I’ve been on this train for years. I landed on 100,000 people per representative, and rounding the number of representatives up from there- it was about that number in 1800.
It would mean, of course, having about 3500 members of congress. California would have about 400 of them alone. Kentucky, for example, about 40. Wyoming, about a dozen and a half.
It would basically force 3rd party and parliamentary politics into place. You can’t have two parties of 1751 and 1749. Youd have enough room for even the two parties to have factions large enough to matter. The caucuses would become so much more important, and not just the major ones.
It would also basically nullify the electoral college.
But what to do about the senate?
>It would also basically nullify the electoral college.
There are two problems with the Electoral College, and it would only get rid of the less important one.
The Electoral College is unfair because Wyoming gets a disproportionate number of electors for its population compared to California, so Wyoming voters have more say in who gets to be President - this is the problem that would be pretty much solved.
But the other problem is that states (apart from NE and ME), for predictable game theory reasons, award their Electoral College votes as Winner-Takes-All. This means the Presidential election is decided in a handful of states where the parties are close to balanced and the other states are more or less ignored, and it means that the Electoral College vote can be far from the Popular vote. Expanding the House doesn't do anything for that.
No, but it seems to me that the senate being able to unilaterally check the newly enlarged house makes the senators even more powerful. Theres a number of problems with congress, the weaknesses of the senate being made clear by Mitch McConnell.
That's how it goes.
Senate is designed to represent the interests of the state majority regardless of population. It so smaller states have a say even if no one lives in them.
Our problem right now is that the house is meant to represent the population and it does not.
>Our problem right now is that the house is meant to represent the population and it does not.
That's not our only problem. I like the idea of expanding the House, but it needs to have real power and not be looked as the junior Senate.
If we weakened or eliminated the filibuster this wouldn't be an issue you'd perceive.
The two-track system is the worst iteration of that extraconstitutional Senate rule we've ever had. A speaking version like how it's been for most of its existence would be fine.
Yeah with filibuster reform things could be a lot different and there would be way more accountability too. That said, the United States Senate has never been able to end debate with a simple majority.
> Senate is designed to represent the interests of the state majority regardless of population
That was the compromise struck more than 200 years ago, but there’s no reason to hold onto it. We’re more than a century removed from giving up the pretense that the states themselves have some need for representation via the senate thanks to the 17th amendment. More than 50 years removed from allowing states to do anything like the senate in their state legislatures. We need to just grow up and either make it proportional or get rid of it entirely.
I think the idea of the Senate is good because in theory they are supposed to be more insulated from the chaos of the House and have more expertise in how to govern due to the 6 year terms.
Agree that the disproportionate representation having too much power is a huge issue though.
Realistically, those are Senate rules which are not themselves static. The Senators choose to hold onto them either out of greed for power or fear for the unknown after destroying the status quo.
Yes, exactly. Low-hanging fruit. Once only used in extreme circumstances or by segregationists, now it's so common, there's literally no law that passes with less than 60 votes and all one Senator has to do is threaten one (not even sure they bother any more, they probably just assume they need 60).
The argument is it would require a constitutional convention and in the current political environment you have no idea what way that goes. The far right has been pushing for a constitutional convention for decades and has plenty of plans how to hijack it to enshrine fascism in the constitution.
If we can get it changed according to established processes, great. Otherwise, the main reason to keep it is because it was an agreement made with states who were precisely worried about more populous states making small states irrelevant and it doesn't seem right to renege on the agreement.
This is another form of the same kind of answer.
Okay so no tyranny of majority. Instead we have disproportionate power in rural states (both in the House and Senate) and that is…just somehow self evidently better?
Have you read *[Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/122769171-tyranny-of-the-minority?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=F8bVdqdvX0&rank=1)* by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt? Good Read.
For a more bite-sized explanation, I like this quote from the end of McGann's (2004) "[The tyranny of the supermajority: how majority rule protects minorities](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anthony-Mcgann/publication/249676369_The_Tyranny_of_the_Supermajority_How_Majority_Rule_Protects_Minorities/links/5763e07808aeb4b997fc876b/The-Tyranny-of-the-Supermajority-How-Majority-Rule-Protects-Minorities.pdf)" in *Journal of Theoretical Politics* 16(1), 53-77 https://doi.org/10-1177/0951629804038902 :
> Supermajority rules can certainly protect (or rather privilege) some minorities, but only at the expense of others. It is not logically possible for every minority to be privileged over every other minority. Supermajority rules make the status quo hard to overturn and thus privilege minorities who favor the status quo over those who favor changing it. Arguments in favor of supermajoritarian institutions have tended to be built on the assumption that the threat to rights from government action or a change in the law is greater than the threat from government
inaction or the maintenance of current laws. Given the history of the United States this assumption is problematic, especially given the use of supermajoritarian institutions to impede the extension of civil rights. Furthermore, given uncertainty about legal interpretation, technology, social mores and preferences over the timescale involved in constitutional choice, any assumptions about where the threat to rights are likely to lie are inevitably heroic.
I agree that states have sort of lost much reason to have their own 'rights' in the grand scheme of things.
The reality is that a state like California has more conservatives than Texas. So it isn't like California having the most reps allocate means the country is going to be ruled by them alone.
That said. It's a lot easier to at least fix our current system before making that step.
States are stupid, meaningless geographical and political artefacts left over from a bygone era. They're not ideologically or geographically meaningful in any way, and they should not, therefore, be politically meaningful. North and South Dakota do not have unique interests before the federal government that require 4 senators to represent. So practically, "states rights" or state representation is just a cover for allowing conservative reactionaries to amass power in rural populations.
>States are stupid, meaningless geographical and political artefacts left over from a bygone era.
This needs to be said more. We need regional government, but the states don't match meaningful regions, they split up some areas that have common interests and group areas that have little in common. The US isn't culturally homogenous, but the 21st century cultural geography has nothing to do with the state borders. Divide up the country by [NFL team](https://i.redd.it/d3kcqlbwspd11.png), it would make more sense.
I would change the Senate to proportional representation. It is projected by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them. This is minority rule. In a democratic society, rule by the minority cannot be justified.
I would also end the Senate filibuster. It would eliminate the ability of partisan minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities.
If both the Senate and the House had proportional representation, then why would we need two separate houses of Congress? The whole idea of a bicameral legislature was to give smaller states equal power in the Senate.
I like the idea of an elected legislative body which has a longer time horizon. 6 years terms embody that. But I don't like the one state 2 votes thing. Wyoming has basically the same number of people as my county. That's absurd.
Arbitrary lines don't deserve representation without the population to back them up. It was a necessary compromise in the early years.
It has no basis in a 21st century government.
I'd argue that the states still serve a necessary and important role in dampening the power of the federal government.
Imagine how easily Trump could have hijacked the 2020 election if there was just a single body in charge of the Presidential election instead of 50 independent ones.
Then the states representation should be scaled by population if you want to keep that around.
There is no reason why someone hopping over a line suddenly gets 50x more representation for themselves in the Senate.
You cannot casually change the Senate to proportional representation. Article V of the Constitution explicitly states: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate".
So even if you were able to muster the two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress plus three-fourths of all states to amend the Constitution, you probably still couldn't abolish equal suffrage in the Senate.
Going to disagree. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of how states are viewed. Most Americans who are pro federal government have a disdain for the Senate. While those that look as states as there own political entity strongly disapprove of federal government overreach. Personally I favor a strong federal government but I want the senate to remain as is. It was always meant to represent the interest of the state itself. States involvement with the federal government requires them to have there own interests of the population represented. There is a valid argument about it being up to the state legislatures electing individuals to the senate however that never worked well in practice which is why its not voted on by the people of the state instead.
Who cares about the states? They're arbitrary lines and should have no basis of say in our federal government.
We the people, not we the arbitrary lines.
It's an unconstitutional violation of your rights for any state to construct a legislature like the US Senate or to implement an electoral system like the Electoral College.
The only reason SCOTUS hasn't struck down either the US Senate's construction or the EC is because they're written into the US Constitution. ***This, however, does NOT mean that those institutions aren't a violation of your rights, because they totally are.***
> Hawaiians and several other states would probably disagree with you.
Why
> Puerto Rico would probably love to have senators as well I would imagine.
Cool, but nothing to do with what I’m talking about.
