Legislature

 

In this section numerous modifications to Congress will be proposed which would improve the performance of the legislature in informational society. The estimate of the common weal would be improved if legislators had incentives in creating legislation to carefully comply with established precedents for general benefits, consistency and efficiency. Also as will be discussed, the performance of the legislature in creating legislation, conducting administrative oversight and solving constituent problems would improve if the task of creating legislation were separated from the other tasks of the legislature.

Let us first consider the problem of creating incentives  for legislators to carefully comply with established precedents for general benefits, consistency and efficiency in creating legislation. We assume most legislators enjoy the power and prestige of office and seek long term political careers. Consequently, legislators in pursuit of power have strong incentives to take whatever action is required to ensure re-election. To make the professional review a re-election issue, a legislator in sponsoring a bill or amendment would assume the responsibility that the bill would pass a professional review. And the current intensity bias  in the campaign financing of elections would be greatly reduced by publicly funded elections with fixed limits for each level of office. Currently, the unlimited campaign financing by political action committees, PACs, and private contributions gives a disproportionate influence to concentrated interests in elections.

With fixed amount, publicly funded elections, the legislator wishing to remain in office would have to be prepared to face an opponent with equal funding. Moreover, the voters with limited resources to carefully analyze issues would focus on simple measures of performance which they understood. A negative professional review becomes a simple measure of failure to perform which an enterprising opponent would quickly bring to the attention of voters. A negative professional review on the grounds of lack of general benefits is a clear sign that the incumbent has been captured by special interests. A negative professional review on the grounds of lack of consistency or efficiency is an indicator that the legislator may not be competent. Consequently, legislators wishing a long political career would subject sponsored bills to much more careful scrutiny than is the current practice.

To make the incentives for analysis even stronger, we must reconsider the concept of a legislative  district. Currently legislative districts are physical districts. This means that legislators who have a major impact on national legislation, such as the chairmen of powerful committees, are not responsible to the national electorate. Moreover, the local voters who decide the re-election fate of a powerful national legislative figure may have quite different interests from those of the national electorate.

To encourage accountability to all voters, legislators would be elected in national elections. Given the broad scope of government and the complexity of political issues legislators should run for legislative specialties which are defined as particular areas of legislation-for example, finance, social programs, or defense. Prior to each election Congress would specify the legislative specialties which would be fixed until the next election. Legislators running in one of these legislative specialties would be guaranteed committee assignments in the area specified.

The proposed national elections would shift the focus of re-election politics; each legislator would have to consider a majority in terms of a national constituency rather than a small physical district. While a charge of special interest would be an asset in a district where the special interest was the majority, such a charge would be far more damaging in the perception of a national constituency. Consequently, nationally elected legislators would necessarily be much more concerned about general benefits than would legislators elected from geographical districts.

To implement a Congress elected by legislative specialties, the limited resources and bounded rationality of the voter must be considered. Given the limited resources that the voter can devote to election decisions, the number of legislators which the voter should have to evaluate in an election should be quite small. We will assume that the voter should not have to elect more than seven at any one time. Under a system of annual elections and six-year terms of office, Congress would be composed of only forty two members. But even with the decentralization suggested in the next chapter, we assert that such a Congress would have too few members to conduct the legislative tasks of informational society.

Thus, in order to obtain a larger Congress, each voter would elect six members each year for national legislative specialties and one additional member from a geographic district. We will stipulate that two hundred legislators elected on the basis of geographic districts should be adequate. Each state based on population would be allotted its share of geographic district legislators whose districts and length of service would be specified by the respective state. Congress would thus consist of 237 members, one vice president, 36 nationally elected senators, and 200 congressmen elected from the various states.

The final change to improve the estimate of the common weal is that only senators would have the power to sponsor legislation or amendments. This power is because senators with national constituencies would be more concerned about general benefits than congressmen with localized geographic constituencies. But the hazards of re-election politics from negative professional reviews could create a chilling effect of sponsoring any type of legislation at all. For example, currently senators and congressmen can have long successful careers by specializing in promoting constituent relations with their government and rarely if ever sponsoring legislation of any type. Thus, under the career hazards of a professional review, few, if any, senators might be willing to sponsor legislation.

To create stronger incentives for senators to sponsor legislation, the functions of the two houses would be specialized. The function of the Senate  would be to sponsor all legislation and the function of the House would be to conduct administrative oversight and to address constituent relations with government. Given this split, the Senate would focus on sponsoring new legislation and modifying the President's legislative program, a feature of government originating with F. R. Roosevelt and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Before sponsoring legislation the senators would subject the legislation to intense analysis in order to ensure themselves it would pass a subsequent professional review. As knowledge accumulated, the Senate would periodically analyze existing legislation for the three desirable properties.

