r/theories

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Think about a judge. We have all these rules to keep judges neutral. They can't meet privately with one side. They can't trade favors. They have to recuse themselves if they're biased. We take this stuff seriously.

Now walk down the hall to Congress (or Parliament, wherever you are). None of those rules apply.

Lawmakers meet privately with the companies and groups a bill will affect all the time. We just gave it a nice name: lobbying. They trade votes constantly ("I'll vote for your bill if you vote for mine") and we call that being a good dealmaker instead of what it actually is. And basically every single one of them belongs to a party whose whole job is to win, not to be neutral.

So here's the theory: a court can only ever be as fair as the law it's enforcing. You can have the most honest, unbiased judge in the world, and she can still be enforcing a law that got written through backroom deals and one-sided lobbying. She's not doing anything wrong. She's just applying an unfair result very carefully.

James Madison basically called this out over 200 years ago: "No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment." But that's literally what a lawmaker does every day. They write the bill, argue for it, then vote on whether it passes. Same person, both jobs. We'd never let a lawyer also be the jury.

Belgium actually put the fix in their constitution. Article 42 says members of parliament represent the whole nation, not just their district or their voters. Which is a nice goal that basically nobody's system is built to actually deliver.

So what's the fix?

Split the single job of "lawmaker" into two separate jobs, sitting in the same chamber, kind of like how a courtroom splits "advocate" and "judge":

• Party representatives: their whole job is to openly argue for their group's interest. Beekeepers, a manufacturing sector, a rare disease patient group, whatever. They write proposals and make the case, out in the open, on the record. This is what lawmakers already do when they lobby for their platform, just now it's the entire job instead of something done behind closed doors.
• People's representatives: they don't represent any faction. Their only job is to vote yes or no on whatever the party reps put forward. No writing bills. No meeting with lobbyists, because there's nothing left for a lobbyist to do.

Once every interest can get its own open representative instead of needing a private backchannel, you can finally ban ex parte meetings (private one-sided access) without shutting anyone out. Nobody needs the backchannel anymore because everyone already has a front door.

And here's the part I think is actually clever: vote-trading structurally can't happen anymore. It only works if one person controls both the "yes" they're offering and the "yes" they want back. Party reps have proposals but no vote. People reps have a vote but nothing to trade it for. Neither side holds both halves of the deal, so there's nothing left to swap.

The two roles even get elected differently, since they're answering different questions. Party reps answer "does this interest deserve a voice," so you'd use something like approval voting, where people can back as many parties as they want and parties aren't fighting over the same voters. People reps answer "does the whole community trust this person to be fair," so you'd need something stricter, like requiring more for-votes than against-votes, not just "most votes." That filters out candidates who are loved by one faction and despised by everyone else, and pushes toward people who are broadly acceptable instead of narrowly beloved.

(Based on ideas from this piece if anyone wants to go deeper - I wrote it as well)