A UK college student explaining congressional procedure to Washington

> the opinion that this guy is some sort of savant is that of professional staff on the Hill (named in the article), and is, by definition, qualified.

"Qualified" based on their personal experience with what is apparently common practice for Congress and its staffers, yes. But that just means that the common practice for Congress and its staffers involves an appalling level of ignorance about the rules and procedures of the very institution they are working for.

To run with the construction analogy, it's as if a bunch of structural engineers were calling a college student on Twitter who isn't even majoring in engineering a "savant" for having and sharing detailed knowledge of how to do load calculations to determine what size I-beams are required for a bridge or a building, based on reading the reference works that describe the details of those calculations. Yes, it would be impressive that a college student not majoring in engineering could gain such a detailed knowledge of structural engineering calculations in their spare time. But it would emphatically not be impressive for the people who are supposed to already have all that knowledge to be calling the college student a "savant".

"I refuse to acknowledge that a 20 year old can be exceptional, so I baselessly assert that literally everyone in the field must be stupid and inept instead"

Why not both. An above average (but not savant) 20 year old who appears more exceptional than he is because the professional class he's being compared with really does have a lot of rot.

> Congressional procedure is not even remotely as complex as what you need to know to build an average office building

[Citation needed].

We can just compare the books, per the article the Congressional procedures are 1000 pages and the International Building code is 832 pages https://shop.iccsafe.org/2021-international-building-coder.h.... So at first glance building seems easier. But then when you crack it open, you also need to read up on gas, mechanical, plumbing, fire, and energy efficiency, so there is an extra 200+186+270+692+302=1650 pages. So I think it is true - a Congressperson only needs one book, but to build an office building you need 6 books (and probably 6 people, each specialized in a book). Now building a residential house, that is the IRC which is roughly comparable in page count to Congress, and you do see house flipping businesses run by a single well-versed entrepreneur.

Or perhaps really well trained AI? Until they named him I was expecting that to be the answer. That’s exactly the type of question a well trained LLM could answer, the proof is what gives it away as not AI, as most AIs I know are unable to offer up any sort of evidence to back up any claims they make bec they don’t actually know what they’re saying or why they “believe” something.

Or he knows how to use the resources available for finding the answer to this question, which is a more useful skill than memorizing facts anyway. The embarrassing part is that congressional aides don't have the same skill. I wonder if they'll stop tagging him in questions now that they know he's just a college student from the UK. Hopefully someone recognizes his talent and hires him as a staffer (there are plenty of Brits working in US government).

It's not so much that he knows procedures well, it appears that he has some sort of didactic memory that he has focused on this topic.

It's both. Source: I follow him on Twitter, and I'm a professor of American politics.

Nitpick: 'didactic' should be 'eidetic'.

It's fascinating how distance encourages both absurd curiosity (“How does that work?”) and some form of detachment (“At least it isn’t personal to me.“).

As a German I started following British politics in the Brexit years, first for the fun of an utterly funny parliamentary culture (“ORDAAAAH!”) – then a few months later I found myself looking into Erskine May. But I'll be never on that guys level, too easily satisfied after a small-ish dose of something different.

Some politicians will know a lot more about procedure. Especially if they want to go for a leadership position.

People like Lyndon Johnson knew Senate rules backward. If you could win or lose a critical vote based on some obscure rule last used 30 years ago it was worth learning them.

..and for every person who does put their head down and do a good job, there is a politician behind them taking the credit.

Who pays to partliamentary expertise?

I don't know if what you said contradicts the parent comment. The parent complains that congressional rules don't favor equality in its membership; you say that doesn't matter because lobbying and committee assignments mean more.

My reading is both could be true.

I think you are missing the connection between the rules and the maintenance of power -- both the chamber rules and the caucus/conference rules and arguing there's a disjunction in my and Surdy's vies on power. Let's start by analyzing how power works in the chamber.

Let's use the House as an example. The three major pillars of power in the House are: (1) control of the floor, (2) control of committee assignments, and (3) fundraising/candidate recruitment.

1. Control of the floor is largely managed through the House Rules committee, the members of which are solely appointed by the Democratic and Republican leaders. This contrasts with other committees, whose members are appointed by the parties via the steering committees. From where does leadership derive this power? The chamber rules and the caucus/conference rules. (Suspensions go at the direction of the Speaker, and discharge petitions are rare enough to discount.)

