"The rule changes might (theoretically) have been good policy. And the method by which they were passed might have been good politics: As Jeff Blehar pointed out on Twitter, if the House GOP was convinced these reforms needed to be made, it made all the sense in the world to make them in such a way that they would prevent against spurious attacks. But they ripped through the tissue of norms that has traditionally held Congress together.
It’s really hard to talk about norms in the abstract, much less to defend them. And it’s very hard to notice their atrophy. But by this point, it’s readily apparent that norms of behavior in Congress simply don’t have the power to enforce themselves anymore...
This is actually something that’s been happening for a while, as norms in Washington have gotten violated or ignored more and more often. Norms can’t be defended in their own right, so they’re defended as something that will, ultimately, be in everyone’s best self-interest to observe...
Here’s the thing about relying on the expectation of public backlash to dissuade politicians from doing something: It has to work every single time. The first time a politician does something despite being warned that the public will reject him for it, and that rejection doesn’t materialize — or it materializes, but not strongly enough or for long enough to drive him from office — he’s free to dismiss any future warning of backlash as so much noise."
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/3/14154252/office-congressional-ethics-means-important
This is making me think about what it would actually look like to create a structure that would institutionalize public response. Because. it's not really our "responsibility"; we are living our complex and exhausting personal lives, and it is a full-time occupation to be watching the actions of the Federal government and to be educated and updated enough to really understand what is happening and then to know who to contact and how in order to have an impact.
(I also have this thing where I'm uncomfortable contacting people who aren't my representatives, because I don't feel like my representatives should care if someone in some random state is angry with them. If I want to change the behavior of another representative, theoretically I should contact one of their constituents and convince them that it is important).
My first thought was some kind of bot that the public could sign up for that would monitor political newsfeeds and pick up the alarm of the political wonks then contact you if your representative was involved, maybe text you their number so that there was no barrier to calling their office.
But this idea is unbearably Silicon Valley of me.
FB: actually a great disection of the way that norms are changing in the Federal government and the incentives to maintain them and which apply to Trump and what we as the public would need to do to reinforce the governance norms that we value "When a norm has to be defended explicitly, in argument, it’s by definition no longer a norm — it’s a behavior that people can choose to observe, or choose not to. By the time breaking a norm is imaginable, the norm has all but died — the rest is just formality...
Norms can’t survive an argument about “why?”; by the time they’re called into question, it’s really a matter of “you and what army?”"
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