I'm outside the US, but I see similar issues everywhere. I think it's time modern democracies stoped having "representative of the people" voting on laws. Laws should be considered each on their own value, and everybody should be able to vote for/against them.
Unfortunately, United States has a population of ~330 million and that would mean a House of Representatives with 33,000 members. There's no way it would be able to effectively deliberate topics with that many people. Just imagine how little time each representative could be allocated to speak, given there are only 8,760 hours in a year. Additionally the individual power of each representative would be so watered down as to be practically meaningless.
It's an unacceptable solution but it seems to me that the US is just too big and splitting it up would make more sense.
Why do people need to debate on the house floor? Do such debates actually change anyone's mind or how they vote? Let them debate in an electronic forum with written arguments, let them debate in public and on social media (a good portion of political debate already happens on social media). Debate on the floor isn't so sacred we can't do without it.
And yes, the power of individual representatives would be watered down, that's ok. It would be much closer to the direct democracy the parent comment suggested (and the reason I brought it up).
It allows representatives to deal with boring bills the public doesn't care about, but there are enough representatives that I can reasonably expect to be on a first name basis with my representative if I care enough to get involved.
Debate on the floor of the House and Senate is largely faked for TV cameras already in the current era.
CSPAN camera angles are limited on purpose to hide this, but most speeches are given to an empty or nearly empty chamber. Actual floor debate that might change viewpoints is rare to non-existent now - the real debate and discussion happens off of the floor in private intra-party meetings and lunches, or in 1:1 meetings between leadership.
In my country a law saying "you don't have to work, but you still get 10k eur from the government" would win by a huge margin... how this would actually work, noone cares...
Sadly, an average person is stupid, and half are even stupider.
There are countries that do something close to that, and it does in fact work. In many, many ways. Basic Income is a very real and powerful thing.
Reduced crime, increased economic strength, increased education and skills, better overall wellbeing, a stronger economy, better health.
Whichever European country you're in, I'd wager that the .1% are using tax loopholes and straight up fraud to fleece more taxpayer money than 10k per citizen would cost.
Sounds a bit like you're a victim of class war propaganda. Try looking into BI and how it actually works.
Then specialists will explain that to be able to spend this, other budgets will have to be cut, like healthcare.
If people are stupid and we need to be ruled by elites, then why do we have democracies? Why popular vote? Shouldn't we have PhD's decide who are rulers are?
Lookup "sortition", experiences show that common people tend to make better decison for the good of society, while any "club" (politicians, elites) end up working towards expanding their power.
The "citizens", the people who could vote, did pretty well. Not surprisingly, laws were not so good for slaves and other non-citizens, laws were not good for the people who could not vote.
Look how favourable our current laws are to politicians!!