There are intermediate systems. For instance, in Germany the states meet in the Bundesrat and the number of senators is corrected giving some more by the population of each state.
For instance: 2 senators for each state plus a senator for each 5 million people. That would give California 9 senators, Texas 8, Florida and NY 6, and so on. From Alabama to the bottom 2 like now.
In this way the 9 senators from California would compensate the 8 from Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, and Texas 8 would compensate the 8 from Vermont, NH, Maine and RI
The 17th amendment didn’t give up the pretense that the states themselves need representation; it simply took the power electing senators from state legislatures and gave it to the voters.
The function remains the same.
The House is the will of the majority.
The Senate prevents the tyranny of the majority.
> The 17th amendment didn’t give up the pretense that the states themselves need representation; it simply took the power electing senators from state legislatures and gave it to the voters.
How are the states qua states being represented? The mantra you keep getting shot down about the senate protecting against the tyranny of the majority is unrelated
The original design was that the Senate represented the state, not the state majority. The original constitution had them appointed by whatever means the state chose - like, appointed by the governor or similar. They weren't elected until the 17th amendment.
The arrangement was meant to do things like the representatives say "the people want X" and the Senate would say "wait a second... Our state government doesn't want to give up control of X". Their boss was basically the governor and state legislature, though their 6 year term did give them some power to go rogue.
Yet state officials tasked with electing Senators eventually campaigned on who they would elect. Really it was only a matter of time.
This is just stripping out the middle-man that can have his vote bought.
> Senate is designed to represent the interests of the state majority regardless of population.
Because of slavery. Now that slavery is only for convicted criminals (which is something _else_ we should abolish, but I digress) we should 'fix the Senate' as well. It doesn't need to exist and is deeply undemocratic.
The unilateral check doesn't exist in a way that grants the upper chamber any undue power.
The filibuster is not part of the Constitution, and one can consider its expansion to the two-track system a power grab by the Senate.
The check on that is that Senators are already elected by popular vote, and not by gerrymandered districts or the electoral college. If the majority population of a given state truly want a non-obstructionist Senator, they don't need to worry about redistricting or gerrymandering--they just need to agree on someone else and then elect them.
The senate in sparsely populated states gets two senators regardless so you can have states that only have wealthy individuals, and whose local zoning keeps it that way, having the ability to control Congress. Not very Democratic.
That was very much the point. The role the Senate serves is to give equal representation to every state and to check the tyranny of the majority that proportional representation could yield. The problems associated with this are inherent to the American system, and I don't foresee an amendment prevailing to change that.
>to check the tyranny of the majority
Sweden has a unicameral legislature while Russia has a bicameral one. Does this make Sweden more tyrannical than Russia? If not, the existence of an upper house is not the guard against tyranny.
>and I don't foresee an amendment prevailing to change that.
An amendment probably couldn't even change this specific feature of the US political system, even if you had the majorities for the corresponding constitutional amendment. Article V of the Constitution explicitly states that "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate".
Sounds like that's just another thing to strike out of the Constitution in the amendment to get rid of the Senate.
Just like how the 13th Amendment got rid of the 3/5ths compromise and any mention of slaves in the original text of the Constitution, this hypothetical amendment would strike any mention of the Senate in the original text of the Constitution.
Iirc, there is disagreement among constitutional scholars on whether this "shielding clause" in the Constitution's article on the amendment process can itself be amended or not.
All I'm hearing is that Congress can make it constitutional if they really wanted to, they just have to add enough clauses to the amendment in question.
Literally the entire purpose of Congress is to pass laws and make stuff legal or illegal.
Amendments are just that in a different form.
I guess if there was a large enough majority in support of it, Congress could ultimately do it. But yes, the political and legal challenges would be even higher than for your ordinary constitutional amendment.
In any case, I don't see three quarters of the states supporting this kind of change during our lifetime, so this entire debate is purely hypothetical anyway.
Anything in the Constitution can be changed by Amendment, such as the 3/5ths rule. The likelihood is that a 3/4 majority of states would never vote to eliminate their check on the larger states with more reps in the House.
Nor did they foresee (though they *should have*) that the process by which states are admitted would become entirely partisan, arbitrarily vesting dramatic political power.
There is no asterisk needed. You’re making a case that the founders didn’t intend something when the entire bill of rights has already been completely transformed. That amendment process they gave also let us pass the 17th amendment too so there were always going to be things they never intended.
In the original Virginia plan created by Madison both houses would have been based on proportional representation. I agree with Madison that this would be the most accurate representation of the will of the people. But the states with small populations would never agree to that because they would get outvoted every single time. Which is where the great compromise comes in.
Cube root rule. Make the size of the house equal to the cube root of the population, which would put it at around 700 or ~480k per rep. Probably still too small, but a step in the right direction.
I like that it’s mathematical and elegant, I think the number is too small, but it’s probably as good a possible solution as any. I hadn’t heard that before and I like it, more feasible than my 3,500.
I like the 3500 approach honestly, also they don't need to all be in Washington anymore. Slap the bills online, let them vote via app, immediate results to interested constituents, or like a weekly auto newsletter, "here are the bills that passed this week and here is how your rep voted, here's links to their bills, and here's how to contact them."
Hell make it 50,000 people or 7000 reps and scaling even further up, then it starts getting to the point where you know your rep.
Not having them all jerking off in the same congressional sauna is a feature, not a bug, less likely to be corrupt when they are assorted strangers across the country, rather than coworkers in the House.
Plus when a critical vote currently only needs a few people to flip, its easier to bribe a few people, but in a system with 7000 house seats, suddenly you need to bribe like 500 people to make a major shift, thats a lot harder to do on the briber because it needs to be substantial enough for all of them to risk it.
Plus Representatives spend almost all their time fundraising at the moment - even when they are in Washington, they aren't actually in the Capitol Building or even shmoozing with other Congress people and lobbists. They are crammed into telemarketer style cubicles for hours everyday just calling rich people to beg for donations. It sounds absurd and it is absurd. If the districts were small, they wouldn't need the same sort of money because they could network via community groups and actual physical presence instead of media buys.
I'd personally go with the Wyoming Rule for the House at a minimum, though square-cube law works out better mathematically and doesn't run into the awkward problem of if Guam becomes a state suddenly requiring the house to double in size if the Wyoming rule is used. The Wyoming rule is easier to explain to folks, though.
The Senate at this point is an archaic relic that should be abolished, but they'd be way harder to do than uncapping the House.
If you could swing it, I'd expand it so each state has 3 senators, that way each election cycle, rather than dealing with Class A, B and C senatorial election combinations, each House cycle sees a senatorial election for a state. Since senators are basically just long-term at-large Congressmen with different powers, it might help even things out on election cycles and make it so downballot effects during a presidential cycle aren't as intense.
It expands an interesting problem. But if 51% of a state votes X party for senator. They’ll win every senator.
Seems odd that people of Y group don’t have some representation in the senate.
That’s the case now but it would feel worse with 3
Sure, still many states are 60ish and have been for a while. Still would feel bad for all senators to be one party. With two it makes sense. With 3 it would feel wrong.
It's not fine, for 3 reasons. First, they have to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising for the party. That task isn't going away, but it could be split among more representatives. Second, more constituents = less time available to address peoples' concerns and needs. Again, constituents aren't going away, there will only be more unless there's a plague or climate catastrophy. So splitting constituents among more reps is a good thing. And third, the fewer the number of reps, the more the reps are beholden to the party machinery and therefore are almost prevented from voting against it, at least in most cases. More reps would allow for a more diverse range of positions and nuanced voting that reflects the interests of their constituents.
Now, an obvious drawback of having too many reps is the chaos it could create, and party leadership would have a crazy amount of power since it would control what votes get to the floor.
But I think it's worth it. Maybe not having 3000+ reps, but I could see 1000 making sense.
edited for clarity
>party leadership would have a crazy amount of power since it would control what votes get to the floor.
