood of 100 significant things come up that the senator's legislative staff needs to make a decision on. For example, an amendment to a bill that will be voted on in a committee the senator sits on, remarks that need to be prepared for a speech to veterans returning from Iraq from the senator's state, an article about a company doing something that may be important to an area the senator focuses on, preparing questions for a witness that the senator will be questioning at an upcoming hearing, etc. Most of those issues are incredibly important to somebody. Maybe it's just what seems like a petty issue with a particular pesticide taking too long to get approved, but maybe that means 200 jobs in the home state if it doesn't get approved, or on the flip side, maybe if it does get approved it means 25 children being born with birth defects. Maybe asking the right question in the upcoming hearing will shift the way the senate ends up perceiving a key issue with some upcoming legislation and ends up having an even greater effect.

And many of those 100 issues are extremely complex. Maybe a company is coming in complaining about what they perceive as an unnecessary technicality in a statute that is preventing them from expanding into a new area of business. There could have been 50 court cases dealing with that clause, there could be 100 companies that have a stance on the issue and 10 non-profit groups. There could be hundreds of articles on the topic and chapters in a dozen books. There could be extensive CRS reports and legislative history. All said and done to really master the topic might take a particularly adept researcher a week. But, since there are only 20 or so on the legislative staff, and 100 issues like that a day, they really can only work on each one for a couple of hours. IMO that is one of the biggest Achilles heels of our government. That is where lobbyists sneak in. If somebody only has two hours to look at a complicated issue, you can have tremendous influence just by showing up at the right time with the right documents and having everything rolled together in a persuasive package. I'm kind of a measure twice, cut once kind of guy. In my view, the communications and administrative staffs are adequate, but the legislative staffs should be double or tripled. One bad decision by the senate can easily cost the country more than the entire cost of all the legislative staffs of all the senators and representatives. It's just good sense to take precautions to avoid that.
 
Since nearly all members debate from exactly the same two partisans given to them by the talking heads on TV, I cannot see it making any difference.
 
teamosil said:
That surprises me. I had the privilege of interning for a senator once and between the home office and the DC office there definitely were at least 80 folks working there and I think more like 100. That said though, quite a few of them were unpaid and quite a few others were paid by the committee the senator worked on rather than the senator's own budget, but they report to the senator. Could be those two things together explain the difference.
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Well, yeah, if you count the unpaid ones. But that's not the point. And the committee staff, which are...committee staff.

Which state was this? Likely a large one. 35 is just the average - a state like California or NY will have more, of course.
 
I voted 'yes", because I'm frustrated with congress. However, I'm now think probably "not." We have a much wider scope of opinions than congress' small amount of parties. We discuss at more angles than they do. To bad they can't be forced to discuss and forced to make decisions instead of putting things off.
 
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