Opponents have at times described Trump and Biden in strikingly similar terms. The president, they say, has weaponized the Justice Department against his political enemies. He has used pardons to serve his own interests. He lies, he cheats, he’s not up for the demands of the job. He uses his office to advance his family members’ private concerns. Worst of all, he ignores rules meant to limit the power of the presidency, moving us closer to authoritarian rule.

If you feel a both-sides argument coming on, you’re at least a little bit right. I do mean to point out that Democrats’ and Republicans’ complaints can sound a lot alike. The point, however, is not to imply that the complaints are equally serious and valid when applied to these two men – I don’t believe that’s true. The point is that the complaints agree in identifying genuine system flaws. The fact that so many of us perceive the same flaws should compel us to address them together.

Most of us think presidents shouldn't pardon people to advance their own agenda. Endlessly debating whether Biden’s pardon of his son is worse than Trump’s pardon of rioters can lead us to ignore the underlying system design issue. Whether or not all presidents abuse this power, it is clear that all presidents can. That’s a problem.

Most of us think the Justice Department should be independent, but it’s not, really: the president hires and fires its leaders. Not all presidents have used the leverage to weaponize the department, but they’ve all had that power. And, rightly or wrongly, both parties believe the other party’s president has abused it. That’s a problem.

Presidents of both parties have for many decades exploited opportunities to expand presidential power. Blame whomever; it has worked. Today the executive branch towers above the legislature and the judiciary. The president, placed squarely by the Constitution in the executive branch, now acts as the nation’s most powerful legislator and strongest shaper of the courts. It can be hard to remember that the framers intended for Congress to be the dominant branch. The phrase “co-equal branches”, once a dubious assertion of executive power, now sounds like an executive demotion. The presidency has taken charge, and there are fewer and fewer safeguards against authoritarian rule. That’s a huge problem.

Typical American politics offers only one answer to these problems: beat 'em next time. That is not a solution.

Winning an election gives one party a sense of relief, but it doesn’t address in any deep sense the nation’s ever-growing vulnerability to authoritarian rule. We need to be able to trust government data, federal judges, economic stewards, the Department of Justice... We need good reason to believe none of these have been cowed by an overpowered executive. For that need we need genuinely independent decision-making. And for that we need new solutions.

The toolkit for staffing the American federal government has few options:

1. We elect 535 legislators and 1 president (and vice president)
2. Many important roles are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, including ~890 judges and ~1200-1300 high-ranking political appointees
3. The president directly appoints another ~2800 positions without Senate confirmation.
4. And then there are millions more appointed by someone above or by someone who works for them.

In most cases, this is where the imagination of our government's human resourcing ends. There are the elected, those appointed by the elected, and those appointed by the appointed. End of story.

So if, for example, we wanted to prevent the weaponization of the Department of Justice, we would look to the list above as our menu of options. Currently the DoJ head, the attorney general, is nominated by the president, but by and large the public no longer believes that this provides sufficient independence. We could hold popular elections for attorney general, as so many states do, but electing someone is hardly a way to depoliticize a position. We could have Congress appoint them directly, but, yeah, that won’t depoliticize it either. I suppose we could have others in the department elect their head, but that seems like a recipe for an unaccountable bureaucracy. So… maybe we give up.

Or maybe we expand the toolkit. The vital missing tool for legitimacy without politics is democratic lotteries, or sortition. Facilitated assemblies of citizens selected by lot have proven remarkably capable of learning and deliberating about difficult issues. In fact, they tend to be much better at it than elected politicians, in no small part because they have not gone through the deliberation-poisoning process of a campaign. Nor are they prepping for the next one. Much like juries, these representative bodies, sometimes called citizen assemblies, bring to the table ordinary citizens who are open-minded, relatively untainted by politics, and independent.

What if the attorney general were nominated by such an assembly of ordinary citizens? Unlike the president, the lot-selected group could devote extensive, focused time to learning about the job’s many dimensions, reviewing applications, interviewing candidates, deliberating, and choosing nominees with deep qualifications and broad appeal. A similar body might be empowered to review the department's efforts and, if necessary, call for the removal of the attorney general.

