> Well, you need a driver's license to drive a car.

You don't, actually. If that's all it took, we'd never have car crashes.

> What do you need to run a country? Not common sense I suppose.

"Common sense" is a lazy person's way of saying "what I believe". Akin is a fucking wingnut who was happily thrown out of office over his rape comments. Even before that, it's been pointed out that he was placed into committees with the least power because his colleagues weren't impressed by him. How is he even relevant? I'm not really okay with using 1 person as a representative sample of 500 people. It's like saying there was this one American who killed a guy, and therefore all Americans are psychopathic murderers.

More importantly, how does this remotely suggest that committees are an evil that Congress should do without?

Just picking your last question out of context to (re-)state what should be obvious:

Committees are bad, because you will never know what color the bikeshed should be.

You have exponentially many possible interactions between people in a group and any important information will almost surely get lost in the noise. Big committees are a wonderful stage for personal feuds, intrigues and outright sabotage (already in the formation phase).

The results you'll get will mostly be based on lobbying, popularity and whoever barked the loudest, not on benefit, cost, feasibility, let alone constitutionality.

OTOH, I don't really know what would be better. Smaller "committees", more like expert groups, can give better results if the right people are selected. Which is unlikely, given the present state of governments. At the moment it seems as if the best strategy is oversizing and over-bureaucratizing to slow down the process and limit the amount of damage done in that way. Meh. :-/

> OTOH, I don't really know what would be better. Smaller "committees", more like expert groups, can give better results if the right people are selected. Which is unlikely, given the present state of governments. At the moment it seems as if the best strategy is oversizing and over-bureaucratizing to slow down the process and limit the amount of damage done in that way. Meh. :-/

Most utopian schemes end up being conditioned on a lot of very difficult, if not outright impossible, presumptions. I am not claiming that the current system is perfect; it can, without reservation, be improved significantly. The question is how, why that how, and at what cost.

It's worth pointing out, btw, that the SCOTUS is a committee. Congressional committees are weak because their members are elected and, at least superficially, represent real people in a direct manner; their job is to be biased, and this bias makes them vulnerable to non-committee actions like lobbying and popularity contests. That is why you don't get to elect the SCOTUS: precisely to protect them from that weakness. (And also why you don't get to elect any other Presidential appointee; most of them also end up on committees.)