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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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If you had real political parties rather than primaries then the parties would have an incentive to get the expertise they needed into the House by running the experts in safe districts.

If each subcommittee has 15 members (about the average for current House subcommittees) and each part-time Representative sits on two, then you could have about 1500 sub-committees - roughly one for each Senate-confirmed executive branch officer under the current system. So as long as the required expertise was there and there was a working system for getting less-controversial legislation that passed after a detailed markup in subcommittee through committee and to a quick yes/no vote of the whole House, you could indeed replace regulations with legislation.

I assume that members of the main committees would be full-time. I also suspect you would need some kind of Grand Committee of a few hundred senior full-time Representatives (probably the same ones that sit on the major committees) that could handle bills which are sufficiently important that you don't want to pass the text reported out of committee without further debate, in the same way that current legislatures allow for amendments to be proposed and voted on on the floor. I assume that Grand Committee members would get Washington offices and larger staffs, and that Grand Committee members plus a random selection of part-time Reps would get seats in the House Chamber for important ceremonial events.

In this model the work of a backbench part-time Representative has three components:

  • Constituent service.
  • Ensuring "their" Grand Committee member (what "their" means depends on how the Grand Committee is elected and how the party caucuses stitch up those elections) is aware of issues that particularly affect their district.
  • Legislative work in sub-committee.

Sub-committee chairs also need to spend a lot of time managing their subcommittee's business through the parent major committee - they might need to be full-time as well to do that job.

Full-time Representatives would have similar jobs to what they do now, except that their "constituents" would be the backbench members of their own party, rather than voters.

It feels like an experiment worth trying.