Increase the number of representatives to be more in line with the purpose of the body intended by the founders.
The fixed number of representatives in the House of Representatives does not allow for the Constitutional feature of representation that people deserve and it makes it much easier to get a full body of support for policies that are not necessarily beneficial to constituents due to groupthink and politcal-class culture. It more easily allows for elitism among congressmen and missteps to go unaccountable to constituencies.
The benefits of increasing the number of representatives would be as follows:
1)Increased political activity among the population - This creates a new culture surrounding politics among citizenry. (If combined with term limits) It can expose more people to the realities, complexities, and accounabilities of government office and it can be as educational to the populace as much as it can be a means of transparency on a feseral level in relation to national issues.
2)Tangible political accountability - the increase of potential candidates circulates both the pool of representatives and the specific credibility of each representative. This can create/identify better statesmen.
3)Creates a greater threshold for policies to pass which means only the ussues of real consensus actually become law - issues requiring majority votes and 2/3rds vote to pass require a much higher consensus as intended at a federal level by the founders.
The representatives āshouldā do their job, fix that part first.
Second, we donāt know the actual number of us citizens anymore because representatives donāt do their job in fixing illegal immigration.
We have enough corrupt and crony congressmen and women to deal with and they already too lazy to vote a single bill at a time. They combine several bills into one because there is already too many of them. They also almost never debate each other.
How can a representative ādo their jobā when its nearly impossible to represent the voices of over 100,000 people? How many things do 100 people hold precisely the same, let alone 1,000-10,000-100,000?
Running water is more pure than standing water. Also, even poisonous compounds can be eliminated by increased volume of water (increased representation).
All Iām proposing is a return to the founders intended purpose of their own constitutional provision that āThe number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand.ā
We could get way closer without making an impossible situation.
There is ultimately a hard limit on how many Representatives there can realistically be. I donāt know what hard limit is but I know itās a small fraction of the number needed to get even close to the ā1 Representative for ever 30,000 peopleā ratio.
30,000/seat gave a reasonable chamber size at the time of the Founders. However, with our current population, it would give us a House of over 11,000 seats! We have to balance chamber size and constituency size somehow, which is why thereās the cube rule proposal.
A formula I personally like is: Seats = ā(Population / 500)
If they did their business in their home state that would be a body of 220 per state on average. I dont think it would be too hard to accomodate that but I dont have a problem with going for even a bit higher like even 1 per every 70,000 or something.
I think decreasing the individual representativeās distance from their constituency is an overall win.
What are your thoughts on having an intermediate body?
Suppose we kept the current size of the House at 435, but allocated one House elector per 30,000 people. Then all the House electors meet up at a giant national convention, and divide into 435 groups to fill a seat. That way the size of the body that physically meets remains manageable, but the average person has a direct line to their elector.
Sort of. A better way to think of it is the electors are the representatives, but they delegate their vote to a member in a body of 435, in order to simplify the logistics of physically meeting in D.C. Perhaps a better word for them is ādelegatesā. In practice youād get cliques of about 25 delegates pooling their vote to decide who operates in D.C. Meanwhile, the rest would remain in their home states. Recall elections and emergency appointments would be very easy to handle, since they could be initiated within the relevant group of delegates. Also the delegates would naturally act as advocates for the people, and a hedge against special interest lobbyists trying to influence the voting representatives. Thus representatives would actually be more accountable to the people, not less.
The lead thing that comes to mind is that youāre adding unnecessary levels of complication, and the more complicated it is, the easier it is for things to go wrong.