In 1985, Ernest Callenbach and I published a book called A Citizen Legislature. This is to let you know that it is being republished next month by the British publisher Imprint Academic.
The original is online where we put it after we sold out the 5,000
original copies. The new book has a wonderful preface by Keith
Sutherland, a Stanford University Professor, who makes it clear that our
original book is at the core of modern political science curricula
about democracy.
Ernest (Chick) and I, in the original book proposed selecting legislators randomly from the population, just as juries are selected (or the way they are supposed to be selected). I had written an op-ed in 1979 with Robert Gnaizda, published about five years earlier in the LA Times, where Sutherland first saw it, and in a 1975 article in the Co-Evolution Quarterly.
Robert Gnaizda influenced me and Ernest to offer the idea that the House be randomly selected while the Senate remain the same, in order to offer a comparison.
Over the decades since then I have a new, different and original idea about the value of keeping the Senate elected the way it is.
I now believe that a citizen legislature is inadequate to represent all of society's interests. The interests of corporations, business, government and the great diversity of other institutions, including foreign entities that are not individuals need to be represented in the legislature. In many ways they are represented in the current money based electoral process.
We need a legislative body to represent all the non-individual entities in our society, in addition to citizens, qua citizens.