It’s running that way right now. Members of Congress can physically meet, just not all of them together in one place at one time. Those members who want to get stuff done are getting it done.
The House is already too big for representatives to have a personal relationship with each other member. They pick and choose who they get close to.
Truth be told, whether or not we use the Wyoming rule or not it all pretty much comes out in the wash, which I think may have been YamatoTwinkies point. Any division of the states into integer numbers of representatives is going to result in winners and losers, and those winners and losers are going to be concentrated among the less populated states because rounding errors are a larger proportion of the overall representation. Under the current system, the big winner is actually Montana, which gets 1.4 times the number of representatives it deserves, but Delaware is a loser with only 77% of the representation it should have. Under the Wyoming system the big winner will be South Dakota (1.3 times) while the big loser will be North Dakota (74%).
In terms of over and under representation there isn’t too many problems with the house Represenatives. Yes, Wyoming gets upped to the one representative hard floor, but even without a floor it would still get its one representative due to rounding.
The real issue is in the senate where a filibuster can be sustained by senators representing states with a total population less than that of the single state of California.
I guess I’m missing the point. How can both the winners and the losers be concentrated among the smaller states? And if that is the case, what bias can be found in this?
Or its a lousy idea and you’ve wasted time over coffee. I discovered we got a hell of a lot more done when we weren’t “hearing people out” over coffee. You had to present your ideas succinctly, and far less bad ideas got implemented because they’d been socialized. By far the best environment I was in was virtual teams, and I think my husband, who has been working that way for three years now, would say the same thing. The worst environments I’ve worked in were the ones where favors like coffee were expected in order to push ideas through - if you didn’t gladhand the right people, good ideas were lost. If you did, bad ideas saw the light of day.
He’s saying that for small states, using 700K or 800K or 900K or 1M as the divisor per representative is real lumpy compared to their small populations. So they will experience large round-off errors in getting to a whole number of reps. Conversely in a populous state like TX, CA, NY, etc. the unit of measure is much finer compared to the thing being measured. So it fits better.
It’s the same math logic as trying to put a few basketballs into a box the size of, say, a home oven. Some number will fit in there but there’ll be a lot of wasted space. If you put smaller golfballs in the same oven, not only do a lot more fit, but the total wasted space will be far less. Filling with sand grains would be even more so. The “wasted space” corresponds to the rounding error on number of reps.
That seems like a valid mathematical observation to me and one which could be largely mitigated with a “double” Wyoming Rule.
Or a one rep per 30,000 residents rule.
Rounding errors would be pretty negligible then.
That might be the way to go. You could tell Wyoming, “Think of it! You could have 21 electoral votes instead of three!”
Just forget to mention California gets 1,319.
But then we’d end up with over 11,000 reps now, and that number will just grow larger over time. We’ll practically need to build a new World Trade Center to hold all of them and future-proof for America’s expected rate of population growth. Also, any roll call votes will take forever.
After taking all the points brought up in this thread into consideration so far, I am more and more inclined to believe that this is a classic trilemma, where there are three desirable characteristics but we can only pick two:
I’m not really seeing a way around that, and IMO the best we can do is decide which tradeoff is least-ugly.
As the current operations under pandemic conditions show, we don’t need one location big enough to hold all of them. Congress can gather in smaller groups. They can take turns in the main chamber for speechifying and voting. They can teleconference at will. It works.
I feel that the primary principle should be that each member of the House is representing a group which is as close as practical to the size of every other group. Looking at it from the other end, this means every American is getting equal representation in the House. If anyone feels there is an argument to be made for unequal representation, let them make it.
Only if every state has to do it and districts are drawn by independent commissions.
This is higher priority than increasing the size of the House.
You can fit several tens of thousands in any stadium worth its name for any events where you really want all to be in attendance. Other than that, they don’t really need to be all in the same place.
Only if you do them one by one, name by name. If they can just push a button and have their vote recorded (which they can do), then problem solved.
Not a hard choice, IMHO. I pick the first two.
I also find that the ability for representatives to do their jobs, that to be the liaison between the people and the federal govt, to be much easier if they are only representing 30,000.
What if we got rid of districts, and just had them all elected at large? Maybe the top 5% of vote getters become the delegation that regularly spends time in washington.
You’d probably see a whole lot more third party candidates become more viable.
This is exactly what I was saying, and yes expanding the house would reduce the discrepancy but its not clear that it’s worth it. As it stands, it really comes down to one or another state gaining or losing at most one half of a congressman out of almost 500, so having increased or reduced influence by about 1/1000. If you double the size of the house you can get that down to 1/2000 but that doesn’t seem to me to be qualitatively different.
More importantly, it isn’t systemic who gains and loses. It isn’t like the senate or the EC where all of the gains are concentrated in the predominantly Republican low population states and all the losses are concentrated in the predominantly Democratic high population states. The gains and losses are scattered more or less randomly so it all comes out in the wash.
I disagree. I feel the losses are not scattered randomly. Any system which creates an artificial maximum (like 435) is biased against the more populous states. Every state is guaranteed a representative; this means all low population states will get one. So any losses caused by a cap have to come from higher population states.
This isn’t just theoretical; it’s happening under our current system. In California, there are approximately 747,400 people in a congressional district. In Wyoming, there are approximately 569,000 in a congressional district. This means a citizen in Wyoming is getting 1.3 times the representation that a citizen in California gets.
I feel this is wrong and we should repeal the law which causes this.
What happens if 53% of the voters vote for Smith, 46% vote for Jones, and 1% vote for Brown in a state with three representatives? Do we send Smith, Jones, and Brown to Washington and give them equal seats in Congress? If so, we seem to be ignoring the fact that a lot more voters wanted Smith or Jones than wanted Brown.
As I wrote above, I disagree. I feel any change might effect the balance between the Democrats and Republicans elected, but I don’t feel it would cause a rise in third party candidates. Unless you have a system which artificially declares third party candidates a winner, which is what I feel the system you described does.
If there are 600 Democrats in the House, the leaders of the party will be the folks interacting with their counterparts to hammer out legislation (assuming dealmaking and bipartisanship ever re-emerges). Nobody other than party leadership will be meaningfully interacting with a first time Congressperson until he or she demonstrates that they have some kind of significant influence.
I actually like the multi-story office concept for an expanded House. It should be an office-like environment where our elected representatives are conducting the country’s business. (Note this is not the same thing as that bullshit “running the country like a business”)
This is combined with my idea of having one rep per 30,000, in order to better deal with the issue that has been raised about not having enough space for them all in Washington.
If a state has fewer than 120,000 residents, it probably shouldn’t be a state.
No, it would be largely the increase in the number of reps that would do that. Being at large, with that many reps, means that anyone who can muster 30,000 votes will be elected. Given that many of the higher vote getters would be sucking down far more votes, it probably wouldn’t take more than 15 to 20k votes for a particular party to get at least one rep.