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Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely right on that point. I am so frustrated at the massive vacuum left by our worthless federal legislative branch. It seems like "both sides" of the political aisle are feeling the same: Executive branch attempts to do something in an arguably commonsense way to solve a real problem, the guilty parties who caused the problem run to the courts for relief (usually on the grounds of lacking clear authority from Congress), courts agree and (often very explicitly) encourage Congress to pass a law if they think this authority ought to exist, and Congress resumes furiously fundraising and meeting with their donors.

Edit: I know in general it's the left who "likes to regulate things" but a relevant example on the right would include regulating things like immigration.

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> I am so frustrated at the massive vacuum left by our worthless federal legislative branch.

IMO that problem can be traced back to issues like:

1. The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 which prevented adding more Representatives as population grew.

2. The game-theoretic outcomes of continuing to use plurality/first-past-the-post voting.

3. How most officeholders end up spending most of their time raising money for re-election rather than the job itself.

1 and 3 are pretty related problems. Freezing the size of congress means each representative covers more population, so getting their election message out is more expensive, forcing representatives to raise more money.

With a magic wand I’d massively increase both the house and senate, publicly fund elections, and switch to 3 member mixed districts to increase the chances every citizen of a district has someone they feel reasonably represents their major views.

I’d certainly rather try that than keep with our fully failed system, but I’m curious: with so many members (from both resetting the constituent ratio to what the original one was, plus multi-member districts), would it start to physically look like the Galaxtic Senate? Maybe a basketball arena packed with representatives? Clearly we are now equipped for simple votes to be taken instantly even in those quantities, but part of me thinks that this would be tough because ultimately 22,000 people can’t have a floor debate together unless in practice only a handful actually matter. Same for committees of say, 10x the current size.

I’m not saying it’s worse than what we have now, I’m actually more curious how the people who would like to see that reform would want it to look in practice so I can know whether I could support it and how I’d argue for it.

Congressional votes don’t need to be secret, so we have tons of technology that would permit remote participation and voting. That also frees up members to spend more time physically in their district.

When I’ve pictured this it’s with member counts in the low to mid thousands, not tens of thousands.

Floor debates are already mainly performative, with little bearing on changes to bills. All the real work happens in committee and by the Speaker’s office. I’d think about embracing this with more different caucuses of various members who come together on specific issues and bring versions of bills and amendments for committees to adopt or reject, maybe even a few levels of committees to build consensus slowly so the final floor vote is more formality than debate.

The other outcome of the increased population ratio is that it becomes very cheap to buy a law. If you can convince one representative to vote your way you've captured the votes of 770 thousand people. That's a juicy conversion rate. A larger Congress would raise the cost of K-street. Shifting the balance of political power back to the electorate.

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