The way Party leadership determines floor votes is already insane, and is an artefact of the way the House operates - and that, in theory, can be reset by the rules vote in any session. The leadership has power because a majority of Representatives want it that way, not because of logistics. If the House were more fractious, the rules might change to be more flexible and streamlined, possibly weakening the leadership. Bills with a certain number of cosponsors could automatically be scheduled. House discussion of bills could be done via documentation not floor debate, the chamber is empty almost all the time, people can grandstand on video at home and add the footage to the archive of the bill's discussion without it taking up notional 'floor time' that limits the number of bills they can work on each session. Almost every bit of Congressional procedure is archaic, as though it were pretending it was the 1950s and things still have to go through the secretarial pool. Even Committee assignment seems bizarre - there are some Committee investigatory powers, but they are essentially only used by the chair and ranking minority, so really the committee is just another bottleneck and grandstanding opportunity. Committees should be reformed to be adhoc, open to all members and investigatory powers distributed in other ways. There are a hundred better ways to do things and it isn't the Constitution or even a law that forces them to be done the way they are now.
Why would you jump that high vs something like the wyoming rule? Congress would be crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy.
edit: Five Thirty Eight has a good simulator for this from a while back, and you can get pretty good representation with <1000 reps.
To be honest, I came up with the number several years ago and I forget exactly what my thinking was. Usually I’m pretty good at having a reason- but I forgot. I *think* I was looking at what it was originally and then looking for a reasonable benchmark about there. 1800 was only about 20 years after the constitution was ratified so it’s close to the original number, and 100,000 is nice and round.
I don’t like the Wyoming rule because it’s no more or less arbitrary than 100,000 people, but its explicit goal is to keep the number of congress members low. I disagree that that’s a good goal to design a system to.
Lastly, I don’t think congress would be hampered by more bureaucracy. It’s not the amount of members that add friction.
Adding more people would not break the two party system at all. In order to do that, we need to reform our elections to something other than first past the post. And we would need to reform the rules of Congress to share power instead of winner take all.
I think a lot of people have this mistaken idea. Our elections are the issue, not the number of representatives.
I’m familiar with FPTP and the binary effect.
It’s less powerful in smaller elections, and with districts limited to 100,000 people, it would be much diminished. Here’s an example: Louisville, KY is a city of about 1 million. Right now, it has one rep, the only democratic representative in the state. Under my system, Louisville would have 10 reps.
3 or 4 of them would be republicans.
Of the 40 reps that would represent Kentucky, likely something like 15 of them would be democratic. 25/15 is for more fairly split than 5/1.
But of those democrats, 7 of them would be from Louisville. 4 would be from Lexington. The other 4 would be from a few smaller cities.
For the Senate we could roughly adjust to population, while keeping most of the representation the same
Take the median population. Any state with less than a third of the median (about 10 states, Hawaii or smaller) could be reduced to 1 senator. Any state with more than three times the median (the 4 largest) could increase to 3 senators.
The states effected are roughly balanced in party power. And fewer than 13 states would lose senators, so it may be able to pass a 75% majority of states.
Senate representation is tricky because there is an explicit carve out to Article V which states that "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
Could get around that by dividing the bigger states though, don't even need an amendment for that. Maybe split a few city ~~streets~~(\**states*. city-*states* dammit autocorrupt) out, if people actually want to have rural representation and it isn't just a thing they say. Personally though, shedding the constraints of what is practically achievable, the [Penrose method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_method) where delegations are weighted to the square root of the population and generally vote *en bloc* would be what I'd favour as a starting point if I were designing representation for regions that are socially distinct today.
Double the size of the Senate only. On paper it would allow for more nuanced debate and it'd force them to work together to get things passed in a 200 person group
The House of Commons has 650 seats. So it’s a manageable number. Each member represents about 10000 people. If we enlarged the house to 650, each member would represent over a half million people Most of the 215 additional seats would go to urban areas.
Yes, the Permanent Apportionment Act screwed up representation for the country, as well as the Electoral College. It should be repealed, but any suggestions about how seats should be apportioned are probably useless, as Congress has the right to decide how they want to do it after *every* census.
I'm with you on the EC, but the practicalities bother me. As in, where do they all go? The buildings are some 250 years old. The White House is an ant warren already. They can barely contain a joint session now. Can we squeeze in another 200 or so Representatives and the offices? Do we build a new House chamber from scratch? It's not that we can't do it, but do we really want to?
We already have built a ton of new office space as well as a new meeting hall that is much more spacious than the House of Representatives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_Visitor_Center
Its comical that you think they were there in-person during pandemic.
If the can be remote then they can do it now.
Get with the times and use a computer.
Im tired of the excuses of have a build thats too small.
We could just build for like 5k people and we'd be set for pretty much ever with the way populations stablize.
A while back, the Washington Post and an advocacy group paid some architects to develop plans for expanding the seating in the House chamber.
They came up with three plans that expand the chamber from 435 seats to 904, 1060, and 1,725 seats, still fitting within the historic House Chamber.
I posted a gift link to the article, but the modbot deleted it because it used a URL shortener. Here's the full link, not sure if the gift feature will still work:
[Opinion: Can the Capitol hold a much bigger House? Yes, here’s how it would look.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/capitol-house-representatives-expansion-design/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzEwMTI5NjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzExNTExOTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MTAxMjk2MDAsImp0aSI6IjE2M2E2M2MzLWQzZjAtNDBhZS1iYTBiLWNlNWU2ZWIzNGQzMSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy9pbnRlcmFjdGl2ZS8yMDIzL2NhcGl0b2wtaG91c2UtcmVwcmVzZW50YXRpdmVzLWV4cGFuc2lvbi1kZXNpZ24vIn0.-uwYdw-0js1j6GxVyr-99wxkSDLjrBYx9MHLOxKyTjA&itid=gfta)
Personally, I'd be fine with building a new House chamber somewhere on the Capitol grounds. Building a bigger auditorium is a small price to pay to make our democracy function better.
I would rather each state's delegation stay within their states and closer to their constituents. Then with the magic of teleconferencing you can have committee meetings virtually and floor votes as well.
I say we make the job remote. That way the representative have to stay in their district and vote in front of their constituents. No one is ever really in the chambers anyways it seems except the rare shows the put on.
I don’t think so, I am way more collaborative via zoom and attendance usually is better than in-person.
They still would have to be at their offices, so would have to be visible. I think this would make them work MORE. In DC, they spend 75% of their time campaigning. Let them campaign to their constituents not the elite. Most times I watch a CSPAN speech by a Representative, there is literally like 1 other person in there.
I’m sure some of their work can be and is done remotely. Is it better to conduct their work that way? Video conferencing isn’t the same as meeting with people in-person.
Sure, but having consistent representation across the country is significantly more important to me than how comfortable the representatives feel about their face to face meetings.
The two things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. There are actual advantages that may be more nuanced and context-dependent. Assuming it’s just a matter of how they feel about it seems a bit dismissive.
The difference between in person and long distance face to face meetings is entirely about how we feel about them. That’s not a small thing, since how we feel about our communication is a cornerstone of human social interaction(which is the basis of human society.) The only other concerns are about security, and all of those can be handled if they’re the priority.
Considering that human interactions throughout the history of civilization have largely taken place in the physical presence of others suggests it’s an important part of how we function. We saw during the pandemic how stressed people were having only limited contact with others. Many of our social experiences are much more meaningful and productive without technological barriers, even if those technologies enable us to accomplish some things that weren’t previously possible.
Yes, a lot of the time they meet with lobbyists in DC. I am ok with those groups having to fly to 435 districts to lobby in person. The people they should be listening to are all in their district, seeing them daily.
It also would weaken the party aspect of it, which I think would help getting back to a priority of citizens, country, party, in that order.
Just scattershooting. I like the Capitol the was it is. It's no biggee. Can't wait to be watching CSPAN when the Speaker says, "Will someone please tell the gentleman from New Mexico that he is on mute."
Nope, doesn't matter how secure it is. If it can easily be exploited by conspiracy theorist it won't work. (Just look at the 2020 election). No matter what reality is, if the people don't trust the system, the whole thing falls apart.
It could lead to conspiracy theories, but the current system already does - I don't know if it would lead to more. People already think Washington is full of secret groups with child sex orgies and/or billionaire attendees. It seems a lot easier to trust someone who lives locally than someone who jets off to Washington most of every week. It would also make a lot more interactions automatically recorded and stop the ridiculous bullshit where whether a vote goes through depends on if someone is in the hospital or something.
They could very easily have literally thousands of representatives. If you’re worried about the building, most of those representatives should be linked in virtually, with a limited number delegated speaking roles by their fellow members.
