This is also the best argument for killing the filibuster. Right now, the majority of congress can promise whatever they want and be immune from any consequences because they know it'll never overcome the filibuster. Take that away, and many tunes will change. If we kill the filibuster, congressman will have to switch gears from take-slinging to actually legislating.
It’s a bit weird that the governor said she wanted Mamdani to keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner “because she’s Jewish and comes from a successful family”. Nothing about police policy or even her competence as a manager lol. It’s good he’s keeping her but I do wonder if there’s a kind of overhyped narrative about her competence given her family has so much influence and money to establish such a narrative
I feel like you’re too hard on Brandon Johnson. He’s my mayor. He’s trying out a lot of things. It’s a tough job - we’ve had a series of middling mayors. But crime is down and taxes are steady and the parks are open and streets are clean and teachers aren’t striking so I’m not complaining.
Yglesias puts him down because he is black. the systemic problems in Chicago date back to the original Daley administration in the 1960s and none of them have been adequately addressed. Very much like the president of the US, you could put anyone in the mayor's seat in Chicago and the results would be comparable because the City Council is bought off by developers and corporate interests, which Johnson has attempted to fight and that also riles up elitist hacks like Yglesias.
As Brandon Johnson or Sam Brownback (look him up kids) or Tina Kotek or Kim Reynolds show executives can and do make dumb ideological decisions. However, the feedback loop between decisions and impact on voters is much quicker than making proclamations as a legislator in a heavily partisan district, you can literally go decades saying things that don't add up.
This is yet another reason that national end to gerrymandering legislation so more of them have more robust feedback to their takes and care more about the quasi-rationality of swing voters.
Can AOC win the primary without promising to open the border, abolish ICE, and go all Luigi on the insurance industry? If she doesn't, surely someone else will, and the Left vote will be split. But is does campaign in the primary like that and consolidates the Left, can she then win the general?
"The truth, though, is that members of Congress have the option of having successful careers as politicians basically just by posting and never buckling down to the work of writing bills, aligning stakeholders, and setting priorities."
How can any country create a system to ensure that it's parliament/congress actually their job and don't just cede all actual authority to the executive and instead function as high profile Twitter posters?
Two mostly-obvious extensions/corollaries of this well-articulated thesis:
1. Legislators in the *minority* have even more incentive to post and not governor.
2. The overall concept applies nicely on the right too. Just look at the difference between GOP governors and GOP representatives on COVID policy in 2020-2022.
Hm, I'm not sure that "don't worry about the left, these guys won't act on their beliefs" is convincing when talking about the POTUS. Aren't we living through two trump terms that tell us how important the position can be in the arms of someone unfettered by normalcy?
Overall a lot of the reason the back benchers in Congress cant do much more than shitpost all day is simply because of how allergic congress overall has become to enacting legislation of any kind. Kill the filibuster and this dynamic changes pretty quickly.
This is all correct, and additionally the moderate representatives that Matt likes more are also mostly just posters. Golden and MGP each have their pet issues about killing more sea life, but everyone has a pet issue. Mostly they post about how the party is too left wing, just like Matt does.
The central question is how to reform our institutions so that legislation takes priority over posting. Unfortunately, my sense is that other countries are moving in our direction, with back benchers becoming posters.
Backbenchers have always been posters everywhere. It’s just that most democracies in Europe and Asia are either parliamentary or semi-presidential, and so the senior leadership of the legislature is also in the executive.
Sorry to hijack the comments with ai related content again, but there is a bit more human drama that I want to get out there.
Couple of days ago, openai released a few more things, some math, some computer science, and some (mathematical) physics. Their approach this time was to hand each result to a group of experts and let them decide what to do.
For the math, the expert they contacted told them to make it public as is and keep his or her name out of it.
For the comp science, the group of experts also told them to publish their outputs now, organize conferences around it, and so on.
The (group of five) physicists said ''thank you, we'll study the 1000+ pages of stuff, when we are satisfied we'll share it with the world. by the way, here is an email if you want to get in touch''.
The response has been exactly what any human being with a working brain would have predicted the response would be. The five math physicists have dug in (https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/YM_working_group.pdf), the broader math community (including witten btw) has aparently given up on trying to convince them to do the right thing and is asking openai to release it themselves (https://agmai.org/#request-immediate-release) and the world being as it is, this may well end with someone (or multiple someones, to be clear, obviously not me, i don't care, don't have the means and don't condone illegal behavior...) convincing their ai agents that the morally right thing to do is to hack these people and have the document magically appear online, if it hasn't happened already.
AOC would absolutely be better than Harris. Knocking of Crowley was a real achievement. Sleeping with Willie Brown and playing the insider game in California politics was not.
Is it a real achievement though? I mean yes, in terms of “points on the board” it was, she won and he lost. But also it was an election where fewer than 30,000 people voted. Catching an incumbent sleeping is a good trick, but like most trick plays they only work when the defense isn’t expecting it. It’s not the sort of electoral technique that leads to constant over-performance.
This is also the best argument for killing the filibuster. Right now, the majority of congress can promise whatever they want and be immune from any consequences because they know it'll never overcome the filibuster. Take that away, and many tunes will change. If we kill the filibuster, congressman will have to switch gears from take-slinging to actually legislating.
