The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.
When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.
The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.
I think a problem with blind voting is, who do the citizens know who represented them and acted in their interest, and therefore who they should support and vote for? Backroom deals and corruption would run rife. Greater transparency is better than less.
A conscience vote, where the party leaders do not enforce a particular party line, instead accept the will of the representative member (notionally on behalf of their constituents) should be more commonplace. This is essentially the same as getting an independent. Best bet is to break up the 2-party system.