I agree, but what's the solution? Aside from a complete overhaul of our system of government, which realistically would require armed revolution or some sort of bizarrely-peaceful military-supported coup d'etat.

> If this forces Congress to get their shit together and pass lasting laws

It won't. One of our political parties is hell bent on removing rights, reducing protections on workers, the environment, everything. They want a significantly smaller federal government. They wield enough power that there is no way that, for example, if Congress had to do all of the EPA's rulemaking jobs, anything would actually get passed.

States have some ability to take this on (for now, at least). California's vehicle emission standards, which end up being the de-facto national standards, are one example. But I could easily see conservative SCOTUS not letting this stand, and coming up with bullshit reasons why those rules are unenforceable.

And this is a part of the problem. The conservatives cry "states' rights!" at every turn, but they are still quick to strike down (at a federal level) things that progressive states do that they don't like. The other part of the problem is that there are quite a few policy things that you can't leave to a patchwork of states to decide for themselves. You need national unity for it to matter.

> It's just going to be very uncomfortable for the next few decades as we sort it all out.

Awesome, by the time that happens, I'll be an old man unlikely to see any of the benefits of it eventually becoming sorted out.

More likely, I expect Trump to win this fall, and he'll dismantle and destroy the executive branch, and further degrade any trust in institutions that we have left.

...

One thing I do think would help would be to fix representation in the House. House membership was regularly expanded as the nation's population grew, but has been left static for over a century now. One of the more reasonable methods I've seen for determining the total number of seats in Congress would have us at around 700 now[0] (vs. the 435 we actually have).

There are a lot of options here, and it can be instructive to look at other countries for comparison. The UK has a fifth of the US's population, but their House of Commons has 650 members. But on the other end of the spectrum, India, with a population 4x that of the US, has a lower Parliament chamber with a maximum of only 552, though that's a constitutional requirement and perhaps harder to change. Anyhow, if we were more like the UK, the US House would have around 3,250 members (a quite nice ~100k constituents per representative). That's probably a bit too unwieldy? But if we were more like India, the US house would shrink to 135, which is almost certainly far too few (mind-boggling ~2.5M constituents per representative).

Not only would a larger House mean better representation for constituents (both being more proportional, and having each representative represent fewer people), but it would mean larger committees, and more people to tackle various rulemaking jobs that are currently handled by executive agencies. I do expect that a larger, more proportional House would end up being more left-leaning, so I'm obviously biased at least somewhat in my desire for this to happen. (As an aside, would fewer constituents per Congressional district make gerrymandering more difficult? Intuitively I think so, though I have no real basis for believing that.)

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/28/danielle-... (cube-root method)