I’ve wondered what practical difference rolling back the 17th amendment would have. One concept it might re-establish is that of each state as an entity whose viewpoint should be heard (at the level of the state government). I suppose it would also be an additional check between states and people?

The issue is with the artificial limit on the House of Representatives. The limit of 435 Reps skews the numbers.

House of Representatives is suppose to be 1 Rep per a fixed number of people. But Congress put a hard limit of 435, that means Small States have more people per Rep than Large States.

For example, Wyoming has 1 Rep for 480900 people.

California has 1 rep per 736000 people. To be fair and agree with the original intent of the US Constitution, California should have about 82 Reps instead of 53.

Texas for that matter should really have 52 Reps instead of 36 has it as now. The way it is now it has one rep per 700279 people.

Fixing that limit should solve a lot of problems

Maybe we could instead support a veto branch? Run it like jury duty where people get randomly chosen to go to DC for 1-4 years. Those people have to vote to decide if they veto a bill before it goes to the president for signature. Try and pass bad policy through that system… corporations would be pissed…

The thing is we need a whole bunch of great people for parlimentary work. But nobody can know all of them well enough to vote for them.

But if every voter was randomly assigned a limited collection of candidates some months ahead of the election, they could make a very well informed vote on those specific candidates.

If there are 100 million voters, 1000 parliament seats and 10,000 candidates then every voter could be assigned let's say 20 candidates and 4 votes to distribute among them.

With a 50% participation rate you'd get about 100,000 inspections of each candidate which should be more than enough.

The best part is that this system completely eliminates personality cults.

For a random system to work it would have to randomly appoint people for life or at least long enough terms that they can actually learn how to implement what they want.

>Randomly chosen

How long before that gets hijacked? Nothing is random and gaming random chance systems is a specialty of a whole group of industry con-artists.

As far as I know jury duty is by random selection, and it's one of the fundamental building blocks of our democracy, and in my opinion it's a well functioning one.

And as the joke goes, you’ll be judged by a jury of people who couldn’t get out of jury duty.

How can it be detected in our current system?

Also, https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-ap... is more subtle than I expected.

They didn't want too much direct representation but apparently didn't worry about too little. That said, I have never dug into the history and I am taking the text at face value.