I probably wouldn't go quite as far as this piece, but worth noting that Germany (another country with judicial review as strong as the US) has judicial nomination votes kept secret. This is meant to help keep the process as un-partisan as possible. Would be interesting to hear what other votes are kept secret in various legislatures around the world. I might nominate taxes as another good one. Representatives behave very differently when they're not in front a C Span camera!
Honestly, just outlawing cameras on the floor of Congress would be a big step forward. No incentive for pointless partisan speeches that throw red meat to the base
Removing CSPAN itself wouldn't limit the ability to go on any of the shows and offer spin but I think would still be a huge step in the right direction. Thank GOD federal courts haven't and will never open up to live video feeds. Audio for the real nerds is fine.
Even Supreme Court audio has hurt the Court. Justices ask questions that they know will play well on Twitter but have nothing to do with the issues in the case.
I'm of two minds about this. Yes, I tend to feel video would be a danger but most Americans have a really uninformed impression of the court and imagine it just behaving like they do when they debate abortion or whatever.
Sometimes you get a misleading audio clip played out of context but at the same time I think you also get lots of Americans exposed to audio of the justices taking these issues very seriously and raising points that most people might not realize are relevant.
I think overall audio is a blessing since the alternative is relying on biased reporting.
Speaking of taxation, no one in the press commented on Biden's line about 'secret ballots' in Congress. He made it in the middle of the 2022 State of the Union. Commenting on how big business and the wealthy don't pay their fair share, he said ‘I may be wrong, but my guess is, if we took a secret ballot in this floor [Congress], that we’d all agree that the present tax system ain’t fair. We have to fix it.’
Biden didn't say this based off of conjecture. He was in Congress in 1986 when closed doors and secret votes were used extensively in the crafting of the 1986 Tax Reform. These actions became the centerpiece of one of the most read books in political science Douglas Arnold's "Logic of Congressional Action." Time and again, both Douglas and his interviewees (mostly Members of Congress) make the same claims - the closed doors sessions allowed us to check powerful groups and vote for better legislation. Both Republicans and Democrats hail that tax reform as the best of modern reforms, and one has to go back to pre-1970 Wilbur Mills Ways and Means to see something of the like. Notably Wilbur Mills closed the doors on everything his committee did. All votes were declared to be unanimous.
A similar dynamic happened just four years later, when Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, exasperated with his failure at producing strong climate legislation, closed the doors to accomplish similarly wonderful results. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments is the strongest piece of environmental legislation in history.
Throughout time, we see the same thing. Secrecy prevents the brunt of powerful interests. And this is why Hamilton commented on the secrecy of the writing of the Constitution with such strong language: "Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamors of faction (special interests) would have prevented any satisfactory result."
That's worth repeating, transparency in the legislatures would have "prevented any satisfactory result." Spot on.
I wonder how much difference it would make if we kept only transcripts of government, or if we only released recordings on a substantial delay (like 1 year or more after the event), so that we’d have a record but not a lot of opportunity to grandstand for social media.
Pre-1971, all important votes in congressional committees were conducted in secret. We don't have (AFAIK) a single committee vote or proposal put forth by John F. Kennedy when he was a Senator in the 1950s. These practices dated back not just to the first Congress, but all the way back to the first Continental legislatures as well as many similar institutional settings in England. The "Committee of the Whole" was used universally as a parliamentary device to reject legislation in secret. It was neutered by the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act which was signed by President Nixon - ironically before Watergate and before the Pentagon Papers. Committee transparency was the express goal - and the results have been an unending nightmare.
SCOTUS sometimes releases per curiam opinions, which literally means "by the court", instead of being attributed to one justice. Any justices are still free to concur/dissent on their own, but the binding ruling is a collective one.
Love this! Is there anything in the constitution that would disallow this? The other nice thing is this would make big money donors way less confident they’re getting their money’s worth. Do you think it would still be good to make public aware the party breakdown of votes yes/no from each party that happens during Anonymous Congress? If we had the latter system where total party support was recorded, would there be any issue in just letting all votes be anonymous sans the 20% minority threshold since the voters would still have the ability to throw out offending parties in the case that bad legislation won out?
The main constitutional question would be whether having the President involves violates the separation of powers. (This could potentially be avoided as Michael suggested in a separate comment by having the Vice President be the third decision maker, since the VP is oddly sort of a member of both the executive and legislative branches for certain constitutional purposes already.)
Yeah my understanding is that the rest of the proposal is Kosher because for the most part the Constitution lets Congress set its own rules of procedure
Bringing the President more directly into legislative negotiations in Congress -- which already happens and is inherent in the constitutional structure that requires the President approval of legislation -- is certainly less unconstitutional than Congress wholesale delegating its lawmaking power to the President, as happens too often now. This doesn't cut one branch out of the lawmaking process the way that delegating to Presidents the ability to enact major legislation without Congress voting on it does.
The President's informal role in negotiations is one thing; the President having a formal role is the passage of legislation is another; the first thing is constitutional and the second runs into separation of powers issues; see the legislative veto in Chadha v. INS, or the line-item veto in Clinton v. New York.
Fair concern that I had as well, but I actually think that the wide freedom the houses of Congress have to set their own procedure covers this.
The problem in the line item veto was that the bill that became law wasn't the bill that passed both houses of Congress. Similar issue in Chada.
Here the role of the president only affects whether the legislation gets brought to the floor under a certain procedure. I sus the court stays out of that.
Sure, but I didn't see anything here about allowing the president to excuse portions of a bill that's already passed Congress and sign the rest into law, which is what a line item veto is; or about allowing one house of Congress to override executive branch decisions, which is what INS v Chadha involved. And Presidents do have a formal role in the passage of legislation -- they have to agree to sign it before it takes effect.
The formal role is delimited by the Constitution! Expanding that role to encompass "gets to decide what bills get a vote in Congress" goes beyond what's laid out in the Constitution. That is why it is not kosher and that is why the legislative and line item vetoes weren't either.
But actually re: big money donors I think it's just the opposite. It actually means that small money individual donors are less likely to get what they want.
I know people like to think what happens is that big money donors just corruptly buy people off -- and it's not that it never happens -- but that's not how it normally works.
What they really buy is access and time so the legislator hears their view on all these issues. You know how it is when you only hear one side of an issue, especially one you don't have preexisting views on. Not to mention that politicians see themselves as there to make the country better not to be corrupt so there is a strong internal pressure to come to actually believe the things they say when they reassure a donor. Also the big money donors get enough face time that they can get a decent sense of what issues the politician really is passionate about and can focus on electing like minded people.
What this system is literally designed to do is reduce the power of all the ideologically extreme small donors who don't want to see any compromise because it's not about achieving some particular policy goal but expressing identity.
That's a fundamentally different mechanism. That's about a secret ballot for *voters* which prevented landlords, employers or just their peers etc from punishing or rewarding those voters based on how they voted.
Here we are talking about the *relative* ability of two different groups (rich large donors vs voters) to punish or reward the legislators for the votes they take. I'm arguing this increases the relative power of the large donor versus the individual voter (whether or not they are a donor trying to vote them out is a means of imposing consequences).
