10/06/2010 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Minutes of a Public Hearing ' October 6, 2010 i Page 7 ? perspective what you want is a system made up of representatives in which these representatives can then function and govern the society. So we tend to be kind of split between those two views on government and they carry out all the way to the Supreme Court in how the Supreme Court views issues and government. Governance, and this is what I've been thinking about a lot because I am watching the United States to me lose its ability to govern well and healthcare reform to me was an example of an issue that should have been a really open discussion that involves citizens and instead it became a big clash of interest and it was hard to even know what was being handled in that process. That's not the way to govern. What you want in governance, whether you are a Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian is to create a system where people who aze going to govern can deliberate. That is really key. Voting is not nearly as important I would argue as the ability to deliberate. What's been interesting and was reflected in the comments of the Chair of the Charter Review Commission, is that charter commissions and charter review commissions are an example where people begin to deliberate. To write a charter, for example, takes six months meeting at least once a week for 3-5 hours. People who dori't attend get no sense of talking through all of those issues. That's why we talk about juries. Juries deliberate. They listen to all of the evidence then they go somewhere where they can, by themselves, nobody can interrupt, and they can deliberate over that evidence. It's deliberation that makes the real difference where people can come and talk and discuss and then get a better understanding of what the issue really is, what the problems really are, and what options we have for dealing with those. In contrast, at the national, we get into the situation where 24/7 running campaigns and so one party will meet and the other party refuses to deliberate because it wants to win the next election rather than deliberate. That's a real problem. The second issue that's often misunderstood is compromise. You can't compromise without deliberation. We tend to think of a compromise as, well I'll give you half of what you want and you give me half of what I want. T'hat is some type of a political compromise. But that really doesn't help deal with real issues. The kind of compromise you want is, long ago she was an academic and an activist, Mary Parker Follett talked about constructive compromise, where people deliberate together and pick the best at each argument they hear. They compromise in terms of picking better items than their argument. They don't compromise by splitting the difference or anything else, so sometimes you may have to do that because it's an issue in which you decide is just irreconcilable. Most of the time that's not the case. If people can talk and listen to the different views and have a chance to think about those different views, then they can say, well you know on Issue 1 you actually have a better solution than I do but I still prefer my