2. While some committees are appointed by the Democratic/Republican leadership, most committee members are selected through the steering committees. When you read the party rules, you can see that steering committee membership is largely chosen by the Democratic and Republican leaders. Because leadership dominates the steering committees, they dominate how those folks are chosen. And, rarely, they will remove people from committees for not following their leadership.

3. What controls the head of the House and Senate fundraising entities? Those folks are appointed by operation of the party rules, which again gives most of the power to leadership. Plus in the modern era, the party leaders are the heavy fundraisers. And they play a significant role in candidate selection.

This wasn't always the case, and you can skim my [summary](https://firstbranchcenter.org/eras-of-control-of-the-house-o...) of eras of control in the House to see how it has been organized different.

James Wallner, who you cite, and I agree a lot. We both think it is important for the factions in the chambers to be able to express themselves. The current incentives for party leadership is to keep their team together and to split the opposing team. What that means is that they've crafted rules and norms designed to keep their team together and prevent defections. That's why most members don't make use of the procedural rules on the floor -- because it's not in their interest to do so. They feign helplessness. When you read the article, it first quotes me, and then him, making a point that Wallner would also agree with.

"But, Schuman said, something of a “rules revolution” has begun to brew in Congress lately, with House Republicans ousting their own speaker and defeating several procedural motions, while their Senate counterparts have freelanced on foreign aid and military nominations, bucking Mitch McConnell.

Surdy, for one, views many of these developments as welcome changes: His tweets often feature critiques of Congress’ centralized power (and how it is unquestioningly reported). He likes to note that leaders — by the rules alone — are mostly figureheads; it is only years of members following the pack, and choosing not to learn their own power, that have made the status quo so rigid."

Let me repeat it: power is centralized (at the top) and the members defer to it. The members choose not to learn their own power, IMO, because there's a collection action problem (which is described in the article). So far, only the Freedom Caucus-aligned folks have been willing to break that mold in the modern era.

One powerful committee chair (this was a while ago) said: “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure, I’ll screw you every time.” The process dominates the results, and the process currently is designed to empower those at the top.

A fine structural analysis

As readyman says, these are two very well expressed, both valid views of how the system operates. There's a system of rules, and there's a power structure. The formal rules operate almost all of the time, and can be an interesting sport to follow. But there's a lot in that "almost". The moment a mob comes through the window with guns, the rules become irrelevant and the power and loyalty structure becomes extremely important.

And even in the everyday there are attempts by all parties to simply end-run round congressional process, at State, presidential, or Supreme Court level.

The straightforward answer is because they like their current rules more than Robert's rules. I'd imagine literally every rule was voted on by the body in question, so they are all things that people supported.

If you want to get really cynical, the major parties are complex coalitions of interest groups. It is really convenient for the power brokers to have arcane rules because issues can be delayed and the waters muddied around which politicians support what. Doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be weird enough that the average voter gets confused about whats and whys of procedural details.

Because the rules of the chambers are not designed to be neutral, they're designed to advance the goals of whoever has written them. In the House, it's leadership. In the Senate, it's to protect the powers of each individual senator.

The House Rules change every 2 years. In the Senate, changing the rules takes 2/3s, and that basically never happens.

I believe that is the wrong approach.

Why is an individual after 3 years becoming the go to expert when the government employees many individuals for this very reason.

I don't mean this in a demeaning manner, but the government needs to raise the standard of expectations of their workers.

There is nowhere else I know of that has this sense of absolute job security and yet expectations on individuals never rise.

Why does government staff continue to grow at incredible numbers with the access to technology, and yet services don't leap forward?

Literally no UK university student would call themselves a college student, regardless of the few UK universities that structure themselves into colleges. I, and everyone of my university friends stopped saying we were in college when we left college (at 18) and instead said we were in uni. Every uni grad I know talks about “when I was at university” and not “when I was in college”.

The article is talking about a student in the UK, it should use the correct terminology for that country and not the US specific one.

Like I said, I’m being pedantic.

A lot of universities have "schools" too e.g. business school. But we wouldn't call them school students either..

No, very few universities in Britain are structured in this way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleges_within_universities_i...

I did start to write an answer, and in checking my answer realised that a link I’d have to link to an article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleges_within_universities_i...

I was wondering if there could be colleges in Federated colleges, but that’s daft.

I think Kent was going to be called Canterbury, but there was already a Canterbury University in New Zealand.

Lancaster, Kent, and York sounds a bit Shakespearean.

Now I’m thinking is there a University of Atreides?