Peter, the secret ballot metaphor holds precisely wrt to Congress. But it only works if we clear up a misunderstanding you have. You see, it is naive to claim that political money buys access. Sure, we hear that a lot, but let's look at the actual numbers. 95% of dark money is spent on attack ads. 95%! Clearly an attack ad isn't a form of access or bribery or cajolery, that is money spent in a negative fashion, and is better known as voter intimidation. The second most important use of political spending is challenger funding, which is again, money spent in a negative / attacking fashion, with the express goal of removing someone from office (as in to primary someone) or to prevent would be challengers. Money is also spent on push polls, opposition research etc, and then, only then does money trickle in to gain a member's ear in the form of donations etc. What this means is that members are terrorized - and I don't use this word with a sense of hyperbole. They receive death threats, they are attacked endlessly via big dollar media campaigns, they see their work distorted through expensive misinformation campaigns, and then well all of that is achieved, they are primaried. A great example of this is Bob Inglis. Greater secrecy would provide legislators shelter to vote their conscience. And we don't have to guess on this. We have great empirical data to show this taking place. Secrecy shuns lobbyists and intimidation and allows reps to craft better legislation for the broader public.
It would almost definitely be unconstitutional under the current order. The relevant section of Article I:
"Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal."
At the very least 1/5 of members of Congress could block anything being done anonymously. And I would say that this proposal does not cover a case that "require[s] security" in any way that the framers could have possibly meant those words. The courts might still defer to Congress' judgment but it would still be a violation of the spirit of the law.
The Framers endorsed secrecy and used it readily. So read Article I, Section 5, Clause 3 a bit more closely. These 56 words are more crafty than you think. And they ensure an absolute right to secrecy.
So sure, as you suggest, 1/5th of those present are able to get all the names of all the members put in the Journal. But go back to the top line of that clause, the Journal only needs to be published from 'time to time' which in Madison's case was 53 years. But things get more interesting with the following line, starting with "Excepting." This exception declares that nothing from the Journal needs to be published ever.
I always put on my Machiavellian hat when I consider this realm, and my first thought is that you would have a lot of metaphorical witch hunting to try to suss out who voted against the party line. "Who are the RINOs/DINOs that voted for/against this? Unless you reveal your vote, we're gonna primary you!" And this being politicians, they're prone to lie about what their real vote was in anonymity. You could have some neutral entity who knows, but then that entity will get pressured to leak it, and once it's leaked, people have a First Amendment right to further spread the leak.
There's a lot I like about this, but you have some collective action problems that need a very strong norm of respecting anonymous votes in order for it to stick.
That's a real challenge, but I predict we could come up with a mechanism that would create enough uncertainty and plausible deniability to make a difference.
It doesn't even have to be perfect: sometimes, just buying a few weeks would allow politicians to wait out the news cycle and blunt the harshest consequences of bipartisan votes, especially for policy matters that aren't already intensely polarized.
Agreed, an "accused" Congressman would just vehemently deny it, and then accuse someone else. Like a giant game of Mafia/The Traitors. And then the media would move on after two days.
We don't have to imagine. We've had secret legislatures conducting their votes for a good chuck of history, including in the US, The Committee of the Whole held secret votes in Congress for nearly 200 years before it was ripped apart by Nixon's 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act. AFAIK, there is no record of this witch hunt taking place. And I suspect I know why, because it would be akin to picking up watermelon seeds with grease on your fingers. It would prove so fruitless that folks would just stop attempting to sort this out.
Further we don't have to go back to ancient times or the 1960s for examples. Even in the past year there were dozens of secret votes in Congress. The most salient were the secret ballot Republican caucus votes on the Speaker. Phones were not allowed in the rooms, ballots were cast and people were blown away by the results (in every case the secret votes proved to be a slap in the face to Trump and his pressuring, whereas the public votes endorsed him). But in no case did they officially out one member, or really even try, because why? Because it would prove fruitless. And I can't imagine a more pressured and publicized series of votes.
Useful as a thought experiment, though the specific proposal you outline is beyond unwieldly. In the old days of secret caucuses and very powerful committee chairs, much (most?) of congressional work happened somewhat like that. It's to my Boomer shame that way back then we campaigned so loudly for open democratic congressional procedures and the abolition of smoke-filled rooms. I speculate that just banning TV recording would help.
My thought on a similar vein to this is to make it way easier to force a vote on a bill. Something like legislators can force a vote in both chambers on a bill by getting 5 Senators and 30 reps to sign this newly revamped discharge petition. Each senator and rep could only sign one petition per 2 year cycle, so it's not something that can be done with frivolity.
This is an interesting column, and I love the general idea behind these weekly columns so kudos to Ben and the team.
I agree that citizens need to be able to hold their Members of Congress accountable. That can't happen if the results of certain votes are anonymous. So I don't think that vote results should stay anonymous permanently, but maybe they can stay anonymous for a certain time period (90 days, 180 days, until after primary season are all ideas off the top of my head). That would shield MoCs from immediate backlash but also allow citizens to eventually know the results and factor them into a general election vote.
Your comment highlights a serious problem with how 'accountability' actual works. Accountability is an amoral tool, and it overwhelmingly favors those in power. This is true in Congress and in the electorate - and the prevention of intimidation by powerful groups (wielding physical clubs and guns of accountability) was a major reason why the switch to secret ballots has been so successful. Time and again, scholars who tackle this question come up with the same unsettling answer as scholars Achen and Bartels did in 2016 : "Greater 'electoral accountability' mostly seems to have involved catering to the interests of an affluent (and probably more attentive) minority of the electorate." Journalist Martha Hamilton wrote up a similar observation in 1984 "The congressional sunshine initiative became a tool for the very special interests whose power the reforms were supposed to dilute. Corporations and lobbying groups have seized on the open hearings to help them hold legislators accountable as never before." I agree.
I love this thought experiment. One thing I would suggest is that, in addition to only being held four times a year, only bills that had been introduced into congress and voted on publicly at least once could be considered during an anonymous congress. That way there would be at least a degree of the accountability that happens during an open session. I'm sure refinements would be necessary by those most expert in the world of politics, but I offer this as something to add into the discussion.
Part of the idea is to pass legislation that isn’t even coming up for a vote right now - but perhaps just requiring that it have been brought up for a vote in one of the two chambers is sufficient.
Sleepless in Seattle is a near perfect movie. The problem with modern romantic rom coms is the lack of suffering to counterpoint the value of love to heal loss. The whole “goofy meet cute” hallmarkification of rom coms is what has doomed them, not any murky cultural climate issues.
I found that movie extremely disappointing. When something finally happens the movie ends!* Now “you’ve got Mail”- that’s a different story. There you have peak Tom Hanks era rom com imo!
P.S.
Admittedly I’ve only watched sleepless in Seattle once, and as a kid. Possibly some subtleties were lost on me then. I still maintain that you’ve got Mail is better.
I love this one. My bottom line assessment of our imperfect democracy is that it really only guarantees one power, but it is very important: we can throw the bums out. Anonymous congress preserves that power and solves a lot of the pathological defects of democracy.
In case you (or other readers haven't read it), there was an excellent Astral Code Ten book review contest entry of Brian Kogelmann's "Secret Government" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-secret-government). It complements today's post: deeper, but less practical.
I'm not sure how meaningful the power to "throw the bums out" is if you don't know who "the bums" are. How do you know you're not voting out one of the good (from your perspective) members?
One powerful and blinkered assumption throughout all these comments, is that citizens - even some of them - seek out and follow congressional votes. This is not only not true today, it has never been true wrt to any legislature in the world. In the US Congress, each rep currently votes about a 1,000 times a year. This means for me, in Boston, to follow just the votes of my reps, I would have to follow 3,000 votes - 2 Senators, 1 Member of House. Even elite citizens and elite newspapers don't follow 1 percent of this. And coming to solid decisions of even those votes often requires reading thousands of pages of legislation and legislative proposals, viewing endless hearings, studying law and history, etc. Worse, lobbyists, reps, funders, etc all know which of these votes that citizens pay attention to, so they work the other ones. Now, of course, there is one group that more readily follows all this action - which even the New York Times and The Hill does not – lobbyists. Lobbyists aren't just idiotic mercenaries. No. The good ones are 20 year veterans of Capitol Hill, they are policy specialists, often with advanced degrees, who have the capability (and a nice salary) to follow the ornate legislation. And when they sus out problems they send that information back to their employers. This game of 'accountability' and 'transparency' benefits them. And it isn't even close. Citizens do not follow the action at all. So let's not pretend they are about to 'throw the bums out' based on rational decisions built on the data. They have never done so, and never will. But lobbyists thank you for asking for greater tools of accountability - they wield those tools well.