Anyone worried about the idea that a president has weaponized the Department of Justice should consider such a system. If he can’t hire and fire the boss, what power does the president have to use the department against his enemies?

Advocates of citizen assemblies often point to the seriousness with which participants grapple with their options, the openness with which they discuss concerns, and the thoughtfulness of their results. They pitch these assemblies as salves for ceaseless partisan conflict and as sources of collective wisdom. All valid, but in the case of appointing an attorney general, the assemblies’ value is simpler: ordinary citizens do not have massive political conflicts of interest. They do not have political enemies at whom they could aim department resources, nor would they have the power to prevent the department from reviewing their own legally dubious activities. They could use the department as neither a sword nor a shield.

That is a solution.

This process of convening citizen appointment boards selected by democratic lottery, sometimes called election by jury, has the potential to help address many of the system design flaws that both parties point to in their lament over opposition presidents.

What if such bodies nominated the Chair of the Federal Reserve? Or the heads of research institutions like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Institute of Health, and the National Science Foundation? What is it that democracy gains from having all of its public research institutions under the thumb of one person? Wouldn’t they be much more accountable to the public if their heads were appointed and reviewed by bodies that were actually representative of the public?

What about the arts? Art is rarely discussed in presidential elections outside of occasional budgeting mentions, and perhaps that is a blessing. Surely we don’t want the president to add National Artistic Director to his already-excessive list of titles: Commander-in-Chief, Head of Government, Head of State, Chief Executive, Chief Diplomat, etc. What if the heads of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, and so on were all appointed and overseen by citizen appointment boards? Such a scenario would both increase public accountability and reduce the influence of electoral politics on institutions focused on arts and the humanities. What would we lose, other than potential for authoritarian abuse?

Or, to up the stakes a bit, what about judges? The more polarized our politics becomes, the more federal judges are associated with the party of the president who appointed them. That association bedevils the narrative of judicial impartiality. When a significant portion of the public shows disdain for any opinion written by a judge of the opposite party, the court’s legitimacy is left in tatters. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll found American trust in the courts had fallen to 35%, an all-time low. Our current system rests on a gamble that the public will believe that judges nominated by partisan politicians will be fair and impartial. As a nation, we’re increasingly losing that bet and, with it, a shared belief in our justice system.

Could election by jury help? If citizen appointment boards were to appoint judges, the public could at a minimum be confident that judges were not being selected to advance partisan judicial leanings. Trust in the courts hinges on trust in the courts’ independence. That trust can and should be earned.

Once you begin to see the power of civic assemblies, it’s astounding how many problems they can help address. We could protect against the abuse of presidential pardons by convening assemblies to review them and empowering them to reject pardons with conflicts of interest. Assemblies could tackle concerns often neglected by Congress, like reviewing and approving executive agency policies or overseeing adherence to presidential and judicial ethics rules.

Of course, many of these changes would require that we amend the Constitution, which gives the president the sole authority to nominate federal judges, for example, or to issue pardons. Someday democratic lotteries may help here, too. More and more advocates are calling for state and national constitutional conventions in which participants are selected by lot.

Indeed, the most ambitious visions for lot-selected assemblies involve empowering them to legislate. In Democracy Without Politicians, due out this spring, Terry Bouricius describes how systems of genuinely representative assemblies could work together to propose, review, refine, and approve laws far more deeply considered than those produced by career politicians.

In the meantime, we should begin by looking for opportunities to do what Bouricius calls peeling, gradually assigning roles once held by elected politicians to ordinary citizens.

We actually seem to agree that something like this is necessary. We agree that presidents have enormous power and sometimes abuse it. We agree that independent counterweights are needed. We may only articulate this view when we don’t like the president in power…, but we can get over that. We know there’s a problem, and increasingly we know there are solutions in the form of civic assemblies. If we can just agree to implement them, we don’t need lots of magic.

Just the magic of lots.