It’s a bit weird that the governor said she wanted Mamdani to keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner “because she’s Jewish and comes from a successful family”. Nothing about police policy or even her competence as a manager lol. It’s good he’s keeping her but I do wonder if there’s a kind of overhyped narrative about her competence given her family has so much influence and money to establish such a narrative
Does people here think that if Mitt won in 2012, he would govern based on his primary promises around spending on Social Security and Healthcare?
I feel like you’re too hard on Brandon Johnson. He’s my mayor. He’s trying out a lot of things. It’s a tough job - we’ve had a series of middling mayors. But crime is down and taxes are steady and the parks are open and streets are clean and teachers aren’t striking so I’m not complaining.
Yglesias puts him down because he is black. the systemic problems in Chicago date back to the original Daley administration in the 1960s and none of them have been adequately addressed. Very much like the president of the US, you could put anyone in the mayor's seat in Chicago and the results would be comparable because the City Council is bought off by developers and corporate interests, which Johnson has attempted to fight and that also riles up elitist hacks like Yglesias.
I too live in Chicago, and I say he’s a CTU hack. I’ll be for Susana Mendoza.
And we need to pay those teachers less and punish them for trying to teach our kids!
As Brandon Johnson or Sam Brownback (look him up kids) or Tina Kotek or Kim Reynolds show executives can and do make dumb ideological decisions. However, the feedback loop between decisions and impact on voters is much quicker than making proclamations as a legislator in a heavily partisan district, you can literally go decades saying things that don't add up.
This is yet another reason that national end to gerrymandering legislation so more of them have more robust feedback to their takes and care more about the quasi-rationality of swing voters.
This forces us to think again about what issues, exactly, keep a candidate credible with a base or a flank.
You don't need as many as you think and you probably have more options than you think.
If any ideologue is going to moderate due to the constraints of governing, then there shouldn’t be the fear of a Republican either?
I think MY makes a big leap when he starts talking about mayoral constraints and then draws conclusions about presidential ones.
Can AOC win the primary without promising to open the border, abolish ICE, and go all Luigi on the insurance industry? If she doesn't, surely someone else will, and the Left vote will be split. But is does campaign in the primary like that and consolidates the Left, can she then win the general?
"The truth, though, is that members of Congress have the option of having successful careers as politicians basically just by posting and never buckling down to the work of writing bills, aligning stakeholders, and setting priorities."
How can any country create a system to ensure that it's parliament/congress actually their job and don't just cede all actual authority to the executive and instead function as high profile Twitter posters?
Two mostly-obvious extensions/corollaries of this well-articulated thesis:
1. Legislators in the *minority* have even more incentive to post and not governor.
2. The overall concept applies nicely on the right too. Just look at the difference between GOP governors and GOP representatives on COVID policy in 2020-2022.
.
and separately, I think a pretty eloquent essay about how some in math now feel about ai: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/28/responsibility-of-mathematicians-in-the-age-of-ai/
Hm, I'm not sure that "don't worry about the left, these guys won't act on their beliefs" is convincing when talking about the POTUS. Aren't we living through two trump terms that tell us how important the position can be in the arms of someone unfettered by normalcy?
Overall a lot of the reason the back benchers in Congress cant do much more than shitpost all day is simply because of how allergic congress overall has become to enacting legislation of any kind. Kill the filibuster and this dynamic changes pretty quickly.
This is all correct, and additionally the moderate representatives that Matt likes more are also mostly just posters. Golden and MGP each have their pet issues about killing more sea life, but everyone has a pet issue. Mostly they post about how the party is too left wing, just like Matt does.
The central question is how to reform our institutions so that legislation takes priority over posting. Unfortunately, my sense is that other countries are moving in our direction, with back benchers becoming posters.
Backbenchers have always been posters everywhere. It’s just that most democracies in Europe and Asia are either parliamentary or semi-presidential, and so the senior leadership of the legislature is also in the executive.
Sorry to hijack the comments with ai related content again, but there is a bit more human drama that I want to get out there.
Couple of days ago, openai released a few more things, some math, some computer science, and some (mathematical) physics. Their approach this time was to hand each result to a group of experts and let them decide what to do.
For the math, the expert they contacted told them to make it public as is and keep his or her name out of it.
For the comp science, the group of experts also told them to publish their outputs now, organize conferences around it, and so on.
The (group of five) physicists said ''thank you, we'll study the 1000+ pages of stuff, when we are satisfied we'll share it with the world. by the way, here is an email if you want to get in touch''.
The response has been exactly what any human being with a working brain would have predicted the response would be. The five math physicists have dug in (https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/YM_working_group.pdf), the broader math community (including witten btw) has aparently given up on trying to convince them to do the right thing and is asking openai to release it themselves (https://agmai.org/#request-immediate-release) and the world being as it is, this may well end with someone (or multiple someones, to be clear, obviously not me, i don't care, don't have the means and don't condone illegal behavior...) convincing their ai agents that the morally right thing to do is to hack these people and have the document magically appear online, if it hasn't happened already.
Dismantling Miller's Stasi is, in fact, very near the top of the list of good governance things a D president should be doing in 2029.
AOC would absolutely be better than Harris. Knocking of Crowley was a real achievement. Sleeping with Willie Brown and playing the insider game in California politics was not.
Is it a real achievement though? I mean yes, in terms of “points on the board” it was, she won and he lost. But also it was an election where fewer than 30,000 people voted. Catching an incumbent sleeping is a good trick, but like most trick plays they only work when the defense isn’t expecting it. It’s not the sort of electoral technique that leads to constant over-performance.