Matts podcast partner is boring. Not in a good way. Matt should team up with someone like Sarah Isgur. She would bring energy, good verbal communication skills, and some interesting disagreement plus she’s kind of fun! I’m just planting this seed now so that possibly it can grow into something 2-3 years from now.
Anonymous Congress, eh? I get it - not democracy. That’s a dangerous trend on the left, from Thomas Friedman’s pining for Chicom authoritarianism to Matthew Yglesias wanting less transparency in government to the anti-free speech laws the left is forever pushing in Scotland, England, Canada and here in the USA.
It’s time the Democrats just add Repeal the First Amendment to their platform, along with a Less Transparency in Government Act. I suggest you guys also take a look at the old Roman custom of declaring a temporary dictator in times of emergency like, uh, say a Republican is trending toward winning the White House, lol.
Democracy is a sliding scale, and strictly more isn’t always better. It would be more “democratic” if mayors had zero executive powers and everything were voted on by the legislature. Actually, screw the legislature— we could abolish legislatures entirely just have every decision go directly to the voters as a ballot measure! No elected officials at all, because more democracy is always better, right?
What I believe, and is likely the trend you’re attacking, is that we fetishize the process of democracy over outcomes. The measure of a well functioning democracy is: when most people want some outcome, does it generally happen (barring outcomes that trample certain enshrined rights)? In the US, the answer is usually “no”, due to our overabundance of veto points. I would be in favor of making the US more governable. I’d expect Republicans to benefit from that just as often as Democrats, but the outcome would be that voters would be able to assign accountability for outcomes to the party in charge, and that would force *both* parties to campaign on more realistic platforms.
Important to realize that many of our country's strongest pieces of legislation were written, debated, and voted on in abject secrecy. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are two fun examples. But even through the 1980s and 1990s there are great moments of beneficial secrecy. Full transparency? What has it produced? I think we are still waiting to see its success story.
No, the outcome isn’t “usually” no, but it often is. If you don’t like that then by all means suggest reforms, but not hide what legislators are doing so that they can continuously lie to their constituents about how they voted and to what values they adhere. That’s a disgraceful idea.
The problem now isn’t that bills representing most people’s wishes aren’t being implemented; it’s that the bills being implemented all too often go against their wishes - fomenting foreign wars, and funding deals that enrich our politicians and their friends. Do the people really want these bills, and continuing resolutions, that overspend our revenue by trillions? What Matt wants would allow our legislators to continue to roll in pork fat with no accountability.
Legislators already constantly lie to their voters about what they believe. Sitting Republican legislators have told us that upwards of 30 Republican Senators wanted to impeach Trump. This is an extreme example, but the number of legislators who are able to honestly vote what they believe under the current political system is zero.
The mechanism by which legislators are kept honest to their voters also allows them to be held hostage by a minority of their voters: ideally a legislator representing 40/20/40 RDIs should be supporting any legislation supported by 75% of their voters, an overwhelming supermajority. But in a R district, a policy supported by 15/20/40 RDIs and opposed by 25/0/0 can get the legislator primaried into oblivion. This is also somewhat undemocratic and stupid. Secret ballots aren't considered undemocratic inherently: you have one, and they aren't guaranteed to increase spending: there are a lot of sacred cows that can't be unfunded because anyone who tries will put a target over their heads.
I disagree with your assessment that a passionate few punching above their weight is undemocratic. There are reams of documents, chiefly in the Federalist Papers, explaining why that is not only desirable but a design feature of our constitution.
Democrats pushing punishment-free crime, resulting in the putrefying cities we see today, is a result of committed minorities bullying the majority. That case is undesirable from my point of view, but others seem to approve. Democrats pushing transvestite participation in women’s sports is another. Most people think Biden is crooked, but the Democrats are committed to sweeping his crimes under the rug. These are all bad outcomes in my view, but there have been many good outcomes from passionate minorities carrying the day. These examples don’t advance my argument very much. I only bring them up because I am feeling churlish about your Republicans-are-always-evil examples.
All you've done is show us examples of why minority rule is also bad when the Democrats do it. I suggest instead that the actual lesson is that minority rule is undemocratic and bad. The Federalist Papers are full of things that are undemocratic.
Number one, we are not talking about minority rule. We are talking about passionate minorities getting their way on some issues. I think this is good, and our founders were right on the money when they set it up that way. Like any other mechanism, it will produce good and bad results. They knew that true democracy would result in an evil tyranny just as bad as communism or fascism, as examples.
There is a creeping authoritarianism in today’s left, which is a response to the dysfunction we all observe in our government. Friedman notoriously pined for a Xi, but what’s worse is that the left generally agreed with him, or at least did not react with repugnance. Matthew Yglesias thinks what we need is to let our politicians operate behind a cloak that obscures their actions.
The dysfunction is caused by exactly what our founders said would be our undoing. We have become, largely, an amoral people. Listen to any discussion about a notorious crime committed by a wealthy person. “Stupid” is what you’ll hear over and over again. “Can you believe he killed his wife and hid her body in the pond? What an idiot! He was rich and had it made, yet now he’s going to jail.” I’m always agog at these conversations, which invariably go just like that.
Two or three generations ago the word you’d have heard is “evil”. But our population is so sunk in relativism that they can’t even bring themselves to use that word. Our founders said that the government they birthed could only work for a moral population.
Maybe Yglesias and Friedman are right. Maybe we should just be realistic and admit we are fallen so far that a Democratic, Constitutional Republic will no longer work. And instead of trying to find our way back, perhaps we should settle on an enlightened despot like Xi. Look at how well he’s doing for China with his zero covid, enslavement of the Uyghurs, and Belt & Road shenanigans. Friedman is already there. Today Matt took a disturbing step in that direction.
"The problem now isn’t that bills representing most people’s wishes aren’t being implemented; it’s that the bills being implemented all too often go against their wishes"
You think these giant bills filled with things no one has time to read, that were put in at the behest of either monied interest or those of small committed minorities, are what people want? No, I can’t prove my assertion. Neither can you prove this one.
This is a worrying trend, but it isn't really a trend on the left, and I'm not sure how left Yglesias is. Maybe more of a trend in the center, or a cross-party phenomenon. I actually don't see a lot of ideas like this floated on the farther left like DSA, Bernie Sanders, etc., where people (in the US at least) tend to be pro-democracy.
As for the last remark, that's rather silly for a couple reasons. First, and less importantly it gets the history wrong: the Roman dictator did not suspend the existence of regular offices (which became temporarily subject to him) of elections, in fact a dictator could even be appointed to conduct an election when no one else could. But to your actual point, it's not "the Democrats" but Trump (who you not so subtly alluded to) who talks about declaring himself a dictator.
I’m not a Trump fan, but I consider the Democrats even more of a threat to the liberal order. It is they who are weaponizing the government successfully. They were impeaching Trump almost the moment he took office, for what we now know was an absurd dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton. It is they who are prosecuting him for mishandling classified information in a fashion more benign than Hillary or Biden did. And sure, only Trump obstructed, but he was the only one facing a hostile investigation. He didn’t have the benefit of cooperative investigators who would let the clock run out. As much as I dislike the bugger, the Dems keep shoving me into his corner. Why is that? Is this just another example of them picking their opponents?
