What if the U.S. House of Representatives were made up of people drawn from a random lottery of all the nation’s citizens? What kind of laws would such a body propose?
Here’s one fascinating scenario. A Citizen Legislature has been called The Federalist Papers of our time.
“At the birth of the American republic, as James Madison noted, members of the constitutional convention ‘wished for vigor in the government, but wished that vigorous authority to flow immediately from the legitimate source of all authority. The government ought to possess not only, first, the force, but secondly, the mind or sense of the people at large. The legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society.’
“This concept of a popular legislature has a deep and lasting appeal. It offers a durable standard by which to judge the composition (and the actions) of any legislature in a country which professes to live by democratic principles.”
“Living Business” in InContext, #11, p. 57, Autumn 1985.