That would never work. To start with, you can't stop members of Congress from associating with each other. If you said "you get one week every 2 years to pass everything", the entire congress would spend 1 year and 51 weeks in secret meetings trying to figuring out what to vote for in their 1 week of voting time.

All that would happen as a result is there would be a 2 year back log of legislation, and it would take FOREVER for anything to get done.

The only real way to deal with corruption in government is to limit it's power. As long as there are people in power, some of them are going to become corrupt. That's just human nature. The best you can do is limit power, so that the damage they can do is minimized.

> you can't stop members of Congress from associating with each other.

Actually, many states have open meeting laws where, if it becomes clear that politicians met and discussed certain topics, it is a crime, and it's punishable.

They don't often get used, but I think that the threat does alter behavior at least a bit.

I'd like to read about these, particularly about how they could be Constitutional, but I can't seem to find the correct words for a Google search. Would you post a link, or possibly a set of words to search for?

http://www.rcfp.org/ogg/index.php provides an outline of open meeting laws by state.

Seemingly arbitrary limits on the time/compensation of legislators might have more of an effect than you think. The Texas legislature meets only once every two years, and its session is constitutionally limited to 140 days.

The California legislature seems to meet constantly, and regularly spends time in extended sessions trying to pass overdue budgets in a never-ending fiscal crisis. California doesn't get any benefit from the extra official time its legislators put in, and Texas legislators aren't busy preplanning legislation the entire time they're out of session.

Given the fickleness of public opinion, there are natural limits as to how much planning months' ahead of time can help.

AIUI, one reason California is in a constant fiscal crisis is that it takes a supermajority to raise taxes and other constitutional provisions mandate how a certain proportion of the budget should be spent. So it's much harder for California legislators to negotiate a budget than for Texas legislators.

Heck - in California it takes a two-thirds majority to pass the annual budget