Abstract
Every institution for collective decision-making is built on a fault line between legitimacy (a decision is rightfully ours because we shaped it) and competence (the decision is good). Systems force a trade because they ask one mechanism to deliver both. This paper proposes a standing institution that refuses that bargain, drawing legitimacy from who is in the room (a large, stratified, openly nominated citizen pool vetted only for reasoning) and competence from how the room is filtered and tested: random rotating panels, mandatory cost accounting, and three blind judging passes whose agreement functions as a replication test. Drafting is randomized on the same terms as judging, so agenda-setting dissolves as far as voting; we call this the two-sided loop. Building on sortition and multi-body lottocratic designs, the paper proves that replication detects panel noise but is provably blind to pool-level bias.