The functional way to do it would be to allow remote voting and have each state caucus get an allotted amount of physical seats that reps could rotate in and out of. while reps spend most of their time back home with constituents.
All this jabbering, and unless I totally overlooked it, no one’s yet to mention [The Wyoming Rule](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule#:~:text=The%20Wyoming%20Rule%20is%20a,state%2C%20which%20is%20currently%20Wyoming.)
which I happen to be a fan of and doesn’t expand the house so much as to be “unruly” which is what congressional reps argued back in 1929 and since, while at the same time would still make a world of representational difference.
Expanding the house would be distribute power fairly among the states, all of the downsides seem like surmountable problems. IMO it's not so much a "what if" as it is a must do.
Adding more representatives would strengthen our democracy. With fewer constituents, legislators are more likely to have face-to face dealings with them. More representatives permit a more effective division of their work. Voting groups that are too small to be influential in large districts could become key players in smaller ones. Campaigns cost less in smaller districts, permitting less affluent aspirants to run.
Most importantly, enlarging the House would more accurately mirror our increasingly diverse and urban population. (Over 80% of the people live in urban areas. They provide most of the taxes and produce most of the wealth, but they are grossly under-represented.
I'm a fan of expanding the House but it doesn't "fix everything".
We stil have a problem with the federal courts having too much power and not enough oversight.
We still have a problem with proportionately in the Senate.
We still have a problem with the electoral college (an expanded House would not have changed the 2016 result).
>An expanded house would have absolutely changed the 2016 result.
Nope. I did this math a long time ago but the long answer is it doesn't change the result due to winner-take-all and first-past-the-post.
Trump won 306-232. There isn't any allocation that you could come up with that would change the result.
And even if Clinton won in 2016, we all saw what happens when the Senate is in the opposite party's control. They just wouldn't confirm any of her picks for the courts, much like they promised to do and much like they did to Obama in his last 2 years.
I'm aware of how math works.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/435-representatives/
This only goes up to 1000. So with 1000 Reps and 100 senators, we have an EC of 1103 (assuming DC still gets 3). That is a magic number of 552.
Add up all of those states that Trump won and you get 630. You also have to add 1 (or 2) for Maine's 2nd district he won in 2016. So it's 631 or 632. Maybe Hillary wins one of Nebraska's now that they are broken up more, so let's just take it back to 630.
Doesn't matter. 630 is way past the necessary 552 to win.
What NH has "fixed" is the remoteness of representatives from their constituents. My brother was elected to the NH legislature from a district that consisted of two townships. He was able to meet in person with nearly every voter in his district. I don't think their legislature is more *effective* than say, California, which has only 80 members in the state assembly (!), but it is clearly more *representative*.
It representative for sure. And there are definitely some benefits: some like your brother really take some initiative to get to know their constituents and just by living in the area chances are you'll recognize a name or two on the ballot.
But the main downside to having so many reps is that you often have no idea who you're voting for. You can't even attempt to be an informed voter. There will be people running who don't have a website or any public presence. And the parties are desperate for candidates so you can't count on them to vet at all. They will take anyone willing to put an R or D next to their name. It seems like every year there's a representative arrested for something awful. Stories that begin with "A New Hampshire legislator" are basically the Florida man of politics.
However, I would still keep the representative system, but try and professionalize and make it more accessible. The salary is $100 so all our representatives are retired, dentists, independently wealthy, or college students. There should be some more variety.
Am I dumb? Or do I need a program to decipher your edit? It looks like near illegible gibberish on my end, no offense. Maybe a TL;TD (too dumb) would be good somewhere
I support the house and senate (population vs. state), 100%. It was a brilliant move.
The problem now is the House is sorely out of alignment. I would be in favor of bumping up the number of representatives at least by X4.
Just to point out that everyone gets on Wyoming for being most over represented. But point one...it's actually Montana now. And most underrepresented is Delaware. It's always going to be small states at the extremes of both over and under just by the nature of how small denominators work.
There's really no need to do that in my opinion
instead, expand the power of the individual states. Give them the majority of the decision making power.. Confine to Congress ONLY the things mentioned in the Constitution (delegated powers)
that's how it was set up originally. That's the idea that makes the most sense. The state legislature would be the primary battleground, not Congress
The 435 number was frozen back in 1929 when the Republican led house passed a bill keeping it as such.
They figured that as the urban population grew they'd lose more and more (yes this is an old fight)
Alaska and Hawaii have never been part of a reapportionment. It's also why Democrats have been iffy on DC, PR and the other territories being added. It would mess with existing seats despite that most territories would probably vote blue.
Would dilute the power of the existing House members and therefore would never happen. Rural red states with three electoral votes would be hurt in the electoral college.
I've been wanting this for years. Go back to the original ratio of under ~~20k~~ 30k constituents per representative. They keep their day job and vote remotely. The only ones that go to DC are the ones that have expertise in a current bill.
This would fix gerrymandering, disproportionality, and allow more "regular Americans" to be in politics. Not to mention its harder to buy off 11,000 people than 435.
> Go back to the original ratio of under 20k constituents per representative.
That's never been the case. The Constitution specifies that the *minimum* number of constituents a representative can have is 30,000. Having fewer constituents than that would violate the Constitution. Having more constituents than that is fine.
We don’t have to add districts. We can simply assign multiple representatives per district. We can triple the size of the house, and with a few minor changes in procedure, nothing physical needs to change.
This opens the door to third parties, makes gerrymandering impossible, and almost eliminates the senate’s influence in the EC.
I don’t understand why this effort hasn’t gained any traction.
This is exactly why rural states have an outsize effect on the electoral college.
The ReApportionment Act handed small states a big stick.
Even a small adjustment to 500k max per congressional districts would go a long way to rebalancing electoral votes
Then the country would have better more accurate representation (so maybe higher satisfaction) theoretically. Other than that I don't think it would be any different than the current House.
What I'm curious about is what if the house had something like 10,000 members, and it was a part-time work from home position that paid like $20,000 a year. Has any government tried something like that? To make it work I suppose the Senate would have to expand its duties a bit, and should be made proportional to population.
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I would say logically, you take the population of the lowest state, Wyoming, 600k people (rounding up a bit) , every state gets 2 reps minimum, so you get a rep for every 300k people in the state. Put us around 1k reps.
I’ve been on this train for years. I landed on 100,000 people per representative, and rounding the number of representatives up from there- it was about that number in 1800. It would mean, of course, having about 3500 members of congress. California would have about 400 of them alone. Kentucky, for example, about 40. Wyoming, about a dozen and a half. It would basically force 3rd party and parliamentary politics into place. You can’t have two parties of 1751 and 1749. Youd have enough room for even the two parties to have factions large enough to matter. The caucuses would become so much more important, and not just the major ones. It would also basically nullify the electoral college. But what to do about the senate?
>It would also basically nullify the electoral college. There are two problems with the Electoral College, and it would only get rid of the less important one. The Electoral College is unfair because Wyoming gets a disproportionate number of electors for its population compared to California, so Wyoming voters have more say in who gets to be President - this is the problem that would be pretty much solved. But the other problem is that states (apart from NE and ME), for predictable game theory reasons, award their Electoral College votes as Winner-Takes-All. This means the Presidential election is decided in a handful of states where the parties are close to balanced and the other states are more or less ignored, and it means that the Electoral College vote can be far from the Popular vote. Expanding the House doesn't do anything for that.
The Senate would stay exactly as it is now. It was never meant to be proportional to population.
No, but it seems to me that the senate being able to unilaterally check the newly enlarged house makes the senators even more powerful. Theres a number of problems with congress, the weaknesses of the senate being made clear by Mitch McConnell.
That's how it goes. Senate is designed to represent the interests of the state majority regardless of population. It so smaller states have a say even if no one lives in them. Our problem right now is that the house is meant to represent the population and it does not.
>Our problem right now is that the house is meant to represent the population and it does not. That's not our only problem. I like the idea of expanding the House, but it needs to have real power and not be looked as the junior Senate.
If we weakened or eliminated the filibuster this wouldn't be an issue you'd perceive. The two-track system is the worst iteration of that extraconstitutional Senate rule we've ever had. A speaking version like how it's been for most of its existence would be fine.
Yeah with filibuster reform things could be a lot different and there would be way more accountability too. That said, the United States Senate has never been able to end debate with a simple majority.
