When only some of us win, all of us lose

Judy Aron's regular posts about what is going on in the House are informative, insightful, well-written, and worth reading.  Near the beginning of a recent post, she started out with this comment:

We knew the 23 bills we had before us were going to yield some very good wins.

I don't think that's an unusual sentiment, but it struck me that this attitude — that one side should win while the other side loses — is what creates almost all of the dysfunction that we find in government.

Try the following thought experiment. 

Imagine that no bill could pass out of either the House or the Senate without being approved by 95% of its entire membership, rather than by a majority whichever members happen to show up on a given day.

(Also, imagine that every statute sunsets after a short time, so all laws would get regularly reviewed for continued relevance, and updated to reflect changing conditions.)

This would prevent any group of people that is significantly smaller than everyone from depriving everyone else of the government by consent that they were promised in the Declaration of Independence.

Hardly any laws would get passed, but the ones that do wouldn't involve one group insisting that its values should be substituted for the values of substantial groups of citizens who disagree with them.

Because nothing would be enacted without nearly universal support, the law would become ‘something I willingly agree to obey’, rather than what it is now — 'something imposed on me, that I'll ignore or subvert whenever I can'.

Which system would you rather live under — the one I'm describing, or the one that we have now?

Under the current system, majority rule is used as a kind of club, which one 'side' can use to beat up the other 'side', until the other side gains control of the club and returns the favor.

What I'm suggesting is actually pretty simple.  It's that instead of always asking,

How many people should we need to get what we want?

we start asking instead,

How many people are we willing to screw over, to get what we want?

As I explain here, when only some of us win, we all lose in the long run.