Crowdsourcing Legislative Sanity

I've been frustrated lately about how Congress does legislation. Bills are enormous, too big to read prior to our elected officials voting on it. The average citizen has no chance of comprehending what's going on prior to a vote being taken. Too many unrelated amendments are added in, usually because individual members pledge their vote for some pork or pet project, or alternately because someone is playing poison pill politics.

I have often wondered what I would do if I was a Congressman, Senator, or the President, and needed to read all the material you have to make decisions about. It's too much reading for anyone but a speed reader to get through. I figured the way to do it would be for the staff to divide up the work and read the report/bill/law/etc. in sections and do short summaries of each part so that you could get a rapid summary. Then you could browse specific parts in detail if there were the parts you were concerned about.

I've often wondered the same thing about Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. He has lots of guests that he interviews that are out pitching their most recent book and it always seems like he has actually read the book. How does he have the time to read the entire book each time? I have suspected that his reading was outsourced to his staff for some time, and that he got some kind of cliff notes summary version to read. Even if they tagged just a few portions, the best parts of the book, you could get through a book in an hour or so if you only had to read a concise summary and maybe a dozen of the best passages.

There is another concept toward outsourcing and consolidating your work that is done by a website called Galaxy Zoo. This is called crowdsourcing. They take the evaluation of galaxy pictures from Hubble and let subscribers sort through the data with a tutorial and applet to help frame their answers. It takes a group of data that is too big for an individual or small group to process and makes it manageable. While the bulk of the data is still not examined by an expert, it can be accessed quickly and indexed for particular trends or phenomenon. This allows they to sort through some 200 billion photos of galaxies in a couple of years, where this would have taken hundreds of years for all the astrophysicists in the world to examine them.

Why not take legislative review out of the hands of staffers and aids, who are political appointees that probably also have political agendas? Why not crowdsource all pending legislation? Have people read sections and summarize them with an outline or app that standardizes the responses. What does it say? What is it about? What are the problems with it? How do you personally feel about it? This last would be in order to give weighted responses. This would be superior to a posting of the entire bill that had a long stream of random comments by anyone that wants at the bottom. You've all seen these comment threads, they are worthless for helping you understand the content of whatever they comment on. Some of these comments in typical threads are well reasoned and useful, but most of it is emotional or inconsequential.

You have to make a commenting community put their efforts into something more useful and accessible. Summaries could be weighted by reviews from others, or there could be a wiki-like function of editors that could block users that are just trying to obscure the subject, use it as a spam outlet, or derail the conversation because they are politicians or lobbyists themselves.

Ideally, a system like this would enable the public to look at pending legislation and quickly find the objectionable or flawed aspects of it, and put public pressure on their representatives to either amend the legislation or rewrite it completely. Ideally, this system would give power to the public to override lobbyists and special interests.

Unfortunately, it could be subverted really simply if our legislators decided to keep pending legislation secret. This in itself would be something that I would hope the public would protest, if they were aware of it. We've seen committee work taken into secrecy in the past, so you know there is a tendency to hammer out backroom deals outside of the light of public scrutiny.

The legislative review site I'm envisioning could be established as an independent oversight entity controlled by the electorate. It would encourage legislative literacy and participation, particularly if complex legal bullshit currently being put into bills could be made simple, quick, and understandable. I believe it could also bring people together in the center, where most real people reside, not in the extremes that the major parties often use as talking points to rally support and obscure the real issues and real way they run the government. It is possible that we would not need a new or third party if we could take back control of the two major parties. It is possible that many of these legislators would welcome a way to say no to the special interests and actually do what is right for the country. This pressure could be brought to bear if only we had a way of wading through all the verbiage and sorting out what is actually being proposed.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend

I was listening to someone recently saying that he was a strict Constitutionalist. I've heard this phrase spoken in many recent debates and campaign speeches. The implication is that one side is right because they are following the true intent of the constitution, and that everyone should know that anyone that opposes this viewpoint are flagrantly flaunting all constitutional dictates and just making up new rules as they see fit. This is similar to what people say about activist judges. You only gripe when a judge makes a ruling against what they believe.