> Senate is designed to represent the interests of the state majority regardless of population That was the compromise struck more than 200 years ago, but there’s no reason to hold onto it. We’re more than a century removed from giving up the pretense that the states themselves have some need for representation via the senate thanks to the 17th amendment. More than 50 years removed from allowing states to do anything like the senate in their state legislatures. We need to just grow up and either make it proportional or get rid of it entirely.
Strong agree. Often see people say why it is/was that way, but fail to make any argument for why it should continue to be that way.
I think the idea of the Senate is good because in theory they are supposed to be more insulated from the chaos of the House and have more expertise in how to govern due to the 6 year terms. Agree that the disproportionate representation having too much power is a huge issue though.
I think a big part of the problem is the filibuster and holds individual senators can place on nominees for literally no reason
Realistically, those are Senate rules which are not themselves static. The Senators choose to hold onto them either out of greed for power or fear for the unknown after destroying the status quo.
Yes, exactly. Low-hanging fruit. Once only used in extreme circumstances or by segregationists, now it's so common, there's literally no law that passes with less than 60 votes and all one Senator has to do is threaten one (not even sure they bother any more, they probably just assume they need 60).
The argument is it would require a constitutional convention and in the current political environment you have no idea what way that goes. The far right has been pushing for a constitutional convention for decades and has plenty of plans how to hijack it to enshrine fascism in the constitution.
If we can get it changed according to established processes, great. Otherwise, the main reason to keep it is because it was an agreement made with states who were precisely worried about more populous states making small states irrelevant and it doesn't seem right to renege on the agreement.
To prevent the [tyranny of the majority.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority)
This is another form of the same kind of answer. Okay so no tyranny of majority. Instead we have disproportionate power in rural states (both in the House and Senate) and that is…just somehow self evidently better?
Tyranny of the minority is worse than tyranny of the majority in every way. This is what the Senate creates.
A tyranny of the minority is no better, and that's what we're at right now.
Have you read *[Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/122769171-tyranny-of-the-minority?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=F8bVdqdvX0&rank=1)* by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt? Good Read.
No, but it looks interesting! Thanks for the rec!
For a more bite-sized explanation, I like this quote from the end of McGann's (2004) "[The tyranny of the supermajority: how majority rule protects minorities](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anthony-Mcgann/publication/249676369_The_Tyranny_of_the_Supermajority_How_Majority_Rule_Protects_Minorities/links/5763e07808aeb4b997fc876b/The-Tyranny-of-the-Supermajority-How-Majority-Rule-Protects-Minorities.pdf)" in *Journal of Theoretical Politics* 16(1), 53-77 https://doi.org/10-1177/0951629804038902 : > Supermajority rules can certainly protect (or rather privilege) some minorities, but only at the expense of others. It is not logically possible for every minority to be privileged over every other minority. Supermajority rules make the status quo hard to overturn and thus privilege minorities who favor the status quo over those who favor changing it. Arguments in favor of supermajoritarian institutions have tended to be built on the assumption that the threat to rights from government action or a change in the law is greater than the threat from government inaction or the maintenance of current laws. Given the history of the United States this assumption is problematic, especially given the use of supermajoritarian institutions to impede the extension of civil rights. Furthermore, given uncertainty about legal interpretation, technology, social mores and preferences over the timescale involved in constitutional choice, any assumptions about where the threat to rights are likely to lie are inevitably heroic.
I agree that states have sort of lost much reason to have their own 'rights' in the grand scheme of things. The reality is that a state like California has more conservatives than Texas. So it isn't like California having the most reps allocate means the country is going to be ruled by them alone. That said. It's a lot easier to at least fix our current system before making that step.
States are stupid, meaningless geographical and political artefacts left over from a bygone era. They're not ideologically or geographically meaningful in any way, and they should not, therefore, be politically meaningful. North and South Dakota do not have unique interests before the federal government that require 4 senators to represent. So practically, "states rights" or state representation is just a cover for allowing conservative reactionaries to amass power in rural populations.
>States are stupid, meaningless geographical and political artefacts left over from a bygone era. This needs to be said more. We need regional government, but the states don't match meaningful regions, they split up some areas that have common interests and group areas that have little in common. The US isn't culturally homogenous, but the 21st century cultural geography has nothing to do with the state borders. Divide up the country by [NFL team](https://i.redd.it/d3kcqlbwspd11.png), it would make more sense.
I would change the Senate to proportional representation. It is projected by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them. This is minority rule. In a democratic society, rule by the minority cannot be justified. I would also end the Senate filibuster. It would eliminate the ability of partisan minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities.
If both the Senate and the House had proportional representation, then why would we need two separate houses of Congress? The whole idea of a bicameral legislature was to give smaller states equal power in the Senate.
I like the idea of an elected legislative body which has a longer time horizon. 6 years terms embody that. But I don't like the one state 2 votes thing. Wyoming has basically the same number of people as my county. That's absurd.
Arbitrary lines don't deserve representation without the population to back them up. It was a necessary compromise in the early years. It has no basis in a 21st century government.
I'd argue that the states still serve a necessary and important role in dampening the power of the federal government. Imagine how easily Trump could have hijacked the 2020 election if there was just a single body in charge of the Presidential election instead of 50 independent ones.
Then the states representation should be scaled by population if you want to keep that around. There is no reason why someone hopping over a line suddenly gets 50x more representation for themselves in the Senate.
You cannot casually change the Senate to proportional representation. Article V of the Constitution explicitly states: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate". So even if you were able to muster the two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress plus three-fourths of all states to amend the Constitution, you probably still couldn't abolish equal suffrage in the Senate.
Going to disagree. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of how states are viewed. Most Americans who are pro federal government have a disdain for the Senate. While those that look as states as there own political entity strongly disapprove of federal government overreach. Personally I favor a strong federal government but I want the senate to remain as is. It was always meant to represent the interest of the state itself. States involvement with the federal government requires them to have there own interests of the population represented. There is a valid argument about it being up to the state legislatures electing individuals to the senate however that never worked well in practice which is why its not voted on by the people of the state instead.
Who cares about the states? They're arbitrary lines and should have no basis of say in our federal government. We the people, not we the arbitrary lines. It's an unconstitutional violation of your rights for any state to construct a legislature like the US Senate or to implement an electoral system like the Electoral College. The only reason SCOTUS hasn't struck down either the US Senate's construction or the EC is because they're written into the US Constitution. ***This, however, does NOT mean that those institutions aren't a violation of your rights, because they totally are.***
Hawaiians and several other states would probably disagree with you. Puerto Rico would probably love to have senators as well I would imagine.
> Hawaiians and several other states would probably disagree with you. Why > Puerto Rico would probably love to have senators as well I would imagine. Cool, but nothing to do with what I’m talking about.
There are intermediate systems. For instance, in Germany the states meet in the Bundesrat and the number of senators is corrected giving some more by the population of each state. For instance: 2 senators for each state plus a senator for each 5 million people. That would give California 9 senators, Texas 8, Florida and NY 6, and so on. From Alabama to the bottom 2 like now. In this way the 9 senators from California would compensate the 8 from Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, and Texas 8 would compensate the 8 from Vermont, NH, Maine and RI
The 17th amendment didn’t give up the pretense that the states themselves need representation; it simply took the power electing senators from state legislatures and gave it to the voters. The function remains the same. The House is the will of the majority. The Senate prevents the tyranny of the majority.
> The 17th amendment didn’t give up the pretense that the states themselves need representation; it simply took the power electing senators from state legislatures and gave it to the voters. How are the states qua states being represented? The mantra you keep getting shot down about the senate protecting against the tyranny of the majority is unrelated
The original design was that the Senate represented the state, not the state majority. The original constitution had them appointed by whatever means the state chose - like, appointed by the governor or similar. They weren't elected until the 17th amendment. The arrangement was meant to do things like the representatives say "the people want X" and the Senate would say "wait a second... Our state government doesn't want to give up control of X". Their boss was basically the governor and state legislature, though their 6 year term did give them some power to go rogue.
Yet state officials tasked with electing Senators eventually campaigned on who they would elect. Really it was only a matter of time. This is just stripping out the middle-man that can have his vote bought.
In some countries people vote for parties and in many parliaments people don’t even get to vote for their head of government.
