Potential reform of the Legislative branch

Seats in Congress

House of Representatives

The way political districts are drawn should be much more restricted compared to how they are now.
Each Representative in the House should be elected from a Mixed-member proportional representation.

Senate

Each Senator should be elected with a Instant-runoff Vote method.
The filibuster should be removed from the Senate, but all actions passing through the chamber should have a threshold, or supermajority, to pass.
Thresholds in the Senate should differ depending on what they are deciding on:

Action	New Threshold	Current Threshold
Passing Bills (de facto)	>50%	60%
Signing Treaties	55%	>50%
Confirming Supreme Court Judges	60%	>50%
Impeachment Conviction	60%	66.67% (2/3)

New Congressional Cabinets

Instead of requiring several committees to approve a bill before going to the Chamber leader (Speaker of the House or Senate leader), the bill would simply need to go to a “Cabinet” in each Chamber.

Chamber Structure

• The Chamber should be composed of 1/10 of the Members of the Chamber (currently 43 for House, 10 for Senate).
• Other members are decided based on a proportional system for parties.
• Every party is guaranteed 1 member in each Cabinet, but only if there are empty seats left to be filled and such party’s make up a “significant” percent. Any extra seats should be given to the largest party.
• The leader of each Chamber (Speaker or Vice President) are the leaders of the Councils and always have a guaranteed seat at the Council.
  • As Leaders, they have the following powers:
    • Manage day-to-day business of the Council
    • Prioritize Bills passed by their necessary committees (determining the order to vote on them)
• When there is a tie within the Council, then either the President Pro Tempore in the Senate, or Speaker Pro Tempore in the House, will be the tie breaker.
• Exact members who get chosen for the Cabinet are determined by the party who has the seats, in which they should decide how to determine Cabinet party members among themselves.
  • For example
    • Assuming 40% Democrats, 20% Progressives, 35% Republicans, 5% Libertarians in both Chambers.
    • One member guaranteed to be the Chamber leader
    • In House,
      • 17 Democrats
      • 8 Progressives
      • 15 Republicans
      • 2 Libertarians
      • 1 (Speaker)
    • In Senate
      • 4 Democrats
      • 2 Progressives
      • 3 Republicans
      • 1 (Vice President)

Process

• Bill is written
• Require at least ten (for the House of Representatives) authors/sponsors, four for the Senate, with at least one being a sponsor.
• Bill is required to pass through and be approved relevant committees.
• Bill is sent to the Cabinet, which decides one of the following
  1. Approval and send Bill to Rules committees (or whatever rule making body for Bill deliberation exists for the Chamber). The “Rules Committee” cannot deny or veto the bill.
  2. Send the Bill back for further review or changes.
  3. Deny the Bill outright.
• Similar to now, the Bill then gets voted on and passed to the next Chamber, which should follow the same procedure and then be sent to the President to be signed assuming it passed all Chambers.

Purpose

In other democracies around the world, their legislative bodies are much more efficient at getting legislation passed into law without worrying about popular support, i.e. public backlash with poor legislation. The way these democracies are able to accomplish this is with a parliamentary body, rather than a congressional one. This is more efficient because rather than using a variety of committees to get expertise on the matters of a Bill, the executive already has experts on standby in a parliamentary system that can make a Bill quality without adding much time to pass it. The issue comes in the United States, where in a parliamentary system the executive and legislative branches work together, but in a congressional one, they are separate, meaning that Congress must setup systems internally to make sure only quality Bills make it to the floor.

With a Cabinet system in Congress like this, Congress is still able to maintain independence from the executive branch, while keeping committees for expert feedback and having a filter to poor Bills.

Put simply, this system reduces the amount of checkpoints and vetoes a Bill must go through, keeping careful review, and reducing the sluggishness of the Congress similar to parliamentary democracies, while maintaining a separation of powers.