Talk:Problem Solvers Caucus

Merge to No Labels?

It seems like this page about a Caucus is a stub. It might work better merged with No Labels, with a redirect to the No Labels #Problem Solvers Caucus section. Thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ChunyangD (talk • contribs) 17:41, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Problem Solvers Caucus: Members: Map missing Utah's 4th congressional district for Ben McAdams (D)

The map may be wrong in multiple respects, I only spotted the first issue: missing Ben McAdams (D) who represents the people in Utah's 4th congressional district. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:C433:5F90:AD54:9EC6:1FDD:6E72 (talk) 03:14, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

A cursory scan shows at least a dozen missing districts. BentFranklin (talk) 22:32, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

American Rescue Plan

I'm not WP:BOLD enough to remove sourced material without at least bringing it up first, but it really seems to me that the inclusion of the vote on the American Rescue Plan is completely irrelevant to the article. The plan was not the one that the caucus had come up with nor did it meet either of the criteria for the whole caucus agreeing to vote in favor (supported by 75% of the total caucus or by over 50% of both dems and repubs in the caucus). All that the inclusion basically says is that a half of a bipartisan group didn't vote in favor of an extremely partisan bill. This could be said of pretty much any heavily partisan bill which would flood the page while still adding no real information about the caucus. I propose removing:

In March 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, an economic stimulus bill aimed at speeding up the United States' recovery from the economic and health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing recession, was passed with zero votes from the Republican members of the Problem Solvers Caucus.[10]

unless anybody else has a good rationale that warrants this being the singular exception to votes by the caucus on partisan bills. Kensai97 (talk) 16:43, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Removed. Feel free to discuss if it should be added back though. Kensai97 (talk) 16:31, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

On Capital Riot and Reaction

There's a question regarding the addition of the following text in the article:

Following the January 6th, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol, two Republicans in the Caucus voted to overturn the presidential election results: Bill Johnson (R-OH) and Dan Meuser (R-PA). In the days after the attack, the Caucus announced new members, adding two more members who also voted to overturn the democratic election: Ben Cline (R-VA) and Tom Rice (R-SC)

A few problems with this are the single source does not mention the Problem Solvers Caucus at all. It's just a list of Republican congress people who voted against certification of the electoral vote and then the user just SYNTHed the names on that list together with the names on this list. The claim that the goals to "foster bipartisan cooperation on key policy issues" and "working to forge bipartisan solutions to America’s toughest challenges" are inherently mutually exclusive with voting against electoral certification, something that has congress people vote against every single presidential election and even had less states seeking to be overturned in 2021 than in 2017, is spurious at best even if that last fact were untrue. This is especially so considering it's in regards to a matter pertaining to how the House of Representatives interacts with the Executive Branch via allotted checks and balances rather than being a matter of how representatives interact with each other regarding their normal duties. Finally, even if we did accept at face value that one could reasonably conceive it as being untrue, it still shouldn't be considered relevant considering the caucus as a whole approved of the new members and had no official comment on the two already present. If the Republican members managed to unilaterally add these members to the caucus without significant input from the Democrat members it would be more relevant, though perhaps for other reasons, but that doesn't seem to be the case. That said, it's certainly relevant to their personal pages, but not at all here. In summation, correct me if this isn't proper order, but while it's being discussed I feel it's in line with Wikipedia policy to remove the material for now while in discussion based primarily on my first point of it essentially being unsourced without the SYNTH as opposed to if it was properly sourced, but contentious. Please, anyone, feel free to either offer up additional sources that do connect the two or any other arguments needing to be considered on the matter. Kensai97 (talk) 21:37, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Would the content make more sense within the context of the Problem Solvers statement on their commitment "to combating attempts to undermine the will of the American people as expressed through the legitimate results of a democratic election" as a lead-in for this portion? D94ZC!ypZcM2 (talk) 01:36, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

That would certainly be better, but then one would also have to consider that the very next commitment they mention in their statement is "We are united in our commitment to prevent fraud by protecting the integrity and security of elections in America" which is what those representatives likely felt they were doing, again just like past elections where there were close calls in some states and just enough reports of irregularities that people felt they should at the very least be investigated and that, especially since such votes have never had a significant impact in the past, they may not have felt like they were trying to 'undermine the will of the American people' but rather did feel like it was at least a symbolic gesture to 'protect the integrity and security of elections'. With that in mind as an at least reasonable possibility considering, to my knowledge, no members have expressed concern about fellow members on the issue, if there was at least some reliable source out there which suggests the perceived discrepancy is at least newsworthy, I'd be more inclined to support its inclusion. Especially if it was instead under something like a 'Criticism' header if coming from only one or two sources without any evidence of internal criticism. I know some people hate criticism sections, but I think that would be appropriate if you can find something. Kensai97 (talk) 17:51, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

References

Achievements (and/or failures/controversies if applicable)

Draft table attempting to wrangle information on which bills the caucus has been given significant credit for helping to pass (or block), how they did so, and what their impact has been of the bills passing/failing.

Superb Owl (talk) 00:03, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Standardizing membership tallies

Hi!

I've been trying to make it easier to keep Wikipedia up to date when the membership of the House changes. There are a LOT of pages about caucuses and such, and even on the U.S. House of Representatives page, there are several locations where the membership tally is mentioned. Most of the time, only one of the locations on the main page gets changed and I have to manually go and edit the other locations, and often the caucus pages don't get changed at all. I just figured out yesterday that you can use templates to solve this problem, and using that solution would bring pages up to date a lot quicker and more reliably than keeping a log of every page you have to change and going and changing every location on each of those pages manually.

Using raw numbers looks nicer in the source, but using templates is in fact much easier and better. You can actually see that in this page, where the numbers before I changed the page to use templates were not only out of date, but very out of date, only last having been updated months ago. Reverting this edit actually brought back the old, incorrect numbers. That's pretty excusable – it's hard and annoying to keep track of what the correct number is! Luckily, we have templates, which were made to solve this problem. Let's make good use of them to make Wikipedia as accurate as possible as quickly as possible when a change in membership happens.

@Vif12vf

Blippy1998 (talk) 17:55, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Such templates are extremely problematic because there is no way of knowing where to edit the template unless you already know where it is or someone tells you (and you shouldn't have to ask), effectively gatekeeping editing. Furthermore, seats for parties and caucuses should be standardized across wikipedia, and using such templates will only ensure that most seat-counts never gets updated since the people normally updating most seat-counts wont be able to find these templates. Keep in mind that these templates are not common, and never will be. Whenever we add templates inside of templates, we effectively add extra unnecessary steps, and make it impossible to easily edit small details! Vif12vf/Tiberius (talk) 01:34, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd be inclined to agree with you were it not for the fact that these articles don't get edited. That is, there is no editing to gatekeep. I'm kind of a newbie myself and it took me a while to figure out how to even do this, so I understand the concern, but nobody is actually editing these numbers to begin with, so I'm not concerned about it. A case in point is in this very article, where the numbers are months out of date.

I obviously agree that seat counts should be standardized. As it stands, though, most seat counts indeed already never get updated since there are no people normally updating them, which results in the exact problem of dozens of articles, including this one, with seat counts that are very inaccurate.

I understand that templates are not super intuitive (believe me, it took me a while to figure this out). But in this case, templates are exactly the tool to fix the problem we are both concerned with. Blippy1998 (talk) 18:51, 27 March 2024 (UTC)