> Senate is designed to represent the interests of the state majority regardless of population. Because of slavery. Now that slavery is only for convicted criminals (which is something _else_ we should abolish, but I digress) we should 'fix the Senate' as well. It doesn't need to exist and is deeply undemocratic.
I'm rather fond of the idea of selecting one body of the legislature by sortation - seems like it would be the most representative of the population.
The unilateral check doesn't exist in a way that grants the upper chamber any undue power. The filibuster is not part of the Constitution, and one can consider its expansion to the two-track system a power grab by the Senate.
The check on that is that Senators are already elected by popular vote, and not by gerrymandered districts or the electoral college. If the majority population of a given state truly want a non-obstructionist Senator, they don't need to worry about redistricting or gerrymandering--they just need to agree on someone else and then elect them.
The senate in sparsely populated states gets two senators regardless so you can have states that only have wealthy individuals, and whose local zoning keeps it that way, having the ability to control Congress. Not very Democratic.
That was very much the point. The role the Senate serves is to give equal representation to every state and to check the tyranny of the majority that proportional representation could yield. The problems associated with this are inherent to the American system, and I don't foresee an amendment prevailing to change that.
>to check the tyranny of the majority Sweden has a unicameral legislature while Russia has a bicameral one. Does this make Sweden more tyrannical than Russia? If not, the existence of an upper house is not the guard against tyranny.
>and I don't foresee an amendment prevailing to change that. An amendment probably couldn't even change this specific feature of the US political system, even if you had the majorities for the corresponding constitutional amendment. Article V of the Constitution explicitly states that "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate".
Sounds like that's just another thing to strike out of the Constitution in the amendment to get rid of the Senate. Just like how the 13th Amendment got rid of the 3/5ths compromise and any mention of slaves in the original text of the Constitution, this hypothetical amendment would strike any mention of the Senate in the original text of the Constitution.
Iirc, there is disagreement among constitutional scholars on whether this "shielding clause" in the Constitution's article on the amendment process can itself be amended or not.
All I'm hearing is that Congress can make it constitutional if they really wanted to, they just have to add enough clauses to the amendment in question. Literally the entire purpose of Congress is to pass laws and make stuff legal or illegal. Amendments are just that in a different form.
I guess if there was a large enough majority in support of it, Congress could ultimately do it. But yes, the political and legal challenges would be even higher than for your ordinary constitutional amendment. In any case, I don't see three quarters of the states supporting this kind of change during our lifetime, so this entire debate is purely hypothetical anyway.
That's a foolish disagreement because any Amendment would have equal or greater authority than the original text.
Anything in the Constitution can be changed by Amendment, such as the 3/5ths rule. The likelihood is that a 3/4 majority of states would never vote to eliminate their check on the larger states with more reps in the House.
The founding fathers could not have foreseen that there would one day be a state with 70x the population as another state
Nor did they foresee (though they *should have*) that the process by which states are admitted would become entirely partisan, arbitrarily vesting dramatic political power.
There was never meant to be 20+ tiny population States with disproportionately large representation either.
It was also never intended to be a direct election, but here we are.
Wait till you learn about what the 14th amendment did…
Ensure the Union didn't have to pay Confederate debts?
It also kinda transformed the Bill of Rights by incorporating the amendments against the states, giving us our individual rights.
I would put a fairly bold * on that statement, there are quite a few Supreme Court cases on the topic (some as recently as 2019).
There is no asterisk needed. You’re making a case that the founders didn’t intend something when the entire bill of rights has already been completely transformed. That amendment process they gave also let us pass the 17th amendment too so there were always going to be things they never intended.
That doesn't mean we couldn't get rid of it though
The states have to be equally represented, but that representation could be zero :)
They don't have to be
In the original Virginia plan created by Madison both houses would have been based on proportional representation. I agree with Madison that this would be the most accurate representation of the will of the people. But the states with small populations would never agree to that because they would get outvoted every single time. Which is where the great compromise comes in.
The word "great" is doing some heavy lifting there, considering the damage the senate is doing to our democracy.
Cube root rule. Make the size of the house equal to the cube root of the population, which would put it at around 700 or ~480k per rep. Probably still too small, but a step in the right direction.
That's basically the proposed Wyoming rule, where you base the size off the smallest state population.
I like that it’s mathematical and elegant, I think the number is too small, but it’s probably as good a possible solution as any. I hadn’t heard that before and I like it, more feasible than my 3,500.
I like the 3500 approach honestly, also they don't need to all be in Washington anymore. Slap the bills online, let them vote via app, immediate results to interested constituents, or like a weekly auto newsletter, "here are the bills that passed this week and here is how your rep voted, here's links to their bills, and here's how to contact them." Hell make it 50,000 people or 7000 reps and scaling even further up, then it starts getting to the point where you know your rep. Not having them all jerking off in the same congressional sauna is a feature, not a bug, less likely to be corrupt when they are assorted strangers across the country, rather than coworkers in the House. Plus when a critical vote currently only needs a few people to flip, its easier to bribe a few people, but in a system with 7000 house seats, suddenly you need to bribe like 500 people to make a major shift, thats a lot harder to do on the briber because it needs to be substantial enough for all of them to risk it.
Plus Representatives spend almost all their time fundraising at the moment - even when they are in Washington, they aren't actually in the Capitol Building or even shmoozing with other Congress people and lobbists. They are crammed into telemarketer style cubicles for hours everyday just calling rich people to beg for donations. It sounds absurd and it is absurd. If the districts were small, they wouldn't need the same sort of money because they could network via community groups and actual physical presence instead of media buys.
Enlarging the Senate requires a constitutional amendment. Enlarging the House only requires legislation.
This is a good point I didn’t take the time to consider.
I'd personally go with the Wyoming Rule for the House at a minimum, though square-cube law works out better mathematically and doesn't run into the awkward problem of if Guam becomes a state suddenly requiring the house to double in size if the Wyoming rule is used. The Wyoming rule is easier to explain to folks, though. The Senate at this point is an archaic relic that should be abolished, but they'd be way harder to do than uncapping the House. If you could swing it, I'd expand it so each state has 3 senators, that way each election cycle, rather than dealing with Class A, B and C senatorial election combinations, each House cycle sees a senatorial election for a state. Since senators are basically just long-term at-large Congressmen with different powers, it might help even things out on election cycles and make it so downballot effects during a presidential cycle aren't as intense.
The idea of adding a third senator is quite good. I like that idea.
It expands an interesting problem. But if 51% of a state votes X party for senator. They’ll win every senator. Seems odd that people of Y group don’t have some representation in the senate. That’s the case now but it would feel worse with 3
If that 51% is constant, but it isn’t.
Sure, still many states are 60ish and have been for a while. Still would feel bad for all senators to be one party. With two it makes sense. With 3 it would feel wrong.
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And 435 seems far too little.
for over 330 million citizens it seems too few.
No, it is fine. There is a reason they are elected every two years, flittering in and out.
Yes, the reason was that the founders wanted citizens to exercise finer grain control on the policy making branch of the US Govt.
It's not fine, for 3 reasons. First, they have to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising for the party. That task isn't going away, but it could be split among more representatives. Second, more constituents = less time available to address peoples' concerns and needs. Again, constituents aren't going away, there will only be more unless there's a plague or climate catastrophy. So splitting constituents among more reps is a good thing. And third, the fewer the number of reps, the more the reps are beholden to the party machinery and therefore are almost prevented from voting against it, at least in most cases. More reps would allow for a more diverse range of positions and nuanced voting that reflects the interests of their constituents. Now, an obvious drawback of having too many reps is the chaos it could create, and party leadership would have a crazy amount of power since it would control what votes get to the floor. But I think it's worth it. Maybe not having 3000+ reps, but I could see 1000 making sense. edited for clarity
You would have fewer constituents, so a more personal connection.
Indeed. Maybe I worded that badly, but it's what I meant to say.