What I find interesting about the Constitution is that when the President is sworn into office, or if you take a commission as an officer in the military, you are sworn to defend the Constitution. Not your country, not your family, not the leaders, but a piece of paper, an idea. I still find this a little strange. You can simplify it and say that the Constitution defines your country and that's what you are defending. I think maybe the framers of the Constitution meant people to be loyal to the rules, and the rule of law calls for the free election of new leaders. This prevents us from making leaders permanent fixtures.

I was looking at the World Almanac later, thinking about the Constitution and I opened it up and found the text on page 579 of the 2006 edition. I realized that I have never read the whole Constitution. I assume that most strict Constitutionalists have not either. It reminds me of people that say they believe in everything in the Bible, but when asked, they admit they have never actually read the whole Bible. So I read the Constitution.

To be fair, I had already read the Amendments many times, as the exact wording of the Bill of Rights comes up often and is worth re-reading. The original Constitution is the document that was written in 1787 and outlined how we would become the United States we are today. It took the U.S. from the Articles of Confederation, which was the way that the government was set up after declaring independence, to a government with a central, federal core that the states would form around.

People often question how the Constitution could possibly be correct for all times when it was written over 200 years ago and the world has changed considerably since then. One point that strict Constitutionalists will make pertaining to this is that you can always amend the Constitution. This is true, the method for amending the Constitution is written right in it. Article V states that either 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or 2/3 of the States Convening to form amendments must pass, then 3/4 of the states must ratify the amendment for it to become law.

I had a discussion with a gun enthusiast and told him that I had discovered that the term "Militia" was not just in the 2nd Amendment, but was all throughout the main body of the Constitution. There is no exact definition of Militia in the Constitution, and there may not be a modern equivalent. I'm not sure that a Founding Father, if rushed forward in time and asked to comment on what a Militia is, would even be able to find for us a comparable group that exists today. In the time of the Revolution, people at a state and local level may have to defend themselves from Indian attack, or possibly from an external invasion (foreign power) to their homes. Everyone was armed to hunt, and I suppose there were occasional wild animals that would enter areas inhabited by people, forcing them to band together in self-defense. The Militia was just a bunch of average guys that picked up their ever present firearms and came together as a group. We don't allow this. We have Police, but you have to have training and pass a test and get hired to do that. We have National Guard and State Reserve forces, but these are people that were trained by the Federal Government and while they can be called out by state Governors, they more typically belong to the Commander-in-Chief (especially since 9/11, after which the Bush administration called on these reserves to fight to a degree that they were not even called on in the Viet Nam War). So, if aliens from space landed tomorrow and began a War of the Worlds - style invasion, do you really think that anyone that you handed a gun to would not willingly step up and fight? Excluding the cowards that would lose their composure and simply run for the hills, the average pacifist that is against firearms in theory will gladly kill to defend his family. The problem is that we do not ever face this situation (and we do not need to hunt for food), so the ownership of firearms as the Founding Fathers envisioned it is not applicable to today's world.

The gun enthusiast pointed out that the proposal of a Constitutional Amendment on gun rights would fail if written either way, pro- or anti- gun ownership. I think he's right. There is no clear overwhelming majority either way. Given the margin of divide on most political issues right and left, there are not many ways the Constitution could be amended with the current mood of the populous. So gun ownership falls into an ambiguous middle ground. People seeking to make what they feel are reasonable restrictions to gun ownership are not usually thwarted by Constitutional arguments and those wishing to extend gun ownership rights, such as the recent trend to allow concealed carry laws in many states, are also not restricted by the Constitution.

There were other things in the Constitution that surprised me. Just how much of the original Constitution has been superseded is surprising. One real surprise for me what the language for return of the slaves to slave states or rather to their owners if they escaped their masters and ran away to another state. At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there were no free states. By the time the Constitution was being framed, states in the North were only just started to outlaw slavery. I remember learning in my pre-Civil War history how the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law inflamed Abolitionists in the North. What you don't realize when you read the Constitution in detail is that this provision was already written into the Constitution almost 60 years before the Fugitive Slave Laws were enacted. You see in the Constitution the struggle to bind together the free and separate institutions that were the states into a single federal group, with central governing authorities. As the United States under the Articles of Confederation (and later, the seceded Southern States under their Confederation) proved, if you do not have strong central authority, you will not have the power to act as a group, and you will not have the power to survive.

