No, I don't mean dissolve congress. Rather I propose a different way to run a legislature in the modern world.

There would be no capitol. Instead, all members would work in their districts, all the time. And we would put in a bunch of extra nice HDTV videoconferencing systems. The system would be designed to handle meetings, all the way up to a full session of the house or senate, with multiple screens to show amalgamated "crowd" as well as close-up views of the important figures -- the person with the floor, the person next to get the floor, the last person to have the floor, the Speaker, the party leaders etc. Members would attend sessions that way, and through a secured channel, vote. There would be screens for semi-private discussions with others during the meeting. Of course all this video would be available to the public, too.

Members, and their staffs, could also videoconference in HD with other members and their staffs, as well as any other government officials they need to talk to. And quite possibly, with a few exceptions such as classified committee meetings, all that video would be available to the public too. For those without the equipment, the old capitol would come equipped with meeting rooms that use the system. "Going up to the hill" would mean going to use one of the rooms.

Members could meet in person of course, but they would need to have a chaperone to assure they don't make secret deals. Classified meetings would get a properly cleared chaperone.

And they could meet with lobbyists over the videoconferencing system too. And those meetings would certainly be available to the public. Registered obbyists need not and could not come to meet in person.

Of course, the members would get out of touch with beltway thinking. They would lose the serendipity of meeting the right person on the hill, the business done at exclusive beltway cocktail parties. But in exchange they and their staff would live and breathe, quite literally, their district. I can see arguments good and bad about the trade-off but it is not clear that either one is inherently superior. It would hurt the DC economy a bit, and airlines would lose some business.

Strictly speaking, all the transparency rules I describe above, where members can't talk off the record or without chaperones, is not inherent in the idea of a videoconferenced legislature. One could do that and still allow all sorts of unrecorded conversations. They would figure out ways to have them anyway. What the video system does is enables an easy implementation of an all-transparent, all-recorded seat of government.

Food for thought, anyway.