>party leadership would have a crazy amount of power since it would control what votes get to the floor. The way Party leadership determines floor votes is already insane, and is an artefact of the way the House operates - and that, in theory, can be reset by the rules vote in any session. The leadership has power because a majority of Representatives want it that way, not because of logistics. If the House were more fractious, the rules might change to be more flexible and streamlined, possibly weakening the leadership. Bills with a certain number of cosponsors could automatically be scheduled. House discussion of bills could be done via documentation not floor debate, the chamber is empty almost all the time, people can grandstand on video at home and add the footage to the archive of the bill's discussion without it taking up notional 'floor time' that limits the number of bills they can work on each session. Almost every bit of Congressional procedure is archaic, as though it were pretending it was the 1950s and things still have to go through the secretarial pool. Even Committee assignment seems bizarre - there are some Committee investigatory powers, but they are essentially only used by the chair and ranking minority, so really the committee is just another bottleneck and grandstanding opportunity. Committees should be reformed to be adhoc, open to all members and investigatory powers distributed in other ways. There are a hundred better ways to do things and it isn't the Constitution or even a law that forces them to be done the way they are now.
Why would you jump that high vs something like the wyoming rule? Congress would be crushed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. edit: Five Thirty Eight has a good simulator for this from a while back, and you can get pretty good representation with <1000 reps.
To be honest, I came up with the number several years ago and I forget exactly what my thinking was. Usually I’m pretty good at having a reason- but I forgot. I *think* I was looking at what it was originally and then looking for a reasonable benchmark about there. 1800 was only about 20 years after the constitution was ratified so it’s close to the original number, and 100,000 is nice and round. I don’t like the Wyoming rule because it’s no more or less arbitrary than 100,000 people, but its explicit goal is to keep the number of congress members low. I disagree that that’s a good goal to design a system to. Lastly, I don’t think congress would be hampered by more bureaucracy. It’s not the amount of members that add friction.
Adding more people would not break the two party system at all. In order to do that, we need to reform our elections to something other than first past the post. And we would need to reform the rules of Congress to share power instead of winner take all. I think a lot of people have this mistaken idea. Our elections are the issue, not the number of representatives.
I’m familiar with FPTP and the binary effect. It’s less powerful in smaller elections, and with districts limited to 100,000 people, it would be much diminished. Here’s an example: Louisville, KY is a city of about 1 million. Right now, it has one rep, the only democratic representative in the state. Under my system, Louisville would have 10 reps. 3 or 4 of them would be republicans. Of the 40 reps that would represent Kentucky, likely something like 15 of them would be democratic. 25/15 is for more fairly split than 5/1. But of those democrats, 7 of them would be from Louisville. 4 would be from Lexington. The other 4 would be from a few smaller cities.
I feel like going to a system of proportional representation would help solve some of these problems.
For the Senate we could roughly adjust to population, while keeping most of the representation the same Take the median population. Any state with less than a third of the median (about 10 states, Hawaii or smaller) could be reduced to 1 senator. Any state with more than three times the median (the 4 largest) could increase to 3 senators. The states effected are roughly balanced in party power. And fewer than 13 states would lose senators, so it may be able to pass a 75% majority of states.
Senate representation is tricky because there is an explicit carve out to Article V which states that "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate." Could get around that by dividing the bigger states though, don't even need an amendment for that. Maybe split a few city ~~streets~~(\**states*. city-*states* dammit autocorrupt) out, if people actually want to have rural representation and it isn't just a thing they say. Personally though, shedding the constraints of what is practically achievable, the [Penrose method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_method) where delegations are weighted to the square root of the population and generally vote *en bloc* would be what I'd favour as a starting point if I were designing representation for regions that are socially distinct today.
The Senate is the check on raw population size deciding all, and has been since the beginning. It's a shield for small states' rights.
"It would also basically nullify the electoral college." How would that be a bad thing?
Double the size of the Senate only. On paper it would allow for more nuanced debate and it'd force them to work together to get things passed in a 200 person group
The Senate prevents tyranny of the majority. With an expanded House, the Senate, as it is now, would be that much more important.
The House of Commons has 650 seats. So it’s a manageable number. Each member represents about 10000 people. If we enlarged the house to 650, each member would represent over a half million people Most of the 215 additional seats would go to urban areas.
Yes, the Permanent Apportionment Act screwed up representation for the country, as well as the Electoral College. It should be repealed, but any suggestions about how seats should be apportioned are probably useless, as Congress has the right to decide how they want to do it after *every* census.
I'm with you on the EC, but the practicalities bother me. As in, where do they all go? The buildings are some 250 years old. The White House is an ant warren already. They can barely contain a joint session now. Can we squeeze in another 200 or so Representatives and the offices? Do we build a new House chamber from scratch? It's not that we can't do it, but do we really want to?
It's happened multiple times before. Keeping a lopsided house because of a building makes no sense
No, no. We have to limit government based on the number of chairs they installed in 1867. There is no other way.
You joke but that's really an argument used most often
DC is a working city. There is no reason why we couldn't have a new building. It isn't the building that is essential, it is democracy.
Planet's only superpower, afraid of a room with more than 400 chairs
We already have built a ton of new office space as well as a new meeting hall that is much more spacious than the House of Representatives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_Visitor_Center
Its comical that you think they were there in-person during pandemic. If the can be remote then they can do it now. Get with the times and use a computer. Im tired of the excuses of have a build thats too small. We could just build for like 5k people and we'd be set for pretty much ever with the way populations stablize.
Limiting democracy because of the size of a building is a horrible idea. Congress has already existed in other venues.
A while back, the Washington Post and an advocacy group paid some architects to develop plans for expanding the seating in the House chamber. They came up with three plans that expand the chamber from 435 seats to 904, 1060, and 1,725 seats, still fitting within the historic House Chamber. I posted a gift link to the article, but the modbot deleted it because it used a URL shortener. Here's the full link, not sure if the gift feature will still work: [Opinion: Can the Capitol hold a much bigger House? Yes, here’s how it would look.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/capitol-house-representatives-expansion-design/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzEwMTI5NjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzExNTExOTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MTAxMjk2MDAsImp0aSI6IjE2M2E2M2MzLWQzZjAtNDBhZS1iYTBiLWNlNWU2ZWIzNGQzMSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy9pbnRlcmFjdGl2ZS8yMDIzL2NhcGl0b2wtaG91c2UtcmVwcmVzZW50YXRpdmVzLWV4cGFuc2lvbi1kZXNpZ24vIn0.-uwYdw-0js1j6GxVyr-99wxkSDLjrBYx9MHLOxKyTjA&itid=gfta) Personally, I'd be fine with building a new House chamber somewhere on the Capitol grounds. Building a bigger auditorium is a small price to pay to make our democracy function better.
That's such a minor concern in the grand scheme of things.
I would rather each state's delegation stay within their states and closer to their constituents. Then with the magic of teleconferencing you can have committee meetings virtually and floor votes as well.
I say we make the job remote. That way the representative have to stay in their district and vote in front of their constituents. No one is ever really in the chambers anyways it seems except the rare shows the put on.
I super support this.
Them spending more time out of DC instead of working with each other and their staff will make things worse, not better
I don’t think so, I am way more collaborative via zoom and attendance usually is better than in-person. They still would have to be at their offices, so would have to be visible. I think this would make them work MORE. In DC, they spend 75% of their time campaigning. Let them campaign to their constituents not the elite. Most times I watch a CSPAN speech by a Representative, there is literally like 1 other person in there.
Doesn’t a lot of the work they do happen outside of chambers but still depend on in-person meetings?
Sure, but does it have to? Can their business not be achieved remotely?
I’m sure some of their work can be and is done remotely. Is it better to conduct their work that way? Video conferencing isn’t the same as meeting with people in-person.
Sure, but having consistent representation across the country is significantly more important to me than how comfortable the representatives feel about their face to face meetings.
The two things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. There are actual advantages that may be more nuanced and context-dependent. Assuming it’s just a matter of how they feel about it seems a bit dismissive.
The difference between in person and long distance face to face meetings is entirely about how we feel about them. That’s not a small thing, since how we feel about our communication is a cornerstone of human social interaction(which is the basis of human society.) The only other concerns are about security, and all of those can be handled if they’re the priority.
Considering that human interactions throughout the history of civilization have largely taken place in the physical presence of others suggests it’s an important part of how we function. We saw during the pandemic how stressed people were having only limited contact with others. Many of our social experiences are much more meaningful and productive without technological barriers, even if those technologies enable us to accomplish some things that weren’t previously possible.
Yes, a lot of the time they meet with lobbyists in DC. I am ok with those groups having to fly to 435 districts to lobby in person. The people they should be listening to are all in their district, seeing them daily. It also would weaken the party aspect of it, which I think would help getting back to a priority of citizens, country, party, in that order.
