Well, there’s your problem. Like K Street, you need to buy a minute of their time.
Exactly. And if they are only representing 30,000 people, rather than 750,000, then it becomes much cheaper.
Just being a voter may be a high enough price.
With 500k minutes available per year it sure seems like they could talk to their constituents if there were 100k or less of them.
A legislative body isn’t a simple mini-plebiscite. You try to persuade others to see it your way by coming over to the office and having a beer or a soda. You can’t do that over Zoom.
You can still have offices to meet in. It’s just that the wouldn’t all be meeting in the main chamber on a regular basis.
It’s a little curious to see a resident of a state which just lost a seat advocating against the expansion of the House.
An unrelated argument that comes to mind is that Reps are strongly urged to spend a third of their time soliciting for campaign funding. Which means to me that we’re really only getting the work output of 290 Reps.
Exactly. The personal contacts are crucial; Zoom doesn’t cut it. Too formal and regimented.
I read that Biden says that he doesn’t like to ask someone to do something for him until they’ve had three or four conversations to get to know each other. And he seems to be a pretty good model for schmoozing.
Zoom is too formal and regimented? That’s at odds to my experiences with it.
I suspect 90% of deliberation and deal making among people in congress is done over the phone anyway. The chamber is just for speeches, debate, and voting. CCTV and staggered trips to the chamber to vote are easy solutions to accommodating more representatives.
I spent most of my career working with virtual teams. Getting face to face contact once is a while is nice, but not necessary. We could persuade over the phone. We could ask favors. Heck, we’ve been doing that on this very board for decades and we don’t even know each other’s real names.
Have them get together twice a year, not necessarily in chambers. Everything else can - and frankly should - be done from their district.
That’s not been my experience. YMMV. There have been times when I really feel the need for a face-to-face meeting but haven’t been able to have it, and I think the decision-making process suffers as a result.
There is something really valuable about sticking your head in someone else’s office and saying, “Joe, can we chat for a few minutes over coffee? Got something I want to run past you.”
Setting up a teams link or a phone call just doesn’t match that informal setting, which can be very valuable for developing and keeping a personal relationship. And that’s what politicking is all about.
One of the criticisms I’ve seen from time to time about Congress’ dysfunctionality is just that: the members don’t socialise, just show up to vote, and spend all their weekends and evenings either in their districts or working on projects, not developing the personal relationships that can be so important to trying to get a consensus.
When John Turner, a former MP and future PM of Canada came back to the Commons after being away for a couple of electoral cycles, he was quoted as saying that he was dismayed that the MPs of all parties no longer had a weekly poker game, because that was really important to developing relationships both within your own party, and across the floor.
There’s lots of office space in Washington, and more can be built. Arguing that the size of Congress can’t be increased because there isn’t room in the Capitol building is just silly.
And I’m not arguing that. Just the opposite: saying that Congress can run by Zoom and Teams just isn’t accurate, in my opinion.
It actually was one of the best team environments I have ever been in. There was a lack of just social chatting, and a huge amount of stuff that got done. It takes some time to adapt to “my coworkers are a phone call away” but once you adapt, its actually really nice not to have someone sticking your head in your office to bug you to grab coffee about something you really think is a lousy idea.
I’m talking about the House chamber, not the offices (which can be expanded much more easily if necessary). The chamber has been largely obsolete at least since they put in the C-SPAN cameras that allowed members to just turn on their TVs to see what was happening across the street.
There are plenty of reasons to think expanding the House is not necessary but the number of seats in the TV studio where the House conducts parliamentary procedure is not one of them.
I didn’t address this before. I think it’s important to remember we’re not talking about some decision made by the founding fathers in 1789. The 435 member cap wasn’t something created by Washington and Hamilton and Madison. It comes from a law enacted in 1929.
Exactly. As discussed upthread, the Founding Father’s thinking was to aim for about 30K citizens per rep. Not 20-30x that many.
The 1929 afterthought was as tawdry a piece of partisan legislation as has ever been passed.
Despite occasional hagiography (mostly on the right) the FFs were not possessed of god-like foresight to know the right answer to governance for all the ages. But in many ways on many topics their average effort is better than subsequent average efforts.
I think even the people who believe the statesmen of the founding generation possessed god-like wisdom don’t hold the same awe for the politicians of the Hoover era.
That lousy idea sometimes sounds not so lousy when you hear someone out. That’s the point.
Or, it is a lousy idea and you help the other person to avoid making a mistake. Informal conversations can be very helpful for both ideas and relationships. And that’s what politics is about.