Their were a number of things that were amended since the original Constitution. There is a very strange clause in there about the way Presidents are to be elected. The expectation was that there would be multiple candidates running for President, and there was a provision for what I will call a run-off election, but in reality, it's a matter of narrowing down the top two candidates. It used to be that you picked who you liked out of a large field, then the top two would not have clear majorities and they would redo the vote with just the top two. In the event of a tie or dispute, the House would decide. This happened between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was one vote away from not being our third President.

There were other odd things. It sounds like there was an expectation that states may want to combine or further subdivide into more or less states. The ability to raise taxes is throughout the text. The problem I have is that I do not understand a portion of the text. What is a Letter of Marque and Reprisal? There are lots of phrases that seem to be preventing states from being able to screw over one another competitively. There is also language that what one state grants its citizens is supposed to be recognized by other states. So what about gay marriage? How is that not a national right as soon as one state extends it as a right for themselves?

One very interesting phrase at the end of the body of the Constitution, before the last Article that tells how the Constitution will be ratified, is that there will be no religious test for qualification for any office in the United States. This certainly flies in the face of people today that like to say that we are a Christian Nation and that our Founding Fathers intended for us to be Christian. If that is so, why are they explicitly saying that there be not test for religion to hold office? If we are a Christian Nation, that clause should say that only Christians can hold office. We are not a Christian Nation, only a nation that is predominantly Christian.

The Bill of Rights comes along and immediately limits the power of the new Government that was established. Everyone knows that the Bill of Rights consists of 10 Amendments. What I did not realize until I re-read this was that there were originally 12 proposed. The first original Amendment was about the apportionment of Representatives which was never passed, and the second was about compensation to members of Congress, which was only passed in 1992.

I only recognized four names on the list of the people that signed the Constitution. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. I was surprised John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were not involved, but I found out that they were in Europe serving as ambassadors at the time. I recognize many more names of people that signed the Declaration of Independence. I would venture to say that most people probably consider the signers of the Declaration of Independence as our Founding Fathers, even though that document only says what we are not, not what we are. The true Founding Fathers that set up the United States and made us what we are today are the writers of the Constitution.

So, after reading the Constitution, I would have to say that I believe we should follow it as we do all laws and regulations, but we also have to revisit it and recraft it from time to time. The original Constitution makes it pretty clear that slavery was not only accepted, but protected by the laws of the land. We had to fight a bloody Civil War to change that. My point is that laws are made by men, and men make mistakes. Times change, and the way we govern ourselves has to change with them. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of patriots from time to time. It's simpler just to amend the Constitution to reflect changing realities. I prefer pruning the branches of the Constitution to descending into chaos.

Culture of Cults

When I was in college, we had a religious group on campus that was recruiting a lot of students and growing very fast. Then the college newspaper, the Collegian, reported that they were a cult. Supposedly, they would take depressed and despondent students on a "retreat" where they would put them in a room with a dozen members and pressure them until they cracked. They wouldn't let them go until they started to agree with them that their views were correct. They would isolate the members from their friends and families over the next few weeks and continue to work on them until they were indoctrinated. I remember the paper reporting that one student's father lost contact with her and became alarmed. He hired someone to kidnap her back and had her deprogrammed. She explained how she had been brainwashed and how glad she was to escape.