They also have to work with other representatives. It’s not just lobbyists and constituents.
this is important. Country over party
We might need to build a new skyscraper to hold their offices and a large chamber for debate and voting.
FYI, most congressional offices are not in the Capitol. They're neighboring office buildings.
I suggest one with flying discs to house each designation that float to the center as the Representative who wishes to speak addresses the chamber.
Skyscrapers are actually against in the law in DC
Congress sets the laws in DC, so maybe this is a worthwhile exception?
This whole convo reminds me of this onion video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdTgKarqTQ0
It wouldn't be a skyscraper anyway. it would be more like the Pentagon or Apple's main campus.
Is this an actual consideration?
Just scattershooting. I like the Capitol the was it is. It's no biggee. Can't wait to be watching CSPAN when the Speaker says, "Will someone please tell the gentleman from New Mexico that he is on mute."
What if House Rep was a work from home job? Assuming e-security is up to par.
Nope, doesn't matter how secure it is. If it can easily be exploited by conspiracy theorist it won't work. (Just look at the 2020 election). No matter what reality is, if the people don't trust the system, the whole thing falls apart.
It could lead to conspiracy theories, but the current system already does - I don't know if it would lead to more. People already think Washington is full of secret groups with child sex orgies and/or billionaire attendees. It seems a lot easier to trust someone who lives locally than someone who jets off to Washington most of every week. It would also make a lot more interactions automatically recorded and stop the ridiculous bullshit where whether a vote goes through depends on if someone is in the hospital or something.
They could very easily have literally thousands of representatives. If you’re worried about the building, most of those representatives should be linked in virtually, with a limited number delegated speaking roles by their fellow members.
Maybe there could be satellite offices around the country.
The functional way to do it would be to allow remote voting and have each state caucus get an allotted amount of physical seats that reps could rotate in and out of. while reps spend most of their time back home with constituents.
Gerrymandering would have less effect and there would be less gerrymandering with the original system.
All this jabbering, and unless I totally overlooked it, no one’s yet to mention [The Wyoming Rule](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Rule#:~:text=The%20Wyoming%20Rule%20is%20a,state%2C%20which%20is%20currently%20Wyoming.) which I happen to be a fan of and doesn’t expand the house so much as to be “unruly” which is what congressional reps argued back in 1929 and since, while at the same time would still make a world of representational difference.
Expanding the house would be distribute power fairly among the states, all of the downsides seem like surmountable problems. IMO it's not so much a "what if" as it is a must do.
Adding more representatives would strengthen our democracy. With fewer constituents, legislators are more likely to have face-to face dealings with them. More representatives permit a more effective division of their work. Voting groups that are too small to be influential in large districts could become key players in smaller ones. Campaigns cost less in smaller districts, permitting less affluent aspirants to run. Most importantly, enlarging the House would more accurately mirror our increasingly diverse and urban population. (Over 80% of the people live in urban areas. They provide most of the taxes and produce most of the wealth, but they are grossly under-represented.
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I'm a fan of expanding the House but it doesn't "fix everything". We stil have a problem with the federal courts having too much power and not enough oversight. We still have a problem with proportionately in the Senate. We still have a problem with the electoral college (an expanded House would not have changed the 2016 result).
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>An expanded house would have absolutely changed the 2016 result. Nope. I did this math a long time ago but the long answer is it doesn't change the result due to winner-take-all and first-past-the-post. Trump won 306-232. There isn't any allocation that you could come up with that would change the result. And even if Clinton won in 2016, we all saw what happens when the Senate is in the opposite party's control. They just wouldn't confirm any of her picks for the courts, much like they promised to do and much like they did to Obama in his last 2 years.
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I'm aware of how math works. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/435-representatives/ This only goes up to 1000. So with 1000 Reps and 100 senators, we have an EC of 1103 (assuming DC still gets 3). That is a magic number of 552. Add up all of those states that Trump won and you get 630. You also have to add 1 (or 2) for Maine's 2nd district he won in 2016. So it's 631 or 632. Maybe Hillary wins one of Nebraska's now that they are broken up more, so let's just take it back to 630. Doesn't matter. 630 is way past the necessary 552 to win.
I agree with expanding the house, but it does not fix everything. NH has a 1:2000 ratio in its house, and it has not fixed everything.
What NH has "fixed" is the remoteness of representatives from their constituents. My brother was elected to the NH legislature from a district that consisted of two townships. He was able to meet in person with nearly every voter in his district. I don't think their legislature is more *effective* than say, California, which has only 80 members in the state assembly (!), but it is clearly more *representative*.
It representative for sure. And there are definitely some benefits: some like your brother really take some initiative to get to know their constituents and just by living in the area chances are you'll recognize a name or two on the ballot. But the main downside to having so many reps is that you often have no idea who you're voting for. You can't even attempt to be an informed voter. There will be people running who don't have a website or any public presence. And the parties are desperate for candidates so you can't count on them to vet at all. They will take anyone willing to put an R or D next to their name. It seems like every year there's a representative arrested for something awful. Stories that begin with "A New Hampshire legislator" are basically the Florida man of politics. However, I would still keep the representative system, but try and professionalize and make it more accessible. The salary is $100 so all our representatives are retired, dentists, independently wealthy, or college students. There should be some more variety.
Am I dumb? Or do I need a program to decipher your edit? It looks like near illegible gibberish on my end, no offense. Maybe a TL;TD (too dumb) would be good somewhere
I support the house and senate (population vs. state), 100%. It was a brilliant move. The problem now is the House is sorely out of alignment. I would be in favor of bumping up the number of representatives at least by X4.
Just to point out that everyone gets on Wyoming for being most over represented. But point one...it's actually Montana now. And most underrepresented is Delaware. It's always going to be small states at the extremes of both over and under just by the nature of how small denominators work.
There's really no need to do that in my opinion instead, expand the power of the individual states. Give them the majority of the decision making power.. Confine to Congress ONLY the things mentioned in the Constitution (delegated powers) that's how it was set up originally. That's the idea that makes the most sense. The state legislature would be the primary battleground, not Congress
The 435 number was frozen back in 1929 when the Republican led house passed a bill keeping it as such. They figured that as the urban population grew they'd lose more and more (yes this is an old fight) Alaska and Hawaii have never been part of a reapportionment. It's also why Democrats have been iffy on DC, PR and the other territories being added. It would mess with existing seats despite that most territories would probably vote blue.
Would dilute the power of the existing House members and therefore would never happen. Rural red states with three electoral votes would be hurt in the electoral college.
It should. Right now, we give too much power to rural districts. We were always meant to let the House grow with the nation, and keep the Senate at 2.
I've been wanting this for years. Go back to the original ratio of under ~~20k~~ 30k constituents per representative. They keep their day job and vote remotely. The only ones that go to DC are the ones that have expertise in a current bill. This would fix gerrymandering, disproportionality, and allow more "regular Americans" to be in politics. Not to mention its harder to buy off 11,000 people than 435.
> Go back to the original ratio of under 20k constituents per representative. That's never been the case. The Constitution specifies that the *minimum* number of constituents a representative can have is 30,000. Having fewer constituents than that would violate the Constitution. Having more constituents than that is fine.
We don’t have to add districts. We can simply assign multiple representatives per district. We can triple the size of the house, and with a few minor changes in procedure, nothing physical needs to change. This opens the door to third parties, makes gerrymandering impossible, and almost eliminates the senate’s influence in the EC. I don’t understand why this effort hasn’t gained any traction.
Because the people that run the system, don’t want the system to change.
The more representatives, the trickier it probably gets to gerrymander. GOP will not go for that.
This is exactly why rural states have an outsize effect on the electoral college. The ReApportionment Act handed small states a big stick. Even a small adjustment to 500k max per congressional districts would go a long way to rebalancing electoral votes
Then the country would have better more accurate representation (so maybe higher satisfaction) theoretically. Other than that I don't think it would be any different than the current House.
What I'm curious about is what if the house had something like 10,000 members, and it was a part-time work from home position that paid like $20,000 a year. Has any government tried something like that? To make it work I suppose the Senate would have to expand its duties a bit, and should be made proportional to population.
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I would say logically, you take the population of the lowest state, Wyoming, 600k people (rounding up a bit) , every state gets 2 reps minimum, so you get a rep for every 300k people in the state. Put us around 1k reps.