One problem is that representatives aren’t specialized. Nobody would run a business where 435 people who all had the same title and job description got together to decide how to run things. It isn’t quite like that; there is hierarchy in Congress. But everybody has “legislator” as their job description. This requires them to be experts in the law. Really, they should have some legal experts to help them figure out where things should go in the legal code, and how they should be written; and a bunch of other experts to argue over what should be done. Having the lawyers run Congress is like having the clerks run a company.
I wonder where the founding fathers imagined the ideas to run the country would come from. Did they think that congresspeople were supposed to get ideas from their constituents, and figure out how to encode them into law? The founding fathers didn’t want there to be political parties, so they may not have expected the center of debate to be in Congress itself.
One problem is that representatives aren’t specialized
US Congressmen are divided into committees, each of which deals with one topic, so they do get to specialize. Unfortunately, the committee assignments don’t happen until after election, so voters can’t take candidate-committee mismatches into account.
I don’t know either, but they did have many examples of legislatures to look at; each individual state had its own legislature, and the British Parliament may be the oldest legislature that still meets today. Parliament had political parties, even back then: the Whigs and the Tories.
One problem is that representatives aren’t specialized. Nobody would run a business where 435 people who all had the same title and job description got together to decide how to run things. It isn’t quite like that; there is hierarchy in Congress. But everybody has “legislator” as their job description. This requires them to be experts in the law. Really, they should have some legal experts to help them figure out where things should go in the legal code, and how they should be written; and a bunch of other experts to argue over what should be done. Having the lawyers run Congress is like having the clerks run a company.
I wonder where the founding fathers imagined the ideas to run the country would come from. Did they think that congresspeople were supposed to get ideas from their constituents, and figure out how to encode them into law? The founding fathers didn’t want there to be political parties, so they may not have expected the center of debate to be in Congress itself.
US Congressmen are divided into committees, each of which deals with one topic, so they do get to specialize. Unfortunately, the committee assignments don’t happen until after election, so voters can’t take candidate-committee mismatches into account.
I don’t know either, but they did have many examples of legislatures to look at; each individual state had its own legislature, and the British Parliament may be the oldest legislature that still meets today. Parliament had political parties, even back then: the Whigs and the Tories.
I believe Iceland’s Althing has that honour.