Nevertheless, the professional review  would not suddenly shift the re-election incentive of each senator from that of maximizing the benefits to his constituent groups to the lofty national purpose of promoting general benefits, consistency and efficiency. Rather, the senator would be interested in performing analysis to ensure that his promotion of his constituent's interests lies within the precedents established by previous professional reviews. The senators would thus have a strong interest in establishing their own professional review mechanism to greatly reduce the risk of professional review challenges in the courts. Senators themselves are likely to be lawyers, businessmen, scientists, and ex-celebrities such as basketball players, astronauts, and actors. While some of the senators would be specialists capable of performing their own analysis, most senators would delegate the analysis to their staffs. The role of the senator, after all, would be to reach compromises within the constraints of the professional review.

In short, the professional review would change the process of creating legislation in various ways. First, senators would insist that the President, in submitting proposed legislation to the Senate, would also have to submit the careful analysis upon which the proposed legislation was based. In the Senate legislation would be submitted to a further two part review. First, public hearings with media exposure would emphasize the human aspects of the legislation and senators as media celebrities would make their traditional political statements concerning the purposes of the legislation. Second, a technical analysis of the legislation would be conducted by specialists presenting opposing analysis of the proposed legislation. These proceedings would generally be too technical to create a great deal of public interest. Staff members of the senators would do most of the work, with senators putting in an occasional appearance, especially if the hearings became media events. These technical hearings would generally be teleconferences  between experts located throughout the country. To support technical analysis of legislation senators would have to greatly increase their technical staff.

The role of informational society senators who would sponsor legislation would be complicated. They would have to provide the electorate with the type of legislation which would appeal to a majority in order to prepare themselves for the next election. In sponsoring this legislation they would have to make sure that a majority of the Senate and House would vote for the legislation, and to obtain this majority they would have to make deals with with congressmen concerned with their local interests. In making the necessary compromises in this process, they would have to stay within the bounds of possible professional reviews. To compensate for such difficulties, the role of senators would be even more powerful than it is currently. In informational society senators would be celebrities who would enjoy considerable power with considerable risk.

In the new design, two aspects of the relationship between the Presidency and the Senate would change. First, the Vice  President would become the leader of the President's legislative program in the Senate. He or she would have the powers of a Senator. If the President's party controlled the Senate the Vice President would be the leader of the majority party, otherwise he or she would be the leader of the minority party. Promoting the President's legislative program would provide the Vice President excellent training in the event he or she were called upon to assume the Presidency.

Second, given the national election of senators and their control over legislation, the annual election of senators becomes a referendum of the President's legislative program. To promote his program, the President would have to campaign vigorously for his party's candidates. Failure to capture a majority of the newly elected senators would be taken as a signal that the electorate wants compromises between the positions of the parties. Also, a President would become a lame duck if his party lost too many senatorial elections.

Now let us consider the role of the House  in the proposed specialization of legislative functions. The House would focus on the day-to-day functioning of government. The main functions of congressmen, a traditional term assumed to include congresswomen, would be to resolve governmental problems of their constituents, to conduct administrative oversight, and to vote on sponsored legislation. Unlike today, constituents would only approach their congressmen with governmental administrative problems. Congressmen would have a technical support staff for administrative oversight and a larger staff to handle constituent relations. Congressmen who maintained good constituent relations, provided oversight on administrative matters of interest to their districts, and voted the interests of their districts could enjoy a long career. Even though all their actions would be subject to a possible professional review, congressmen would enjoy less risky careers than those of senators.

The power of the House to influence government legislation and policies would stem from its power of legislative  oversight. The House alone would investigate scandals and other failures of leadership in the administration. Also in keeping with tradition, the House would initiate the legislative budget process. This process would provide congressmen with clout in their oversight in how well administration policies were satisfying their constituents needs. Although congressmen could neither sponsor nor amend legislation directly, they would have considerable indirect influence on the content of legislation because they would have to approve all sponsored legislation. In proposing sponsored legislation the Senate would seek input from the House.

The new design creates greater checks than currently between the House and Senate, especially when the majority of the two houses are from the same party. The interest of senators in ensuring that their proposed legislation will pass muster in a professional review places them in conflict with congressmen accountable to local interests.

Executive