Wouldn't the crazy extremist members of Congress just reveal who was insufficiently extreme in the private session? Do we expect MTG to honor the anonymity?
So only the triumvirate knows how people voted? Or is it really little pieces of paper in a hat? There needs to be some auditing function. Either someone knows, and can falsify, or the system is vulnerable to digital or analog hacking. If it's the triumvirate who knows, then single party rule would still enable falsifying. There's a sunlight disinfectant element to this...
I am not a computer scientist but of the people I have heard talk about the question of electronic voting the more they know the leerier they are of the idea.
That said, you could do paper ballots so I would not consider the voting system the biggest problem with this proposal.
Who needs cryptography. Aristotle developed a system of two urns and decent-sized balls of two different colors. At the end of the vote turn over the urns (with the cameras rolling) and count the totals in each urn. Works great, even in today's world infested with cameras.
There is no limit to the schemes men can invent to avoid the scenario that worries you. Here's one I just invented: Each member gets two tokens, one green with a round hole in the middle and one red with a square hole. There are two boxes, one for Yes and one for No. Each member places his two tokens in different envelopes, in private, and drops the Yes and No tokens in the appropriate box. At the end of voting the boxes are opened in front of all members, counted, and reported.
I think we should up the stakes. Make each "token" an ostracon, and whichever name is scratched onto the most red ostraca is banished from DC for a period of 10 years...
Further: By requiring both tokens to be cast, no member can emerge and hold up their unused token as proof of their vote. They can lie about their vote or tell the truth, but no one will know for sure. The round hole / square hole is so that a different token can be used for each vote and be issued just before votes are cast.
Also: The shapes would make for good visuals for the TV news folks as a symbol of the bill.
This is quite naive. Look up how secret ballot votes work in other systems. They can still be “whipped” with a high degree of efficiency and parliament members are not fully shielded from pressures and incentives if those around them (fellow party members/leaders or special interest groups). It’s only individual accountability to voters that is truly lost.
THPacis: I know of no example of a secret ballot vote in a legislature being successfully whipped - ever. And you have plenty to choose from. Each year there are dozens or thousands of secret ballot votes in legislatures around the world. In the USA, there were a number of salient and pressured secret ballot votes in Congress last year - the Republican caucus votes on the speaker. No evidence they were whipped.
I also disagree with your analysis of accountability. Accountability is an amoral tool, best wielded by those in power. I can think of no example where greater legislator accountability actually proved beneficial to the masses at large. We find overwhelmingly, that it leaves them exposed to attack ads, challenger funding, etc.
Urns with balls have worked for thousands of years. Boxes with ballots similarly. Turn over the urn at the end of the vote and count. If you really want proof, smash the urn at the end of each vote.
Wait, is that the idea? Matt wasn't real clear on what "anonymous" actually means and whether it was anonymous from the public or anonymous from the members themselves.
Ben was the one who wrote it, not Matt. It definitely would have been helpful to explain that “anonymous” really means anonymous - like each person pushes a small button on their desk (yes, no, abstain) and the lights at the front of the room just display the total once everyone has voted.
Similarly, wouldn’t people who voted for something good that their constituents liked want to be able to take credit for it?
I feel like between radicals wanting to out those insufficiently loyal to their ideology and other members wanted to tout their legislative accomplishments, the anonymity would be very short lived. Plus there’s a whole media angle where it becomes big news to figure out who voted for what.
Exactly: And again we have myriad examples. All important congressional committee votes in the USA, before 1970 were secret. And even in 2023 there were multiple secret ballot votes for speaker in the Republican caucus. Few try to interview members to figure out how they voted because they rarely get accounts that square with the results, and then who do you blame for flipping? No one. The vote was secret.
I realize this is admittedly half-baked, but there is directly relevant history here that ought not be neglected. Before the early 1970s, the House did much more in the Committee of the Whole, and it was very common to take teller votes—yes, submitting little stubs of paper, anonymously. Many of the most important decisions were made in this way, with close and untraceable votes, and then final passage votes would tend to be very large numbers, as members put themselves on the record so as to take credit.
There were a lot of good things about this, and I’d like to see it brought back. But it’s not like the transparency reformers had no valid complaints. Attendance was often poor. Members could serve interests without any record.
The main thing we’d need to do to move back to this model is resuscitate floor action as a way of legislating. Right now it’s pretty completely dead.
Unfortunately, "before the early 70s" is another way of saying "before the rise of 24/7 cable news, social media, SuperPACs and the flesh-eating scrutiny all of that entails."
We actually get lots of wonderful examples of pre-1970 voting each year. And the results continue to be fascinating, and I'd argue, positive.
Even in the past couple years, we've had secret votes on renaming military bases (removing names of confederate officers), we've had secret votes on speakers in the Republican caucus, we've had secret votes on the sanctioning of Liz Cheney.
Continuously we find data that broadly corresponds to what we saw pre-1970. The secret votes are less unanimous (often indicative of fear) and generally appear to avoid some form of tyrannical pressure. Going back a little further, we've had secret votes in the 1990s on environmental legislation (resulting the passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments - perhaps the strongest and most beneficial environmental legislation ever) as well as the 1986 tax reforms (embraced by both the right and left as good law).
So before you throw in the towel, check the data - and the Constitution, which surprisingly endorses secrecy for any and all congressional actions.
I like this idea, but I think that your “too effective” scenario seems very likely. Right now, a lot of Congress’s activity happens through the small set of procedures which create exceptions to the normal gridlock (eg: budget reconciliation); this would probably have a similar effect.
This piece strikes me as too ad hoc and too naive. Anonymous votes may have their place in specific instances and parallels are known in other democracies. But this proposal is too messy and too prone to corruption which is curiously absent from the discussion. Anonymity shields congresspeople from their voters to whom they ought to be accountable but does NOT shield them from special interest groups lobbies their peers or the president. Nor are e proposed limiting rules all that impressive. “2/3” of the people described could be the president and one other loyal person from his party (eg trump and senate/house majority leader). Then all that is stopping you from doing whatever is the assumption that you can’t find 20% of democrats willing to go along with some kind of corruption or power grab in a scenario where they have complete deniability. It assumes that over 80% of Congress in both parties are at heart both moderate and honest. Strikes me as very naive.
I probably wouldn't go quite as far as this piece, but worth noting that Germany (another country with judicial review as strong as the US) has judicial nomination votes kept secret. This is meant to help keep the process as un-partisan as possible. Would be interesting to hear what other votes are kept secret in various legislatures around the world. I might nominate taxes as another good one. Representatives behave very differently when they're not in front a C Span camera!
Honestly, just outlawing cameras on the floor of Congress would be a big step forward. No incentive for pointless partisan speeches that throw red meat to the base
Removing CSPAN itself wouldn't limit the ability to go on any of the shows and offer spin but I think would still be a huge step in the right direction. Thank GOD federal courts haven't and will never open up to live video feeds. Audio for the real nerds is fine.
Even Supreme Court audio has hurt the Court. Justices ask questions that they know will play well on Twitter but have nothing to do with the issues in the case.
I'm of two minds about this. Yes, I tend to feel video would be a danger but most Americans have a really uninformed impression of the court and imagine it just behaving like they do when they debate abortion or whatever.
Sometimes you get a misleading audio clip played out of context but at the same time I think you also get lots of Americans exposed to audio of the justices taking these issues very seriously and raising points that most people might not realize are relevant.
I think overall audio is a blessing since the alternative is relying on biased reporting.