If you want to just stop at one, or the minimum, well, I guess that's fine. But some prefer to express themselves with more than the minimum. Do you want to just do the minimum?

kindof... not exactly

back in the day, reddit was really like that, then digg collapsed after getting redesigned and then reddit started to dilute. that's when r/truereddit and later r/truetruereddit happened. but this is history by this point!

truly there's something about "internet scale" that is still boggling our collective mind/culture to this day

It may also not be wrong to say: "those who know history, are destined to repeat it".

"That which is the common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care..." is not a universal law, and it is easy to think of counterexamples. Without listing these, here are some axes that can govern which side of well-cared-for resources in the commons may end up:

- the extent to which people hold cooperation to be an important ingredient, versus dispensable - the extent to which people are able to trust others, versus not - the extent to which a commonly held resource is considered as much a personal resource, as a common one, versus purely common and otherwise inconsequential - the extent to which people are able to value the importance (and impact) of small, consistent actions versus grand(iose) ones - the extent to which people are willing to learn from mistakes and change, versus the extent to which people feel entrenched and defensive

Most of these come down to education, culture, and type of previous interactions with other humans.

I might be wrong but I think the OP was critising US politics rather than the UK student.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an account that used an LLM to do this very thing for any concept

IME LLMs are decent at summarizing text, I can see how it can help summarize various processes that must be done. I am unsure how it summarizes truly novel things tho, I would assume it might hallucinate more but haven't experimented much.

Is this a generator-adversary network?

I don't think any game has really done full justice to the political process yet. The Democracy series is very limited in terms of its model and obviously the games about elections (like President Infinity) only cover the elections. They bore me really quickly because it is really easy to break the model and end up unable to lose elections and with nothing to do.

It'd also be very hard to create a truly great political simulator because few people who'd be interested in doing that are going to be detached enough[0] to create a truly balanced and realistic game that stays compelling decades or even centuries into the game like Football Manager or Out of the Park Baseball does. Basically, I'm thinking of something much more complicated than Victoria that would be set in the present and be able to generate a different plausible future on every playthrough.

[0]: Most people seem to see policy outcomes and even the range of possibilities through the lens of their own worldview. The Democracy series, in particular, breaks because it assumes constant linear changes in the number of people in certain interest groups based on your policies. But in reality, you are never going to get 100% of society to be religious no matter how much the governments subsidizes religion, passes theocratic laws and promotes it in the schools. That's why the Spanish Inquisition was so infamously paranoid about the possibility of a few people secretly not being Catholic.

I'm still missing the irony here.

I manage that maybe 20% of the time. It's definitely possible.

I could get that much higher if I had a good way to index resources: as-is, I have to resort to exhaustive search when I can't remember an exact phrase, and that can take upwards of half an hour. I'm definitely not on @ringwiss's level.

I find it kind of sad for you that you have not yet met a savant. Spending time with someone that has more than encyclopedic knowledge is very interesting, and even sometimes creepy. But that can be said about any super human ability regardless of the form it takes.

Two words for you: Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/01/15/thanks-million-jon-ske...

It's not really that surprising. America is the superpower gepolitically aligned to the UK and the importance more so in the face of waning British influence. To put it blunt: 'what happens over there matters over here'.

As for the SCOTUK, they have been effectively independent as Law Lords for decades, appointed for life, unremovable, etc etc. What they got was a title change and a new building and removed from voting on legislation.

The independence of the judiciary stuff has always been the case, it's just rarely been newsworthy until recent cases - we've been doing some fairly fundamental legal restructuring. They've never been influenceable by the government post appointment.

Blackstone wrote approvingly of constitutional arrangements under which ‘each branch [is] armed with a negative power, sufficient to repel any innovation which it shall think inexpedient or dangerous’ (Commentaries, Introduction, § 2). Of course, the branches were different.

The Supreme Court is superficially, by nomenclature, an Americanism. But I am yet to see any convincing argument that its jurisprudence has meaningfully been Americanised. It was in the Appellate Committee, not the Supreme Court, that in R (Jackson) v Attorney General Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope in obiter expressed some doubt as to the Diceyan notion of parliamentary sovereignty. The independence of the Appellate Committee was not new. It was, perhaps, rather casually treated (‘Prologue’, Stevens, The independence of the judiciary) and under-theorised. But no non-law Lord has tried to vote since the 1880s. Reference to judicial independence is hardly a novelty.

Have British jurisprudence and constitutional discourse been Americanised in substance? Perhaps, but you make no, and hardly even advert to, such an argument.