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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

A problem with having a large number of seats in the House is that there's no way everyone with something to say on any particular topic is going to be able to say it in an in-person physical meeting. In other words, meetings don't scale, and the problem would get worse if you added seats.

An alternative to live meetings is to move any procedures involving the full House to a web-based medium, similar to HN. Policy discussions can happen in comment threads. Representatives can travel to DC for committee meetings, but otherwise they can stay in their districts where the constituents they are representing actual live, and comment and cast votes online. Any representative can introduce a bill, and they can be passed quickly if they have the votes without a whole lot of procedural scheduling nonsense.

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This assumes that Congress accomplishes anything in "meetings".

Legislation is created and negotiated behind the scenes usually by a small number of lead sponsors who then build a political coalition of support before the bill ever gets to a Committee hearing. Many(most?) committee hearings are perfunctory nonsense attended by just a handful of members and the vote count is an open secret beforehand.

I agree that Congress should explore online voting, but I don't know that the ultimate equilibrium would look that different than what we see today. The typical Member spends Monday to Thursday in DC, Thursday evening to Sunday + August recess + multiple weeklong recesses in district or on the road.

If online voting was adopted, smart Members would still strike a balance between spending time in DC building relationships with their colleagues (and raising money) and campaigning back in the district.

My impression is that we have committees for introducing legislation because congress can only debate so much legislation in the time they have. If any representative could introduce and vote on any legislation, most of it wouldn't go anywhere because the support wouldn't be there. However, congress could have many bills in-progress at any time and no bill would be blocking any other for bureaucratic reasons, or because some committee was stacked with people who hate that bill.

Perhaps committees are an outdated idea, that when you get down to it they're only a roadblock to getting stuff done and an impediment to democracy. (We can still have committees for hearings, and things like that. That's fine.)

I feel like this would never work because of, well, all of the politics.

Most of the 'work' they do happens in hallways and outside the actual committees.

And that's hard to do if you can't just call Joe or walk to his office to see him.

I've never understood why legislatures don't move to something more like modern code review. It would have to dramatically simplify their lives.

I'd love this. Imagine if you could also commit incremental changes, so if someone pushes a 'pork bill' you could push changes to pull out some of the pork and 'trim the fat' so to speak. You can have the defense of women act without making prisons worse for minorities by pushing changes.

I mean, I think you'd still need someone with commit rights to actually push the change (presumably our elected officials), and you would need to have some way of tracking merges well, but that's all seemingly pretty solvable.

yeah it'd need approval by heads of committees maybe and some sort of consensus algorithm. Then of course the bill would need implemented by the specific departments that do those things.

Because the incentive of the actual legislator is to write smelly code. Gotta get them kickbacks.

Because they're all extremely old. Most of them didn't know what Facebook even was when Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress. Go look it up, it's embarrassing.

>An alternative to live meetings is to move any procedures involving the full House to a web-based medium, similar to HN.

Can't wait for $PARTY party to yell "Conspiracy!" when their comments aren't showing up on the congressional web message board, while $OTHER_PARTY says they were simply "accidentally" deleted by the spam filter. Also something about Russian bots and hackers.

Maintaining such a website in a way that everyone involved thought was fair would be hard, but at least it's somewhat simplified if you restrict posts to only members of congress.

If some third party wants to mirror the site and let ordinary citizens post comments on their mirror, they could do that.

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