Speaking of taxation, no one in the press commented on Biden's line about 'secret ballots' in Congress. He made it in the middle of the 2022 State of the Union. Commenting on how big business and the wealthy don't pay their fair share, he said ‘I may be wrong, but my guess is, if we took a secret ballot in this floor [Congress], that we’d all agree that the present tax system ain’t fair. We have to fix it.’
Biden didn't say this based off of conjecture. He was in Congress in 1986 when closed doors and secret votes were used extensively in the crafting of the 1986 Tax Reform. These actions became the centerpiece of one of the most read books in political science Douglas Arnold's "Logic of Congressional Action." Time and again, both Douglas and his interviewees (mostly Members of Congress) make the same claims - the closed doors sessions allowed us to check powerful groups and vote for better legislation. Both Republicans and Democrats hail that tax reform as the best of modern reforms, and one has to go back to pre-1970 Wilbur Mills Ways and Means to see something of the like. Notably Wilbur Mills closed the doors on everything his committee did. All votes were declared to be unanimous.
A similar dynamic happened just four years later, when Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, exasperated with his failure at producing strong climate legislation, closed the doors to accomplish similarly wonderful results. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments is the strongest piece of environmental legislation in history.
Throughout time, we see the same thing. Secrecy prevents the brunt of powerful interests. And this is why Hamilton commented on the secrecy of the writing of the Constitution with such strong language: "Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamors of faction (special interests) would have prevented any satisfactory result."
That's worth repeating, transparency in the legislatures would have "prevented any satisfactory result." Spot on.
I wonder how much difference it would make if we kept only transcripts of government, or if we only released recordings on a substantial delay (like 1 year or more after the event), so that we’d have a record but not a lot of opportunity to grandstand for social media.
Pre-1971, all important votes in congressional committees were conducted in secret. We don't have (AFAIK) a single committee vote or proposal put forth by John F. Kennedy when he was a Senator in the 1950s. These practices dated back not just to the first Congress, but all the way back to the first Continental legislatures as well as many similar institutional settings in England. The "Committee of the Whole" was used universally as a parliamentary device to reject legislation in secret. It was neutered by the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act which was signed by President Nixon - ironically before Watergate and before the Pentagon Papers. Committee transparency was the express goal - and the results have been an unending nightmare.
SCOTUS sometimes releases per curiam opinions, which literally means "by the court", instead of being attributed to one justice. Any justices are still free to concur/dissent on their own, but the binding ruling is a collective one.
Shouldn’t it just be VP rather than President, sidestepping the separation of powers issue?
Not to mention the president being really busy already issue.
We could do with a less-busy president.
Love this! Is there anything in the constitution that would disallow this? The other nice thing is this would make big money donors way less confident they’re getting their money’s worth. Do you think it would still be good to make public aware the party breakdown of votes yes/no from each party that happens during Anonymous Congress? If we had the latter system where total party support was recorded, would there be any issue in just letting all votes be anonymous sans the 20% minority threshold since the voters would still have the ability to throw out offending parties in the case that bad legislation won out?
The main constitutional question would be whether having the President involves violates the separation of powers. (This could potentially be avoided as Michael suggested in a separate comment by having the Vice President be the third decision maker, since the VP is oddly sort of a member of both the executive and legislative branches for certain constitutional purposes already.)
Yeah my understanding is that the rest of the proposal is Kosher because for the most part the Constitution lets Congress set its own rules of procedure
Bringing the President more directly into legislative negotiations in Congress -- which already happens and is inherent in the constitutional structure that requires the President approval of legislation -- is certainly less unconstitutional than Congress wholesale delegating its lawmaking power to the President, as happens too often now. This doesn't cut one branch out of the lawmaking process the way that delegating to Presidents the ability to enact major legislation without Congress voting on it does.
The President's informal role in negotiations is one thing; the President having a formal role is the passage of legislation is another; the first thing is constitutional and the second runs into separation of powers issues; see the legislative veto in Chadha v. INS, or the line-item veto in Clinton v. New York.
Fair concern that I had as well, but I actually think that the wide freedom the houses of Congress have to set their own procedure covers this.
The problem in the line item veto was that the bill that became law wasn't the bill that passed both houses of Congress. Similar issue in Chada.
Here the role of the president only affects whether the legislation gets brought to the floor under a certain procedure. I sus the court stays out of that.
Sure, but I didn't see anything here about allowing the president to excuse portions of a bill that's already passed Congress and sign the rest into law, which is what a line item veto is; or about allowing one house of Congress to override executive branch decisions, which is what INS v Chadha involved. And Presidents do have a formal role in the passage of legislation -- they have to agree to sign it before it takes effect.
The formal role is delimited by the Constitution! Expanding that role to encompass "gets to decide what bills get a vote in Congress" goes beyond what's laid out in the Constitution. That is why it is not kosher and that is why the legislative and line item vetoes weren't either.
But actually re: big money donors I think it's just the opposite. It actually means that small money individual donors are less likely to get what they want.
I know people like to think what happens is that big money donors just corruptly buy people off -- and it's not that it never happens -- but that's not how it normally works.
What they really buy is access and time so the legislator hears their view on all these issues. You know how it is when you only hear one side of an issue, especially one you don't have preexisting views on. Not to mention that politicians see themselves as there to make the country better not to be corrupt so there is a strong internal pressure to come to actually believe the things they say when they reassure a donor. Also the big money donors get enough face time that they can get a decent sense of what issues the politician really is passionate about and can focus on electing like minded people.
What this system is literally designed to do is reduce the power of all the ideologically extreme small donors who don't want to see any compromise because it's not about achieving some particular policy goal but expressing identity.
What you’re saying makes intuitive sense but empirically the opposite was true when regular elections went secret ballot:
https://www.congressionalresearch.org/SecretBallot.html
That's a fundamentally different mechanism. That's about a secret ballot for *voters* which prevented landlords, employers or just their peers etc from punishing or rewarding those voters based on how they voted.
Here we are talking about the *relative* ability of two different groups (rich large donors vs voters) to punish or reward the legislators for the votes they take. I'm arguing this increases the relative power of the large donor versus the individual voter (whether or not they are a donor trying to vote them out is a means of imposing consequences).
Peter, the secret ballot metaphor holds precisely wrt to Congress. But it only works if we clear up a misunderstanding you have. You see, it is naive to claim that political money buys access. Sure, we hear that a lot, but let's look at the actual numbers. 95% of dark money is spent on attack ads. 95%! Clearly an attack ad isn't a form of access or bribery or cajolery, that is money spent in a negative fashion, and is better known as voter intimidation. The second most important use of political spending is challenger funding, which is again, money spent in a negative / attacking fashion, with the express goal of removing someone from office (as in to primary someone) or to prevent would be challengers. Money is also spent on push polls, opposition research etc, and then, only then does money trickle in to gain a member's ear in the form of donations etc. What this means is that members are terrorized - and I don't use this word with a sense of hyperbole. They receive death threats, they are attacked endlessly via big dollar media campaigns, they see their work distorted through expensive misinformation campaigns, and then well all of that is achieved, they are primaried. A great example of this is Bob Inglis. Greater secrecy would provide legislators shelter to vote their conscience. And we don't have to guess on this. We have great empirical data to show this taking place. Secrecy shuns lobbyists and intimidation and allows reps to craft better legislation for the broader public.
I don’t think it’s good to mention partisan breakdown because that will effectively de-anonymize the couple independents in Congress.
It would almost definitely be unconstitutional under the current order. The relevant section of Article I:
"Each House shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either House on any question shall, at the desire of one fifth of those present, be entered on the journal."
