Yeah it's sad, believe me Missy, when you're born to be a sissy...

[matthewdaly]

... Without the vim and verve
But I could show my prowess, be a lion not a mou-ess
If I only had the nerve

Believe me, I've heard some bad reasons to oppose same-sex marriage, and it seems like there are new challengers for the title every day. But I found a new low yesterday. Most embarrassingly, it doesn't come from some villain in Kansas or Alabama or California, but from my own State Senator.

Jim Alesi was heavily on the unknown list. He's a Republican, but he used to be a Democrat. And, of course, he lives in Rochester which has a history of civil rights and not much institutional tolerance for intolerance. He belongs to a renegade Catholic church that sanctifies gay unions. He talks the talk. And I didn't see it myself, but I am given to believe that if you saw a video of a Republican New York Senator who voted against the same-sex marriage bill this week with his head buried in his hands, that was him.

Why? How will he come back home and sit in the pew next to a gay couple and ask for our entire community's support in his re-election campaign next year? What was so important? He explains it in the article linked above.

"Politically, you never vote for a bill that's going to fail. Let me rephrase that. Politically, a highly controversial bill should not be voted on when it's going to fail."

...

You know, I don't mind if my representative fails to represent my position because he feels it to be at odds with the majority of his constituents. I don't like it, but I'll take my lumps. And I don't mind if my representative fails to represent my position because he feels it to be at odds with his or her own conscience even if his constituency supports it. Obviously, I'll support a different person in the next election, but that's the risk that you run in a representative democracy. But it turns out that I have no acceptance at all of a representative who looks around the room at how OTHER PEOPLE'S Senators are voting before making up his mind. That goes beyond a lack of courage to a full-press rejection of the fundamentals of a republic.

What's strangest about this wholly gutless justification of only wanting to support the winning side is that I can't imagine that will satisfy his reactionary supporters in the rural parts of his highly gerrymandered district either. If I don't want to hear that he'll fail to stand on principle when he doesn't feel that the stakes merit it, I can't believe that someone else wants to hear that he would still play the "will he or won't he" game if he ever came to be the deciding vote. You know how everyone hates all of congress but loves their own representative? So why do you want to tell me that you aren't even my representative but a reflection of the will of the Senate? I am furious with incoherence.

Comments

[prairierabbit]

I have a lot of sympathy with your anger. If they could only have one term, of four years, do you think they'd accomplish more? I'm starting to ponder that concept.

[matthewdaly]

I've never been eager to embrace term limits. It seems to me that if nobody in the legislature has long-term experience, then the bills are going to be even more driven by lobbyists (who, of course, would not be term-limited themselves). My other main concern is that if you knew that you were about to be out of a job, then you might wind up more beholden than usual to an industry that you thought might give you a job when your Senate term was up. Or, if you thought that you had a chance to parlay your fame and run for governor or attorney general or something like that, then you're pandering to the voters of the entire state, national-level fundraisers, and the like. The only people without leverage are your actual constituents back home, which is the opposite of the way it should be, I think.

The sorts of reform that I would prefer are things that remove the amazing incentives of preserving incumbency. I think that there should be no hierarchy in committee posts in legislatures, so that Challenger Newbie would have as much influence as Senator Lifetime were she to be elected. I can't bring myself to be fully opposed to earmarks, but we've got to find a way to stop their use as bribes paid by legislators to non-profit groups in exchange for endorsements. This is particularly odd in New York which just gives every legislator a few million dollars for member items to be spread around their community as they see fit instead of even making them place specific earmarks in the budget. These are deals that are cut behind closed doors, and I have no reason to trust that they are done in good faith. Even if they were, they are another example of a perk that a challenger can not claim even though they would be similarly generous with their own pot of money if they were elected.

If I had to propose a plan that was achievable and better than what we have now, it would be to have a pre-primary that would be a referendum on whether we wanted to keep the incumbent in office. If she gets over 50%, there is no election for that post. If not, then we have an election in which she is barred from running. That way, at least you don't have to fight the inequity of pitting an incumbent against a non-incumbent when what you really want to do is to have the incumbent running purely against her record.

Someday I should write up my wholly unachievable plan for instituting nigh-direct democracy in the Internet Age. It's revolutionary, but has a lot of interesting features that challenge a lot of minor irritants in the current schemes of democratic republic.