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Comment on Why don;t more presidents put stuff to a national referendum like Clinton did a couple times? A person would get time off work to vote, show what americans actually want and so on.

dharmacurious@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Because the US does not have referendum. Some states do, but there is no national referendum in the US. If there were the country would likely be quite different. There are issues that “both sides” agree with that neither side push for because it’s not profitable. If we had a referendum we might be able get certain things passed.

Of course, you’d have to depend on those in power to do the referendum to give us a chance to vote on it anyway…

It’s almost as if representative democracy isn’t actually all that democratic most of the time

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schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Because the US does not have referendum.

I think it would probably be possible for Congress to pass a law with a clause “this law is subject to a referendum and shall go into effect only if approved by a majority of voters” or similar. That’s pretty much something any legislature can do if it wants to, even if the constitution doesn’t specifically authorize it. But I don’t think this has ever happened in the US.

In my country the constitution specifically authorizes this and it has happened once, which resulted in a law passed by the legislature not taking effect: en.wikipedia.org/…/1978_Austrian_nuclear_power_re…

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- dharmacurious@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I would imagine that could be possible, but it would require our political parties to want a referendum process, which is pretty antithetical to the way they operate in general. I cannot imagine that ever, ever, ever happening in the US without first having gone through a major change in our system, vis a vis the the two current parties. If, somehow, we managed to get the very progressive/green/soft socialist types in power within the democratic party the way the ultra far right have taken over the Republican party then I could see it happening, but if that were to occur then I think it’s pretty likely to have followed some truly spectacular (potentially violent**) political upheaval in the country that would make the addition of referendum to our lives a footnote in the rest of what would be happening.
  
  And that’s assuming we could even get those kinds of people into power in the US, which I sincerely, genuinely doubt. But that’s just my opinion.
  
  **Pointing it out, not advocating for it
  
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