You could phrase it as "Spend more time with your family and out of the hustle of the beltway! Avoid spending a fortune on private schools, private drivers, and a second apartment in DC." There are several lawmakers who come from modest means, actually grew up in their districts, and have family and community ties there that they need to leave behind for Washington.

It'd probably work best after a significant changeover in Congress, when there are a lot of freshman reps all dealing with navigating capitol hill. Such a change would be a big power shift from people who have established relationships to people who have fresh ideas.

And the idea is that they'd be using e-mail, videoconference, Google Moderator, or some other electronic means to communicate with their fellow reps. The idea is to build stronger bonds of trust between reps and their constituents than between reps and lobbyist/other reps, so that they actually act like representatives instead of a separate caste.

> And the idea is that they'd be using e-mail, videoconference, Google Moderator, or some other electronic means to communicate with their fellow reps.

If those were as effective means of full-spectrum communication as face-to-face meetings, then moving them out of the capital to their districts wouldn't effect lobbyists ability to influence them -- lobbyists can use technology to communicate with members, too.

The point is that they convey information without building trust. Research has shown that face-to-face contact is essential for building trust, because there is a lot of subconscious emotional information conveyed in body language. E-mail and other electronic communication conveys the factual, logical information, but not the emotional information. So if you want representatives to collectively decide things based on what is rational and logical but not be subconsciously influenced by lobbyists or other politickers, cut the emotional channel out of their communications.

It's the same reason that Google makes promotion decisions by a committee located on another continent. You want people to judge based on facts and not impressions, so divorce the objective facts from the subjective impressions.

Some of the decisions can not be actually made based on facts, such as decisions about future performance of some person (there are no facts that can guarantee it) or future effect of certain policy (the facts may be lacking or subjective and depend on interpretation). So, unfortunately, in many aspects in the politics "decisions based on facts only" are just not possible.