No, 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.
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.))
Not the parent, but broadly agree that a change to apportionment would heavily change the US for the better. I don't think it would be a single fix for the country, but I think it would greatly help quite a few of the issues.
Originally there were about 35k constituents/rep. Today it's an average of ~750k constituents/rep, with some districts at over a million.
This is because of the Apportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of reps. If we had the same constituent/rep ratio, we'd have ~10k reps total.
If instead we went back to the constituent/rep ratio that existed originally, a lot of our structural problems go away, via a mechanism that's accessible via US code rather than a change to the constitution.
For instance, the electoral college is based on federal representation. If you expand the house by ~50x, that dominates the electoral college by nearly two orders of magnitude, and creates a very close to popular election.
It's also much much harder to gerrymander on that scale.
That scale would also have a return to a more personal form of politics, where people actually have a real chance to meet with their reps (and the candidates) face to face.
It also feels that by having a much larger, more diffuse legislative body, we'd better approximate truly democratic processes in a representative democratic model.
Wow, that's a lot! I recall reading a piece, I believe in the Washington Post, sometime within the past few years, on this topic. They didn't run the numbers for such a dramatic increase, but I think talked about a House size of around 1000 representatives. And I was surprised to find out that this didn't shift the balance of power as much as I expected it would.
But regardless, as much as I would like for it to be easier for Democrats to win elections (in what would be an entirely fair way for them to do so!), that just puts one party in power more frequently. It doesn't fix the underlying dysfunction.
Biology is a bad example when applied to a government.
Almost all change in biology happens to populations, not individuals. In order for that to apply to governments, we would need to have massive churn and rapid experimentation of government policies and structures. These are not conducive to voter feedback (eg. Democracy) and would be so disruptive to business and life as to make governments useless until they reached some steady state.
I remember hearing that Italy had 52 governments in 50 years. It’s suffering from all of the same problems as the rest of western countries, perhaps somewhat worse than average.
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.
The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.