At the very least 1/5 of members of Congress could block anything being done anonymously. And I would say that this proposal does not cover a case that "require[s] security" in any way that the framers could have possibly meant those words. The courts might still defer to Congress' judgment but it would still be a violation of the spirit of the law.
The Framers endorsed secrecy and used it readily. So read Article I, Section 5, Clause 3 a bit more closely. These 56 words are more crafty than you think. And they ensure an absolute right to secrecy.
So sure, as you suggest, 1/5th of those present are able to get all the names of all the members put in the Journal. But go back to the top line of that clause, the Journal only needs to be published from 'time to time' which in Madison's case was 53 years. But things get more interesting with the following line, starting with "Excepting." This exception declares that nothing from the Journal needs to be published ever.
I always put on my Machiavellian hat when I consider this realm, and my first thought is that you would have a lot of metaphorical witch hunting to try to suss out who voted against the party line. "Who are the RINOs/DINOs that voted for/against this? Unless you reveal your vote, we're gonna primary you!" And this being politicians, they're prone to lie about what their real vote was in anonymity. You could have some neutral entity who knows, but then that entity will get pressured to leak it, and once it's leaked, people have a First Amendment right to further spread the leak.
There's a lot I like about this, but you have some collective action problems that need a very strong norm of respecting anonymous votes in order for it to stick.
That's a real challenge, but I predict we could come up with a mechanism that would create enough uncertainty and plausible deniability to make a difference.
It doesn't even have to be perfect: sometimes, just buying a few weeks would allow politicians to wait out the news cycle and blunt the harshest consequences of bipartisan votes, especially for policy matters that aren't already intensely polarized.
Agreed, an "accused" Congressman would just vehemently deny it, and then accuse someone else. Like a giant game of Mafia/The Traitors. And then the media would move on after two days.
We don't have to imagine. We've had secret legislatures conducting their votes for a good chuck of history, including in the US, The Committee of the Whole held secret votes in Congress for nearly 200 years before it was ripped apart by Nixon's 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act. AFAIK, there is no record of this witch hunt taking place. And I suspect I know why, because it would be akin to picking up watermelon seeds with grease on your fingers. It would prove so fruitless that folks would just stop attempting to sort this out.
Further we don't have to go back to ancient times or the 1960s for examples. Even in the past year there were dozens of secret votes in Congress. The most salient were the secret ballot Republican caucus votes on the Speaker. Phones were not allowed in the rooms, ballots were cast and people were blown away by the results (in every case the secret votes proved to be a slap in the face to Trump and his pressuring, whereas the public votes endorsed him). But in no case did they officially out one member, or really even try, because why? Because it would prove fruitless. And I can't imagine a more pressured and publicized series of votes.
"...witch hunting..."
Couple that with AI deep fakes and, voila! Peace on Earth!
Useful as a thought experiment, though the specific proposal you outline is beyond unwieldly. In the old days of secret caucuses and very powerful committee chairs, much (most?) of congressional work happened somewhat like that. It's to my Boomer shame that way back then we campaigned so loudly for open democratic congressional procedures and the abolition of smoke-filled rooms. I speculate that just banning TV recording would help.
"I speculate that just banning TV recording would help"
No...no.
There has to be smoke.
Yep, sometimes we can have the best intentions, but there are unintended consequences
To be fair, as a fellow Boomer, smoke-filled rooms really were bad in some ways.
Where’s LBJ when you need him?
Actually I think Biden contains faint glimmers of LBJ within him.
My thought on a similar vein to this is to make it way easier to force a vote on a bill. Something like legislators can force a vote in both chambers on a bill by getting 5 Senators and 30 reps to sign this newly revamped discharge petition. Each senator and rep could only sign one petition per 2 year cycle, so it's not something that can be done with frivolity.
This is an interesting column, and I love the general idea behind these weekly columns so kudos to Ben and the team.
I agree that citizens need to be able to hold their Members of Congress accountable. That can't happen if the results of certain votes are anonymous. So I don't think that vote results should stay anonymous permanently, but maybe they can stay anonymous for a certain time period (90 days, 180 days, until after primary season are all ideas off the top of my head). That would shield MoCs from immediate backlash but also allow citizens to eventually know the results and factor them into a general election vote.
Your comment highlights a serious problem with how 'accountability' actual works. Accountability is an amoral tool, and it overwhelmingly favors those in power. This is true in Congress and in the electorate - and the prevention of intimidation by powerful groups (wielding physical clubs and guns of accountability) was a major reason why the switch to secret ballots has been so successful. Time and again, scholars who tackle this question come up with the same unsettling answer as scholars Achen and Bartels did in 2016 : "Greater 'electoral accountability' mostly seems to have involved catering to the interests of an affluent (and probably more attentive) minority of the electorate." Journalist Martha Hamilton wrote up a similar observation in 1984 "The congressional sunshine initiative became a tool for the very special interests whose power the reforms were supposed to dilute. Corporations and lobbying groups have seized on the open hearings to help them hold legislators accountable as never before." I agree.
I love this thought experiment. One thing I would suggest is that, in addition to only being held four times a year, only bills that had been introduced into congress and voted on publicly at least once could be considered during an anonymous congress. That way there would be at least a degree of the accountability that happens during an open session. I'm sure refinements would be necessary by those most expert in the world of politics, but I offer this as something to add into the discussion.
Part of the idea is to pass legislation that isn’t even coming up for a vote right now - but perhaps just requiring that it have been brought up for a vote in one of the two chambers is sufficient.
Sleepless in Seattle is a near perfect movie. The problem with modern romantic rom coms is the lack of suffering to counterpoint the value of love to heal loss. The whole “goofy meet cute” hallmarkification of rom coms is what has doomed them, not any murky cultural climate issues.
Hunger is the sweetest sauce.
#bakedtake
I've never seen it. Are there battle scenes?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCYHpKJZd4&pp=ygUgU2xlZXBsZXNzIGluIHNlYXR0bGUgZGlydHkgZG96ZW4%3D
What a dick!
I think deepening partisan polarization and perverse electoral incentives have ruined rom-coms. And residential zoning laws.
Fun fact: Annie Hall was a NIMBY.
Yes! I saw that in the trailer for "When Harry Met Sally and Convinced Her to Oppose an Multi-Unit Affordable Housing Development Around the Corner".
I found that movie extremely disappointing. When something finally happens the movie ends!* Now “you’ve got Mail”- that’s a different story. There you have peak Tom Hanks era rom com imo!
P.S.
Admittedly I’ve only watched sleepless in Seattle once, and as a kid. Possibly some subtleties were lost on me then. I still maintain that you’ve got Mail is better.
You should rewatch as an adult, though I watched it as a kid and loved it.
I love this one. My bottom line assessment of our imperfect democracy is that it really only guarantees one power, but it is very important: we can throw the bums out. Anonymous congress preserves that power and solves a lot of the pathological defects of democracy.
In case you (or other readers haven't read it), there was an excellent Astral Code Ten book review contest entry of Brian Kogelmann's "Secret Government" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-secret-government). It complements today's post: deeper, but less practical.
I'm not sure how meaningful the power to "throw the bums out" is if you don't know who "the bums" are. How do you know you're not voting out one of the good (from your perspective) members?
