Mambrino wrote:elasto wrote:morriswalters wrote:Any particular reason why you think this would be true? Experts are experts in their fields, not experts in governing. And random picks from the general population would pick up all the random chaff that exists in society, need I explain what that might mean?
Couldn't you make the same argument against juries? They aren't experts in the law after all...
The point is that, like with the court system, yes, if the whole caboodle were appointed at random (judge and lawyers as well as the jury) then some real oddball verdicts could end up getting made, but my proposal would only have jury+experts be one-third of government - not all of it. You'd still have the Senate made up of professional politicians and the President capable of wielding his veto pen.
The idea is that each of these bodies bring different strengths to the legislative process: If the professional politicians get too blatantly self-serving hopefully the cross-party, moderate jury will speak for the 99% - and the experts will weigh in on their areas of expertise via channeling consensus-based, peer-reviewed evidence.
No it wouldn't be perfect; Corruption and incompetence would still abound. But it might work better than now is all.
I'd like to like this idea, but then again, reading this forum I've got an impression the US court system does not work very well. But on the other hand, legislative process is a different thing than a court of law, and the important thing anyway would be what kind of role these juries would have (the final accept / decline vote? proposing legislature for discussion? the process of drafting their contents? what kind of role in the said process...?). It certainly could remove the campaign financing part of possible sources of political corruption, but it could introduce others.
EDIT. This seems only tangentially related to the actual piece of news at hand. Should we have a Serious Business thread about this?
While there is a lot of room for improvement, overall the courts do work. You only read about the times they fail because 'system works, things improving, people happy' doesn't sell newspapers. It's impossible to make a perfect system, and fixing some problems often creates worse ones.