alt Hacker NewsNo, it's the lack of representation. We're an extreme outlier among OECD countries, worst representation in the free world. Even Communist China has better representation. The U.S. in the 1790s had representation in line with Nordic countries today.
The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.
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Increasing the size of the House and fixing apportionment would certainly help with some things, but we need to eliminate gerrymandering too.
It is bonkers to me that legislative districts are drawn by whatever party is in power once every ten years. Not only should the census be more frequent (real-time/ongoing, really, and more lightweight than the system we have now), but districts should be redrawn yearly, and it should be done by a non-partisan committee.
And we really need an objective, quantitative measure of gerrymandering, and comprehensive law against it.
But really I don't think all of that is it. Making representation more proportionate might make Democrats win the House (and possibly presidency, since electoral college votes are apportioned the same way) more often, but the Senate will still be broken, and political polarization will still rule the day.
We need more than two viable political parties (which would require a major overhaul of each and every state's election process, at the least), and they need to govern through coalition-building, more like how parliamentary systems operate.
And ultimately it's just the tone of the whole thing. Legislators need to stop with this all-or-nothing approach, where the biggest hot-button issues don't see any measure of compromise. But that's a culture thing, and you can't fix that with laws or process.
Re the Apportionment Act of 1929 -- care to elaborate? Are there figures for "the worst representation in the free world"?
My impression is that there are many reasons for the dysfunction of congress; the media feedback control system (in a literal and metaphorical sense) plays an important role, as does the filibuster, lobbyists, and other corruption.
(Aside: in aging, an organisms feedback and homeostatic systems tend to degrade / become simpler with time, which leads to decreased function / cancer etc. While some degree of refactoring & dead-code cruft-removal is necessary - and hopefully is happening now, as I think most Americans desire - the explicit decline in operational structure is bad. (Not that you'd want a systems biologist to run the country.))