Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I guess I trust the Supreme Court more than I trust Congress It's quite a damning indictment of US-style democracy that people trust a small cabal of unelected lifetime appointees without any meaningful oversight, over a larger pool of democratically elected officials.
The root of the problem (and this isn't unique to US-style democracy) is that any body that has to deal with re-election every few years is going to focus more on things that get them re-elected, not necessarily things that are good or sustainable for the state as a whole. That's just human nature, and I don't think there's a way to fix that problem without fundamentally changing how with think of elections and terms…
One approach to splitting things might look something like this:
government A: education, taxes, social services, abortion, immigration, ...
government B: electoral issues, telecom/internet, mail, privacy, utilities, workplace regulations, ... basically, mundane areas that are more about boring competence and finding smart solutions. Or at the very least, serving the public will more directly.
This way, the boring yet important stuff can be done by B without being drowned out by the divisive stuff in A, where people become polarized into thinking they just need to vote against particular issues and there's no real accountability for the rest of it.
You might think that state-level government provides more accountability by being smaller, and this is true in some way, but for the most part I see the exact same thing happening where state government elections are mostly not providing much accountability in a lot of government domains because they aren't contentious enough to be the deciding factors in elections. But they are still important nevertheless.