I asked the question earlier “Who should have the franchise?” (yeh, yeh, not in exactly those words)
How about this: change our national/state forms of representation. Our legislative bodies pass too many laws as it is. They simply are not cumbersome enough. Why not propose a Constitutional amendment (and encourage States to follow suit) changing apportionment of the House, at least (and repealing the direct election of Senators, giving us something closer to the Founders’ Constitution)? Say, anyone who can gain the certified signatures of 10,000 citizens would represent just those citizens (and yeh, I know I’m riffing off of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress just a lil bit.). Those citizens could “fire” their rep for failing to represent their views pretty easily by simply refusing to sign on for another term’s representation by that rep. Along with limiting tghe franchise to property owners, like the Founders wisely did, such a move would go far toward cleaning up the mess of snakes we currently have as congresscritters.
Of course, it could just give us a dfferent mess of snakes, but I’d be happy with that.
Let’s see… depending on how “property owners” were defined, the House could bloat up to somewhere between 7,500 and 15,000 members, if I take a purely WAG–cos I’m not digging into the census data for “real” estimates, which could be wildly off, especially since I’ve not set forth a definition of “property owner” in this lil screed.
At any rate, that ought to make Congress unwieldy enough to at least slow down the proliferation of oppressive laws.
Oh, one last thing: either restrict the congresscritter’s (entire family) income by limiting it to ONLY what his personal constituents will pay and REQUIRE congresscritters to live under ALL the laws they enact, or find another mechanism to make the job less attractive to “career” politicians *spit*.
Justathought…