The legislative branch is built upon a series of unconstitutional laws that citizens have been prevented from challenging and that a corrupt and inept legislature has been unwilling to change for nearly a century. These are the various Apportionment Acts that have artificially limited the size of Congress and have cost the people their right to real proportional representation.
Congressional apportionment needs to be returned to its constitutional basis of “one for every thirty thousand.” as specified in Article One, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution. This will be a net benefit to democracy in that it will reshape the House of Congress in a manner that will better represent the political diversity of our country and the will of the people. It will vastly increase the size of the legislature.
The Apportionment Act of 1929 and related legislation limiting the availability of political representation enforces political gridlock, incentivizes graft, and promotes corruption by limiting the number of representatives available for citizens to a paltry 437.
According to Google, the population of the U.S. in 1929 was 121,767,000, or roughly 120 million people. The population is now roughly 330 million. In 1929, U.S. citizens were represented at an approximate rate of 278,643 people per congressional representative.
According to the little research I’ve done, this was meant to be a temporary measure, as the U.S. was entering the Great Depression and could not afford to build a grand new building for the legislature that would accommodate greater numbers.
Today, U.S. citizens are represented at a rate of 755,149 people per congressional representative. This is not only unconstitutional, it delegitimizes the foundational goal of government by and for the people via democratic representation. It is excessively non-representational and must be changed if people are to feel represented and to believe in the legitimacy of their government once more.
We should have around 11,000 Congressional representatives if my math is correct. China, a repressive Communist state, has approximately 3,000 members of its parliament, making it the largest. The United Kingdom’s House of Lords has 772 members. We can and should have represented our people in a more thorough manner than what an inherently undemocratic Communist dictatorship and a Constitutional Monarchy have been able to do for their citizens, but we have failed.
Why have we failed? Not only because Congress could not budget for a new building (a ridiculous excuse, given the billions we’ve wasted abroad). Because temporary measures became “tradition,” and finally permanent measures justified by the worst possible excuses. Because successive generations of Americans accepted these excuses.
We have allowed ourselves to slip into a situation where, the more our population grows, the more worthless our votes become and the less representative our legislatures are capable of being.
We, the people, do not care what is inconvenient for bureaucrats, what would make for an “unmanagable” Congress in their opinions, or what they would find alien and overwhelming. This is an age of unparalleled telecommunications ability and infrastructure. There are no longer any believable excuses for why we cannot have a Congress that grows in accordance with the law and the census, ensuring that each group of 30,000 people has a representative who has time to listen to them and will be able to respond with more than an insincere form letter.
11,000 Congressional members sounds crazy, sure, but only because the Constitutionally prescribed growth of our legislature has been artificially stagnated for nearly a century. We could have been pioneering representative democracy instead of depriving ourselves of our most fundamental rights.
There will be many, many benefits to following the Constitution as originally planned and increasing the number of legislators.
First of all, a larger Congress will be harder to lobby, blackmail, or bribe. People wishing to gain a malign influence over our representatives will have to work harder than ever before. Ideally, the honest will always outnumber the corrupt and will have an increasing chance to do so as the population grows.
Second of all, a larger Congress will give a voice to third parties and eliminate the idea of them being some kind of “third” choice. Greens, Libertarians, and others will finally have a voice and the Republicans and Democrats will be forced to negotiate with them on equal terms. Parliamentary rules we haven’t used in decades will matter once more.
Third of all, a larger Congress will actually increase its utility instead of making legislating more complicated. Committees will be able to have members who are actually specialists in the subjects they are meant to cover. Congress will be more politically diverse, gridlock will be eliminated, and Congress will be able to address many of the other reforms talked about here on this forum.
Fourthly and finally, Constitutional Apportionment is simply the right thing to do. It is spelled out quite clearly in the Constitution that U.S. citizens have a right to be represented at a rate of no more than 30,000 people per representative. Denying us this right due to budgetary and other ridiculous, contrived “concerns,” is costing the federal government the faith of the governed. People do not feel represented, and to remedy this, the solution is simple.
Represent them - represent them regardless of the personal or political cost involved in reestablishing accurate apportionment. Represent them regardless of how long or how much money it will take to build a new legislature, if that’s ultimately what’s necessary to achieve the goal.
I am greatly, greatly concerned that we are hurtling toward some kind of revolution or civil war, and I know I am not alone in this. It seems to me like key portions of our government have been dysfunctional for the better half of a century.
I can understand that pressing concerns like two world wars, the cold war, the space race, the nuclear arms race, etc. have caused legislatures of the past to “kick the can down the road” when it comes to arcane issues like congressional apportionment, but it looks like we are reaching the end of the proverbial road.
Our ancestors erred in avoiding these problems when they could have been addressed in a less dramatic way and for less dramatic reasons. It’s time to fix this. It’s time to make some difficult changes that will let people finally feel like they are being heard once again.
Can we do it? Truly, I’m terrified that we won’t even try.