We should require that our politicians use a transparent decision making process, in which they clearly outline the reasons voted for a bill, and the reasons they hesitated voting for a bill. This process works well for the court system, which is required to give a majority and minority opinion, after they vote. It also works in engineering classes, where students are not only required to get the right answer, but are required to show their work, indicating to the professor how they came to their conclusion. Currently, we don't even require them to pretend that they are acting in our interest by having a formal procedure that they account and explain their actions.
- There are many ways we could expose the decision making progress to the light of transparency. For each vote we could require that politicians:
- pass tests on subjects that affect their vote. This will support transparency by letting us know if our politicians are even informed or not. If they know nothing about anything, they will no longer be able to keep their ignorance hid from us.
- pass a lie detector test. It is wrong to use lie detectors on normal people, but politicians do not have the right to lie to us. For a politician's vote to count they should have to indicate that they:
- believe their action will help the country in the long run, and not just get them re-elected, and that they are going to make the right decision for the country.
- indicate on a scale of 1-10 how much they agreed with major argument affecting their vote. For many of us the reason that a politician voted to make a bill into law is just as important as the way they voted.
- rank the importance of the interest of those who will be affected by their votes.
- write their own speeches. We want to know what someone believes not what their handlers believe. The difficult mental exercise of writing speeches is the only way to find out what you really believe. The Gettysburg address helped transform our nation, but thinking about the man who wrote it is what allows us to trust our leaders. We can't trust any of our leaders since they all stopped writing their own speeches. They are actors. They are empty suits. They are zombies. We are stupid to allow this charade to continue, in which we pretend to improve our country by continuing to vote for politicians who pretend to be people.
- give book reports once a year on the most important book they think they read that year. Real people with real ideas who are willing to explain themselves clearly are explaining the problems that we face, and are explaining how we can fix our problems. Politicians should no longer be allowed to pretend that they are the experts.
- Debate real experts. We don't force politicians to face down real experts, but we do allow them to go on C-Span so they can make ridiculous self serving misrepresented speeches, in which they would never dare treat each other unkindly, because they would be ostracized from their good old boy club.
