I ran across this one back in the Eighties when it was called the Utah Option. (I have no idea how it may be related to the state of Utah.)
The idea was that if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states voted a Resolution of No-Confidence in the federal government, that federal government is dissolved. New elections would be called within 60 days for President, Vice-President, the House and all Senate seats regardless of two-year class. (This presupposes that the 17th Amendment is not repealed. If it is repealed, the states would replace all senators in whatever mode they saw fit.) There would be a Dracula Clause forbidding any member of the old government from serving in the new government.
Following the election, all federal judges would be fired and replaced by the new administration. All term and civil service protection would be revoked for all bureaucrats from the old administration.
This would be the ultimate reboot button short of revolution.
Would that would make the House closer to a parliamentary style body? If we raised the cap to, say, 600, that would be one Representative per roughly 515,000 people. Would that possibly be too many to divide roughly equally between two major parties? Would smaller caucuses emerge with more clout in numbers based on alliances that one not necessarily party-based?
That would force coalitions to emerge to select the Speaker. And the Speaker *should* drive the interests of the coalition that selected him (unlike today).
Then there is the Senate. It would still be capped at 100, and the two leading parties will still run it. They would be truly forced to deal with the House, because the House would likely not be run by party cronies like it is today, where both chambers act as essentially one body.
Then there is the Electoral College, which would grow to 700, which means that the President will need to get 351 electoral votes to win. The disbursement of those 600 district votes across the states will change what we think of as battleground states.
This is all perfectly doable without changing the Constitution.
Thoughts?
-PJ