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Honestly, I think we should replace Congress with this app.
I think this is where I'm going to take a moment to shill my personal vision: let's amend the apportionment act of 1929.
I don't know if the house of representatives having 1,000 members would be an improvement, but I'd like to see what would happen.
Weak. Return to the original apportionment ratio of 1-30,000. Bring on the Small City of Representatives.
(It would make gerrymandering harder and less impactful, though the dynamics of an 11k member house would be very weird)
Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.
I imagine you'd end up with a house-within-the-house that dealt with the vast majority of business.
I am under the impression this is already largely how the House functions, with committees. And particular committees (Rules comes to mind) being much more influential on general business than others.
Most business is conducted in committees, but virtually every rep has committee assignments. With 11k representatives, I could easily envision a situation where the vast majority of reps do very little except vote to organize the House and handle constituent issues.
I wonder if maybe you'd end up with highly specialized committees. How much of the bureaucratic/topical expertise currently embedded in executive rule making agencies could make it back into Congress if the House had 11k members? Although that expertise would probably not be optimally distributed, since it still relies on actually winning elections.
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:
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.
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