> Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.
Yeah, that sounds very much like the current Congress...
You'd probably have to have a hardship opt-out for people who honestly couldn't do it for personal reasons. But as long as it wasn't too strenuous--and there's no reason it should be--most would be willing to do it, just like jury duty. It's a great idea, very democratic.
If the prosecutor tries to baffle the jury the jury won’t convict.
If something happens similar with “legislative juries” where they’d refuse to pass a complicated law they didn’t understand.
How do you explain to someone who doesn't understand high school level writing, let alone math, that "No, you can't just say Pi is 4, it doesn't work like that" in a way that they will agree in the end, rather than just calling you an elitist shithead who is patronizing them?
Today, legislation isn't written by legislators.[1] It's written by lobbyists and special interest groups, then massaged into its final form by legislative staff, who then provide a summary to the figurehead who will be voting on it. Since it's impossible for those legislating to really know what's in the bill, those creating it have no reason not to obfuscate it as much as possible, and every incentive to do so.
[1] https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
You want to have 1000-page monstrosities? Knock yourself out. But you're going to have to actually read all 1000 pages. And you're going to have to persuade everyone else to also read all of it.
While I'm dreaming, I have a second dream change: Congress cannot exempt members of Congress from the effect of laws. Hey, Representative So-and-so, you want to change Social Security? You're changing your retirement, too. You want to change healthcare? You're changing your own healthcare, too.
If you've ever written code that wasn't clear and obvious and necessary to the dumbest script kiddie, it's bad code, right? I'm sure you love those PR bots that sass you for "function getting long" right? They are never wrong, right?
Why do we continue to insist, as the world gets ever more complicated, that non-experts not understanding expert things is a problem with the experts?
Most adults don't understand relativity, so it can't possibly be correct.
You would have to work out corruption of the common Joe here. Employers hold massive sway over their employees, and by nature of employing lots of people would have a pretty good chance of employing some fraction of the government. It would need to be possible for these randomly-selected individuals to enact policies that work counter to the interests of their employers without them fearing for their livelihood after their term. Otherwise, we just make lobbying cheap or free: “all of you—vote for this or else.” I think, at minimum, companies should be unable to terminate such individuals for some cooldown period after their term.
What I think we should do, is if the votes are close to unanimous as a matter of policy we report them only as "close to unanimous" without going into numbers. So for example if we have 100 delegates, and 95 voted for, and 5 against we just say "the vote was close to unanimous". And we do the same thing if the true vote was 100/0. All which would get published is that "the vote was close to unanimous", and the actual tally would get destroyed.
Maybe the threshold could be 10 people. So if the vote was 89/11 we would still publish that, but anything more one sided would just get reported as "close to unanimous" up to and including real unanimous votes.
It would still communicate the same thing: an overwhelming majority of delegates agreed on the thing being voted on. But would keep a fig-leaf of deniability for those who might otherwise be pressured.
That being said. I don't think people would vote unanimously on raising the minimum wage. Especially if the number of delegates is high (100 or above). You would get some people who either own a small business, or worry about the economy.