The United States congress should be dismantled and replaced with a direct democratic voting system

Now,while it may seem like it would be impossible to replace congress with the citizens themselves, I am going to argue now why that is not so impossible. Back in the early days of the United States this would have been nearly impossible, because congress is used to debate and discuss the laws until a vote is to take place. How can every single person possibly partake in such debates in a time where the fastest transportation was horse and you can't have every single person together at once? It just seems impractical. However, we are in a day and age of internet. One doesn't need to be present at a meeting to understand what is going on at that meeting anymore. I propose that debate over the law, can occur via the internet between the people. These debates would be publicly accessible in real time, essentially they could be live streamed through youtube, or any other online video platform. Not every person needs to listen to it at the time the debate takes place either, and it wouldn't be possible anyways since people are busy. It can be watched at another time before the voting actually takes place(which could be quite a bit later after the debates to give people time to watch the debates). There would still be political parties, and basically I would say political parties would choose representatives to discuss the issues that many of the people agree with. After all, if we have many people who agree with something on a topic, there is no reason to have all of them debate the topic, and only one is needed. As for the many committees in congress, committees could still be made with the people, with which representatives are chosen to go in those committees, but all the people will vote on the measure in the end. Not everyone would be in a committee since it's not necessary, as long as opinions are shared roughly among the same percentage in the committee as they are among the populace. I believe also, that if the system was this way, the people would grow tired of voting on every single legislation proposed, which is a good thing in my mind. They would likely decide to give more powers to the states and local governments where it properly belongs and take the federal government out of the many issues it is involved with today since they don't want to be bothered with voting on every single issue. Congress used to meet just a few months in the year in the early days of the Republic[1], now of course it's pretty much year-round based on how much more legislation they have to pass [2]. This is indication that the federal government has grown unnecessarily significantly since the early days of the republic, and hopefully if the people are the ones who are law makers, they would devote much less time to legislation, and thus reduce the size of the federal government. Now, the main reason I support this move of making the people the law-makers, is because congress is supposed to be a representation of the people. The house of representatives was made to be representatives of the people, and the senate, ever since the 17th amendment that made them directly elected by the people, is also essentially supposed to be representative of the people. What better way to make the legislative branch representative of the people than to make the people the legislative branch? Studies show that Congress is not representative of the people anymore. For one, if they were representative of the people, they would not have such a low approval rating as they currently have which has generally been less than 20% for the past couple of years [3] and then roughly 40% of people even approve the job their own representative is doing while 48% disapprove of the job their own representative is doing [4]. This is just one indicator that congress is no longer representative of the people, another indication of this is by looking at who has the most influence over policy making. In a study conducted by Princeton University, in which the four political theories,"Electoral Democracy ,Economic-Elite Domination,and two types of interest-group pluralism"Majoritarian Pluralism,in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented, and Biased Pluralism, in which corporations,business associations, and professional groups predominate" are investigated into it was found that Economic Elite Domination and Biased Pluralism are most prevalent in United States politics. [5] It was also found that the average citizen has little to no effect on policy making in the United States. [5] What this means is that elites, corporations, business associations, and professional groups have the most influence over policy making. In other words, congress does not do the will of the people, but rather the will of economic elites and corporations. Now, while many studies have found little significance of donors influence upon public policy[6][7][8], this was primarily due to the fact that these other studies used an analysis of the donations compared to role call votes, in a more in-depth analysis of donations and ear-marks, the writing of the legislation, and the most specific intricacies of writing a bill, it was found that donations do significantly influence policy-making in one study [8]. What this indicates is that money goes a long ways in getting what you want in our system, and as shown before, the average person disapproves of congress as a whole as well as their own representative, and economic elites and corporations have the most influence on public policy, and since some have more money than others, they have more of a voice in our system than others. One solution to this problem it getting rid of wealth inequality, but that can be seen as unfair since some people work harder and longer than others, so why should they earn the same amount as someone who doesn't work as hard or as long? Having it so that every person votes in legislation is more fair inherently, since it's one person, one vote and it allows some people to be wealthier than others based on merit but doesn't give those people more voice. In addition, someone may say we don't have to get rid of congress in order to make the legislation more representative of the people. One may propose making amendments to the constitution that restrict donations to representatives, gets rid of gerrymandering, institutes term limits, and getting rid of other barriers to preventing congress from being representative. However, I would argue that this would only be a temporary fix. The elites would likely find another way to gain more influence, and politicians would find a way to maintain their position of power. Instead, if we got rid of these politicians altogether, then there would be too many people to bribe for the rich to get too much power, and there would be no one in a position of power trying to seek re-election for their own interests rather than the interests of the people. I'll end here and turn this over to my opponent. Sources: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org... [3] http://www.gallup.com... [4] http://www.people-press.org... [5] https://scholar.princeton.edu... [6] http://scholarship.law.duke.edu... [7] http://www.cfinst.org... [8] http://www.rochester.edu...