I think it would be interesting to have three Houses: Senate, with individual senators appointed by the state legislatures; Representatives, with individuals elected by popular vote; and Citizens, selected by sortition. Legislation could originate in either the Senate or the House of Representatives, but would have to be ratified by the House of Citizens, unless their veto were overridden by super-majorities. The number of citizens per state would be the sum of the state's senators & representatives.
This would take the veto away from the President, and give it to a random selection of people.
Maybe combine it with an amendment stating that all regulations must be passed by the Congress, or at least be ratified by the House of Citizens …
There are a lot of potential roles for citizen juries, but adding a third house is just a solution looking for a problem.
A good arrangement would be:
- Elect 50 Senators nationally by proportional representation (2% party vote = 1 senate seat)
- The Senate works with parliamentary style vote of no confidence system instead of fixed term lengths (fixed term lengths have repeatedly been a disaster for the US). Let's say the maximum is 6 years, in keeping with tradition
- The Senate appoints the President and cabinet directly, instead of using the Electoral College first and then approving the Cabinet. Since the Senate is now national, it's essentially national popular vote for President.
- The House remains on a 2 year limit, but add more Reps (1 per 100K people is good) and do things like Instant Runoff Voting and multimember constituencies.
- For the House districts, have the Federal Election Commission draw up plans and…
- Have the plans approved by citizen juries. It's crazy to just send one random person to congress and expect them to do well, but it's not crazy to ask random 100 people from across the country to come together to give oversight to bureaucrats. We have 12 random people give oversight to criminal trials already. Juries are good at oversight.
- We could also use citizen juries for some Supreme Court stuff, but that might be harder because the cases end up being very technical at that level.
Issue there is that the House and Senate would just represent the people, and no-one would represent the states. That seems contrary to point of a government whose title is the United States.
This would take the veto away from the President, and give it to a random selection of people.
Maybe combine it with an amendment stating that all regulations must be passed by the Congress, or at least be ratified by the House of Citizens …