Where's Our Citizen Legislature?

Every day we hear about the ugly bi-partisan back-stabbing and petty behavior being exhibited by our elected representatives.

Ours is a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy. We elect our members of Congress to represent us How can they possibly resolve problems when they can’t even be civil to one another?

How do we expect them to address problems such as immigration reform, the lack of a cohesive energy policy, national security, veteran’s issues, the cancer of ISIS which has spread and now engulfs the entire middle east, nuclear threats from Iran, delusional behavior of North Korean leadership, rewriting our tax code, the huge deficit, paying down our debt, the sickly economy as well as numerous social and job creation programs?

It’s time to try an experiment to see if we the people can force some positive change to our Constitutional Republic. Attrition, of members of the House of Representatives -- members who retire, take a medical leave of absence, are under investigation for possible criminal behavior, or for any other reason (death, of course) will automatically eliminate that seat from the election process. That seat will instead be returned to the people of the congressional district and a replacement will be drawn from a lottery pool of stakeholders.

We would need to create a database of all stakeholders -- registered voters who would be willing to volunteer their time to serve in the House of Representatives for two years and are in relatively good health. They must work and live in the community. They would be paid a salary strictly for the time they serve and be placed into the Social Security system – no pension and no perks. Period. Two names would be pulled from the lottery pool. The first person would become the House member. The second person would serve as an alternate and assume responsibilities in the event the primary candidate could not fulfill the obligations of Congressman.

After the two-year term is up, a new name and alternate would be chosen from the lottery. There would be no gender-specific or party affiliation rules -- open to all stakeholders within the particular district. The names of people who have served would then be deleted from the pool to allow for more diversity.  Career politicians would be excluded from the process.

This idea is described in our Constitution as our citizen legislature -- part of our bicameral legislative process—and again by James Madison in Federalist Number 62. We might be able to discover why our government is broken, why there is fraud, corruption and duplication in programs. They could tell us if it’s true that lobbyists congregate at that coffee shop across from the White House waiting to pounce on anyone who will help spread their influence. We could find out why our politicians continue to hound us for contributions incessantly, why our government misspends so much hard-earned taxpayer money on drunk chimpanzees and shrimp on treadmills. We might finally have a voice and some control over what happens in our nation’s capitol, our big, fat federal government. We don’t need to have government meddle in our lives and take away our decision-making powers – we need them to protect us, lead us and show accountability for a change.