comment: >
  
  No. Most politicians have a lot of travel and housing expenses that aren’t accounted for in stipends. Lowering their salary will further ensure that only the independently wealthy can serve in office as the salary is a mere drop in the bucket for them. What we need to do is overturn Citizens United as another commenter mentioned.
context: Honestly, I think there are times when we need reps to make unpopular decisions that are in the long term public interest.  
  It’s a really bad idea in my mind to put more weight on following the whims of public approval. >
  
  Bingo. The most vexing problem with democracy is populism, the phenomenon of "leaders" jumping in front of whatever parade happens to be popular and pretending to lead it. We need free thinkers able to see a new path and brave enough to lead the way. >
  
  My AP government teacher called the representative layers of a republic “idiot filters” to make sure the stupid ideas never were implemented. But here we are lmao >
  
  That's the intention but POSIWID, representative layers just filter out people who don't run successful elections. There are a great many people who are successful at campaigning but are either dumb or bad representatives and vice versa. >
  
  I cannot for the life of me figure out what that acronym is. >
  
  the purpose of a system is what it does