I don't believe my idea stipulates that have to understand the minutiae of the bill in question, nor does it imply that you even have to have a deep understanding of what you are voting on. Personally, I think it's patently insane of an electorate to accept that the people who we call lawmakers don't have an understanding of everything contained within a bill.

What's the difference between minutiae and relevant information? If you asked either side of a given debate, you'd probably get very different and conflicting answers. Most disagreements we have are rooted in different premises we accept and the relative weight we give to conflicting data, so the difference between our ideas of relevant information is important; in many ways, it's the main point of contention in every debate we have.

What you're suggesting is that we gloss over that conflict by testing knowledge of the "proper" information. That's defensible as long as it remains undefined, but as soon as you try to apply it to an actual situation you realize you're actively excluding people from argument based on their knowledge of facts you deem relevant. When you do that, you're weighting the premises of one side so that they are more relevant because...your opinion is that they are more relevant.

In the abortion example, you cited a test concerning the reproductive system. But why is that necessarily relevant or more relevant than other topics? How much about the human body do I need to know to make a moral choice? Why aren't we also testing familiarity with moral philosophy?

You're relying on the idea that there is some objectively fair set of core subjects that are relevant to a given law to the exclusion of others. It's impossible to define that core without reflecting innate bias. (Or perhaps making it so unspecific as to be useless.)

What that means is that whoever controls the difference between relevant information and minutiae defines the agenda. If you define knowledge of science as relevant and knowledge of moral arguments is minutiae in abortion arguments, you've arbitrarily stacked the deck against one side.

There's no objective way to create these tests.

If that's the case, then there is a problem with how we make laws in the first place.

That may be the case, but what you advocate is not a solution to that problem.

Asking our political representatives to have skills that require them to be more than popular is perfectly acceptable, in my opinion.

You're asking for a lot more than that. You're saying we should make the ability to speak on behalf of your constituents on any issue during your term should be contingent upon your existing knowledge of whatever topic may come up.

That's not asking them to have skills, that's requiring them to prove qualification to your satisfaction before they're allowed to talk.

These are professional lawmakers, and I feel that not having a professional standard is a mistake.

They're elected representatives, not professional lawmakers. It isn't their purpose to pass laws as efficiently as possible or even to have the most intelligent debate on a subject. Their job is to represent their constituents as part of a representative democracy, not to pass the best laws they possibly can.