We've recently met a couple that are in a local charismatic church that is growing very fast. They have attempted to recruit us several times. We've learned that innocent invitations to parties and get-togethers always include extended sessions of prayers and preaching. I became suspicious of the church and did some research. There were glowing reviews of the church online, as well as scathing commentaries. The detractors were usually members of similar churches that had only small variants to the doctrine. I saw some indications that the church was a cult. I found their site and saw that they had a podcast. When I downloaded and listened to the most recent episode, it was a real treat. They believe that the end of the world is coming. More specifically, they believe that the end times may have already started, and the 1000 years of bad times are here. The sermon discussed how they needed to put laws in place to protect the faithful and needed to take over government functions so that they could be in control. They discussed how the end times would have pockets of good interspersed in areas that had gone bad. They spent a considerable time talking about how this other church was full of nutty people that were seriously deluded because they believed that Christ comes at the end of the 1000 years, while the truth is that Christ comes at the beginning of the 1000 years. Since listening to this incredible sermon, the couple has shared with us their ideas on storing a year's worth of food in their house, and raising chickens as a way to insure they don't go hungry if society collapses.

This is nuts in my opinion. I believe you're free to believe what you want to believe, but I also believe that I can believe that what you believe is crazy, and in this case, that's what I believe. More importantly, when people believe something that is insane, and their ideology is telling them to go out and recruit and spread the word and be ready to take over the government to further these beliefs, that's the point where you've crossed the line into dangerous.

What am I going to do about this? Avoid the crazy people and warn others if the subject comes up.

I started thinking about cults and the characteristics of what makes a cult. Just like the old revelation that sexuality was fluid and that people were not gay or straight, but usually somewhere on the continuum between the extremes, cultish behavior or beliefs are on a continuum. There are many organizations that exhibit cult-like behavior.

So I put together a list of characteristics of cults.
1. Beliefs that cannot be shaken by truth or facts.
2. Recruiting of other members.
3. Intolerance of dissent within the cult group.
4. Policing of beliefs within the group. Training to learn and reinforce group cohesion.
5. Attacking individuals or groups outside of the cult that disagree.
6. Devotion to the cause and willingness to do and say what you are told by the group despite the costs and downside of these actions.
7. Certainty that other forces are arrayed against you. Paranoia. Us versus them mentality that precludes critical thinking or ability to consider circumstances dispassionately.
8. Willingness to protect the group despite the cost or the righteousness of any particular circumstances.

I started thinking about groups that displayed cultish behavior came up with the following list:

Religious Cults
Political Parties
Military Organizations
Police Forces
Intelligence Organizations?
Sports Teams or Fans around Sports Teams
Corporations
Political Movements
Media Organizations

Now obviously, not all members of these groups display cult-like behavior, but there are great examples within each group.

The military, of which I was once a member, is very conscious of their "socialization". They require cohesion to function and succeed, they expect orders to be followed explicitly (and rapidly without question) and they evoke strong loyalty reactions. They don't get pegged to the far end of the cult meter because there are examples of military people that will speak out about a war or report their fellow members for infractions.

Police organizations that become corrupt or overly brutal become cult-like. They talk about the Blue Code of Honor and the Blue Shield of Silence (that's not right, but I can't remember what they call the effect where police are not supposed to ever report each other or bring each other up on charges).

Military organizations that form around brutal dictators are cult-like. Look at North Korea as a prime example. Dissent it not tolerated and belief of anything other than that the Supreme Leader is a godlike figure is not tolerated. Hitler had a cult of personality built up around him and it infected the entire nation to a degree.

Political Parties can be cult-like when they issue "talking points" and try to keep everyone "on message". The problem with this is that if they pick a bad direction, there is no way to correct the problem and steer onto the right course.

The advantage of behavior in the direction of a cult is that people can be unified, they can speak and act with one purpose and they can get things done. They can sweep aside opposition and will not be slowed by internal dissent or hesitancy. The disadvantage is that groups can either be driven far down a bad path, or societies will not find innovations and new ideas if they do not fit in nicely with old beliefs. I can imagine the anti-cult groups having slogans like "Think for yourself" and "Question Authority".

In real practice, I believe that society swings back and forth between this cult discipline (like was seen in the McCarthy era) and dissent and questioning (like what we saw in the 60's). I believe it's good to vacillate back and forth between these extremes. That way you get the advantage of decisive action and the advantage of self correction. History has fluctuated back and forth between these extremes, but what you have to ask yourself is, where am I right now?