Part-time Congress?

Do you think we would be better off if members of Congress served only part-time and spent much of the year living and working in their home districts?
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal does.

Evoking a satirical Mark Twain comment that, “our liberty, our wallets were safest when the legislature’s not in session,” Jindal said, “We used to pay farmers not to grow crops, let’s pay congressmen to stay out of Washington, D.C.” (Read about it here.)
Utah is one of the few states that still has a part-time, citizen Legislature. The advantage is that the state’s lawmakers have a much greater understanding of what is important to their constituents than they would if they served full-time. They have to go to work each day and interact with regular people.
The disadvantage is that spending part-time doing a full-time job might make members of Congress even more susceptible to influences from lobbyists and government’s full-time bureaucrats. They would need those people to help them make sense of complicated issues. (Having said that, Utah has a problem with lobbyist-lawmaker relationships that could be solved by tougher ethics rules.)
I agree it would be interesting to see what would happen if Congress was part-time. It wouldn’t necessarily change the desire to get earmarks for the home district or to please wealthy contributors. Just making the job part-time wouldn’t make running for the office any cheaper.
But a gridlocked Congress could just as easily do nothing at home as in Washington.