One powerful and blinkered assumption throughout all these comments, is that citizens - even some of them - seek out and follow congressional votes. This is not only not true today, it has never been true wrt to any legislature in the world. In the US Congress, each rep currently votes about a 1,000 times a year. This means for me, in Boston, to follow just the votes of my reps, I would have to follow 3,000 votes - 2 Senators, 1 Member of House. Even elite citizens and elite newspapers don't follow 1 percent of this. And coming to solid decisions of even those votes often requires reading thousands of pages of legislation and legislative proposals, viewing endless hearings, studying law and history, etc. Worse, lobbyists, reps, funders, etc all know which of these votes that citizens pay attention to, so they work the other ones. Now, of course, there is one group that more readily follows all this action - which even the New York Times and The Hill does not – lobbyists. Lobbyists aren't just idiotic mercenaries. No. The good ones are 20 year veterans of Capitol Hill, they are policy specialists, often with advanced degrees, who have the capability (and a nice salary) to follow the ornate legislation. And when they sus out problems they send that information back to their employers. This game of 'accountability' and 'transparency' benefits them. And it isn't even close. Citizens do not follow the action at all. So let's not pretend they are about to 'throw the bums out' based on rational decisions built on the data. They have never done so, and never will. But lobbyists thank you for asking for greater tools of accountability - they wield those tools well.
You don't know, it's a blunt instrument.
Matts podcast partner is boring. Not in a good way. Matt should team up with someone like Sarah Isgur. She would bring energy, good verbal communication skills, and some interesting disagreement plus she’s kind of fun! I’m just planting this seed now so that possibly it can grow into something 2-3 years from now.
Love this idea.
Anonymous Congress, eh? I get it - not democracy. That’s a dangerous trend on the left, from Thomas Friedman’s pining for Chicom authoritarianism to Matthew Yglesias wanting less transparency in government to the anti-free speech laws the left is forever pushing in Scotland, England, Canada and here in the USA.
It’s time the Democrats just add Repeal the First Amendment to their platform, along with a Less Transparency in Government Act. I suggest you guys also take a look at the old Roman custom of declaring a temporary dictator in times of emergency like, uh, say a Republican is trending toward winning the White House, lol.
How is anonymous non-democratic?
Democracy is a sliding scale, and strictly more isn’t always better. It would be more “democratic” if mayors had zero executive powers and everything were voted on by the legislature. Actually, screw the legislature— we could abolish legislatures entirely just have every decision go directly to the voters as a ballot measure! No elected officials at all, because more democracy is always better, right?
What I believe, and is likely the trend you’re attacking, is that we fetishize the process of democracy over outcomes. The measure of a well functioning democracy is: when most people want some outcome, does it generally happen (barring outcomes that trample certain enshrined rights)? In the US, the answer is usually “no”, due to our overabundance of veto points. I would be in favor of making the US more governable. I’d expect Republicans to benefit from that just as often as Democrats, but the outcome would be that voters would be able to assign accountability for outcomes to the party in charge, and that would force *both* parties to campaign on more realistic platforms.
Important to realize that many of our country's strongest pieces of legislation were written, debated, and voted on in abject secrecy. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are two fun examples. But even through the 1980s and 1990s there are great moments of beneficial secrecy. Full transparency? What has it produced? I think we are still waiting to see its success story.
No, the outcome isn’t “usually” no, but it often is. If you don’t like that then by all means suggest reforms, but not hide what legislators are doing so that they can continuously lie to their constituents about how they voted and to what values they adhere. That’s a disgraceful idea.
The problem now isn’t that bills representing most people’s wishes aren’t being implemented; it’s that the bills being implemented all too often go against their wishes - fomenting foreign wars, and funding deals that enrich our politicians and their friends. Do the people really want these bills, and continuing resolutions, that overspend our revenue by trillions? What Matt wants would allow our legislators to continue to roll in pork fat with no accountability.
Legislators already constantly lie to their voters about what they believe. Sitting Republican legislators have told us that upwards of 30 Republican Senators wanted to impeach Trump. This is an extreme example, but the number of legislators who are able to honestly vote what they believe under the current political system is zero.
The mechanism by which legislators are kept honest to their voters also allows them to be held hostage by a minority of their voters: ideally a legislator representing 40/20/40 RDIs should be supporting any legislation supported by 75% of their voters, an overwhelming supermajority. But in a R district, a policy supported by 15/20/40 RDIs and opposed by 25/0/0 can get the legislator primaried into oblivion. This is also somewhat undemocratic and stupid. Secret ballots aren't considered undemocratic inherently: you have one, and they aren't guaranteed to increase spending: there are a lot of sacred cows that can't be unfunded because anyone who tries will put a target over their heads.
I disagree with your assessment that a passionate few punching above their weight is undemocratic. There are reams of documents, chiefly in the Federalist Papers, explaining why that is not only desirable but a design feature of our constitution.
Democrats pushing punishment-free crime, resulting in the putrefying cities we see today, is a result of committed minorities bullying the majority. That case is undesirable from my point of view, but others seem to approve. Democrats pushing transvestite participation in women’s sports is another. Most people think Biden is crooked, but the Democrats are committed to sweeping his crimes under the rug. These are all bad outcomes in my view, but there have been many good outcomes from passionate minorities carrying the day. These examples don’t advance my argument very much. I only bring them up because I am feeling churlish about your Republicans-are-always-evil examples.
All you've done is show us examples of why minority rule is also bad when the Democrats do it. I suggest instead that the actual lesson is that minority rule is undemocratic and bad. The Federalist Papers are full of things that are undemocratic.
Number one, we are not talking about minority rule. We are talking about passionate minorities getting their way on some issues. I think this is good, and our founders were right on the money when they set it up that way. Like any other mechanism, it will produce good and bad results. They knew that true democracy would result in an evil tyranny just as bad as communism or fascism, as examples.
There is a creeping authoritarianism in today’s left, which is a response to the dysfunction we all observe in our government. Friedman notoriously pined for a Xi, but what’s worse is that the left generally agreed with him, or at least did not react with repugnance. Matthew Yglesias thinks what we need is to let our politicians operate behind a cloak that obscures their actions.
The dysfunction is caused by exactly what our founders said would be our undoing. We have become, largely, an amoral people. Listen to any discussion about a notorious crime committed by a wealthy person. “Stupid” is what you’ll hear over and over again. “Can you believe he killed his wife and hid her body in the pond? What an idiot! He was rich and had it made, yet now he’s going to jail.” I’m always agog at these conversations, which invariably go just like that.
Two or three generations ago the word you’d have heard is “evil”. But our population is so sunk in relativism that they can’t even bring themselves to use that word. Our founders said that the government they birthed could only work for a moral population.
Maybe Yglesias and Friedman are right. Maybe we should just be realistic and admit we are fallen so far that a Democratic, Constitutional Republic will no longer work. And instead of trying to find our way back, perhaps we should settle on an enlightened despot like Xi. Look at how well he’s doing for China with his zero covid, enslavement of the Uyghurs, and Belt & Road shenanigans. Friedman is already there. Today Matt took a disturbing step in that direction.
"The problem now isn’t that bills representing most people’s wishes aren’t being implemented; it’s that the bills being implemented all too often go against their wishes"
I don't believe you can support that assertion.
You think these giant bills filled with things no one has time to read, that were put in at the behest of either monied interest or those of small committed minorities, are what people want? No, I can’t prove my assertion. Neither can you prove this one.
I made no assertion
I didn’t say you did.
This is a worrying trend, but it isn't really a trend on the left, and I'm not sure how left Yglesias is. Maybe more of a trend in the center, or a cross-party phenomenon. I actually don't see a lot of ideas like this floated on the farther left like DSA, Bernie Sanders, etc., where people (in the US at least) tend to be pro-democracy.
As for the last remark, that's rather silly for a couple reasons. First, and less importantly it gets the history wrong: the Roman dictator did not suspend the existence of regular offices (which became temporarily subject to him) of elections, in fact a dictator could even be appointed to conduct an election when no one else could. But to your actual point, it's not "the Democrats" but Trump (who you not so subtly alluded to) who talks about declaring himself a dictator.
I’m not a Trump fan, but I consider the Democrats even more of a threat to the liberal order. It is they who are weaponizing the government successfully. They were impeaching Trump almost the moment he took office, for what we now know was an absurd dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton. It is they who are prosecuting him for mishandling classified information in a fashion more benign than Hillary or Biden did. And sure, only Trump obstructed, but he was the only one facing a hostile investigation. He didn’t have the benefit of cooperative investigators who would let the clock run out. As much as I dislike the bugger, the Dems keep shoving me into his corner. Why is that? Is this just another example of them picking their opponents?
Wouldn't the crazy extremist members of Congress just reveal who was insufficiently extreme in the private session? Do we expect MTG to honor the anonymity?
The idea here is that not even members of congress know who voted for what, since it's totally anonymous.
So only the triumvirate knows how people voted? Or is it really little pieces of paper in a hat? There needs to be some auditing function. Either someone knows, and can falsify, or the system is vulnerable to digital or analog hacking. If it's the triumvirate who knows, then single party rule would still enable falsifying. There's a sunlight disinfectant element to this...
There's a fair amount of research on cryptographically verifiable anonymous voting systems. I think this part isn't really a stumbling block.
PKI and the like is, to almost everyone, indistinguishable from magic. Magic is not a basis for trust.
I am not a computer scientist but of the people I have heard talk about the question of electronic voting the more they know the leerier they are of the idea.
That said, you could do paper ballots so I would not consider the voting system the biggest problem with this proposal.
Who needs cryptography. Aristotle developed a system of two urns and decent-sized balls of two different colors. At the end of the vote turn over the urns (with the cameras rolling) and count the totals in each urn. Works great, even in today's world infested with cameras.
There is no limit to the schemes men can invent to avoid the scenario that worries you. Here's one I just invented: Each member gets two tokens, one green with a round hole in the middle and one red with a square hole. There are two boxes, one for Yes and one for No. Each member places his two tokens in different envelopes, in private, and drops the Yes and No tokens in the appropriate box. At the end of voting the boxes are opened in front of all members, counted, and reported.
I think we should up the stakes. Make each "token" an ostracon, and whichever name is scratched onto the most red ostraca is banished from DC for a period of 10 years...
I feel like I'm missing something, because that seems like it would result in a 50-50 split each time?
I think the idea is that in the left box, green means yes and red means no. In the right box, red means yes and green means no.
Further: By requiring both tokens to be cast, no member can emerge and hold up their unused token as proof of their vote. They can lie about their vote or tell the truth, but no one will know for sure. The round hole / square hole is so that a different token can be used for each vote and be issued just before votes are cast.
Also: The shapes would make for good visuals for the TV news folks as a symbol of the bill.
This is quite naive. Look up how secret ballot votes work in other systems. They can still be “whipped” with a high degree of efficiency and parliament members are not fully shielded from pressures and incentives if those around them (fellow party members/leaders or special interest groups). It’s only individual accountability to voters that is truly lost.
THPacis: I know of no example of a secret ballot vote in a legislature being successfully whipped - ever. And you have plenty to choose from. Each year there are dozens or thousands of secret ballot votes in legislatures around the world. In the USA, there were a number of salient and pressured secret ballot votes in Congress last year - the Republican caucus votes on the speaker. No evidence they were whipped.
I also disagree with your analysis of accountability. Accountability is an amoral tool, best wielded by those in power. I can think of no example where greater legislator accountability actually proved beneficial to the masses at large. We find overwhelmingly, that it leaves them exposed to attack ads, challenger funding, etc.
How would one prove that the vote went down the way it was reported? Trust the clerk?
Urns with balls have worked for thousands of years. Boxes with ballots similarly. Turn over the urn at the end of the vote and count. If you really want proof, smash the urn at the end of each vote.
Wait, is that the idea? Matt wasn't real clear on what "anonymous" actually means and whether it was anonymous from the public or anonymous from the members themselves.
Ben was the one who wrote it, not Matt. It definitely would have been helpful to explain that “anonymous” really means anonymous - like each person pushes a small button on their desk (yes, no, abstain) and the lights at the front of the room just display the total once everyone has voted.
Similarly, wouldn’t people who voted for something good that their constituents liked want to be able to take credit for it?
I feel like between radicals wanting to out those insufficiently loyal to their ideology and other members wanted to tout their legislative accomplishments, the anonymity would be very short lived. Plus there’s a whole media angle where it becomes big news to figure out who voted for what.
You can talk all you want about how you say you voted, but it will be impossible for anyone to verify.
Exactly: And again we have myriad examples. All important congressional committee votes in the USA, before 1970 were secret. And even in 2023 there were multiple secret ballot votes for speaker in the Republican caucus. Few try to interview members to figure out how they voted because they rarely get accounts that square with the results, and then who do you blame for flipping? No one. The vote was secret.
I realize this is admittedly half-baked, but there is directly relevant history here that ought not be neglected. Before the early 1970s, the House did much more in the Committee of the Whole, and it was very common to take teller votes—yes, submitting little stubs of paper, anonymously. Many of the most important decisions were made in this way, with close and untraceable votes, and then final passage votes would tend to be very large numbers, as members put themselves on the record so as to take credit.
There were a lot of good things about this, and I’d like to see it brought back. But it’s not like the transparency reformers had no valid complaints. Attendance was often poor. Members could serve interests without any record.
The main thing we’d need to do to move back to this model is resuscitate floor action as a way of legislating. Right now it’s pretty completely dead.
Unfortunately, "before the early 70s" is another way of saying "before the rise of 24/7 cable news, social media, SuperPACs and the flesh-eating scrutiny all of that entails."
We actually get lots of wonderful examples of pre-1970 voting each year. And the results continue to be fascinating, and I'd argue, positive.
Even in the past couple years, we've had secret votes on renaming military bases (removing names of confederate officers), we've had secret votes on speakers in the Republican caucus, we've had secret votes on the sanctioning of Liz Cheney.
Continuously we find data that broadly corresponds to what we saw pre-1970. The secret votes are less unanimous (often indicative of fear) and generally appear to avoid some form of tyrannical pressure. Going back a little further, we've had secret votes in the 1990s on environmental legislation (resulting the passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments - perhaps the strongest and most beneficial environmental legislation ever) as well as the 1986 tax reforms (embraced by both the right and left as good law).
So before you throw in the towel, check the data - and the Constitution, which surprisingly endorses secrecy for any and all congressional actions.
I like this idea, but I think that your “too effective” scenario seems very likely. Right now, a lot of Congress’s activity happens through the small set of procedures which create exceptions to the normal gridlock (eg: budget reconciliation); this would probably have a similar effect.
This piece strikes me as too ad hoc and too naive. Anonymous votes may have their place in specific instances and parallels are known in other democracies. But this proposal is too messy and too prone to corruption which is curiously absent from the discussion. Anonymity shields congresspeople from their voters to whom they ought to be accountable but does NOT shield them from special interest groups lobbies their peers or the president. Nor are e proposed limiting rules all that impressive. “2/3” of the people described could be the president and one other loyal person from his party (eg trump and senate/house majority leader). Then all that is stopping you from doing whatever is the assumption that you can’t find 20% of democrats willing to go along with some kind of corruption or power grab in a scenario where they have complete deniability. It assumes that over 80% of Congress in both parties are at heart both moderate and honest. Strikes me as very naive.
How does it not shield them from special interest lobbies?
A funny thing happens when Congress closes their committee doors - lobbyists go home.
https://congressionalresearch.org/Citations.html