Congress is being rather dysfunctional at the moment, and from time to time, there are proposals to increase the number of representatives.
If we bring the number of ratio of representatives to citizens back down to 1789’s ratio, we’d have 5000+ reps. If we brought it back to the 1910 ratio, when the last major increase happened, we’d have about 1450 representatives.
But what would be the effects?
I’d think lobbyists would have drastically less power. With so many reps around, it’d be far more costly to buy them.
Much less disparity between proportional representation. Wyoming has 1 rep per 544,000. Delaware has 1 rep at 885,000.
3a) Emergence of third parties. Or at the least, more extreme candidates. If San Francisco had 10 reps, surely some of them would belong to the Green party, or at least the very liberal end of the Democratic party. Same thing with extremely conservative areas.
3b) But to counter that, I’d think most of the reps would end up being more moderate than they are today (since most americans tend to be moderate).
Much less gerrymandering. Or rather: with such focused representatives, gerrymandering just becomes normal, but it’s okay at such a large scale.
All the above I see as positive effects, but I’d be more interested in negative effects. Aside from trying to cram thousands of people into the U.S. Capitol, I’m not sure I really see any.
Well it would cost us a billion dollars a year in salary and benefits alone, and that’s not counting staff and building costs which would be even more. Although it wouldn’t be quite 10X our current expense because they’d need less staff and we could reduce their pay. But it would still be billions of dollars a year more.
This would change the form but not the function. The linked article decries Congress giving in to special interests, but that’s kinda the point of Congress.
Even if true, IMHO you get what you pay for. We Americans haven’t paid enough for good congressional representation, so the lousy Congress we have is our own damn fault. I’d be fine with a much higher number of Congressional representatives.
But the Senate tends to be more moderate than the House, and many believe the reason to be that a Senator has to be elected from the entire State (urban, suburban, and rural) while a Representative’s district in all but the lowest-population States is more geographically and demographically specific, and thus sociopolitcally more specific and homogenous. Smaller House districts would tend to be more homogenous, not less.
Well if we at the same time abolished a lot of the perks for Congressmen and maybe combined similar government departments (ie combining the Treasury, Commerce, and Labor departments into an “Economics” department or Justice and Homeland Security into a “Security and Justice Department”) the costs probably end up evening out.
In addition Britain with one-fifth of our population has two hundred more seats in the House of Commons than in our House of Representatives.
Just what this country needs, more power-drunk self-centered politicians looking for a career position so they can line their pockets with lobbyist donations
Completely different discussion, but what makes you think you can make departments more efficient or cheaper by reorganizing/merging/regrouping them? Remember Homeland Security?
I really don’t want to see Treasury folded into an “Economics” department.
Since I believe in proportional representation, I don’t think the argument that we need more Senate-style moderation necessarily holds. The fact is, Senators are idiosyncratic.
If the cost is a concern, I’m on record here as calling for the abolition of state governments.
The actual cost of paying and resourcing legislators is pretty trivial, in the overall scheme of things.
A bigger question is, could the House function effectively as a legislature with 5,000 members? Or even 1,500 members? Either debates would be impossibly long, or most members would in practice have to be excluded from making meaningful contributions to most debates. Either committees would be impossibly large and unwieldy, or most members would have to be excluded from all committees of any significance. I can’t see how this would be a good thing.
As for reducing the power of lobbyists, as suggested in the OP, not at all. Economics 101 tells us that if you increase the supply of legislators while demand for legislative support remains unchanged, the price of a legislator will drop. The individual legislator will become cheaper to buy, not more expensive. (Of course, lobbyists would have to buy more legislators to achieve the same degree of influence.)
Nor would increasing the number of legislators be the obvious way to achieve either more diversity, or more moderation, in the make-up of the legislature. If you want that, introduce proportional representation, preferably involving the single transferrable vote, so that the successful candidate groups/parties are those which can command the broadest support, and make the most effective alliances. You don’t need to increase the number of legislators for this.
I do think that smaller districts mean that a campaign could be potentially cheaper, which may be able to reduce lobbyist influence. Although, in big media markets where advertising is expensive, that probably won’t end up being true in practice.
As for whether or not increasing the number will make the House unwieldy, I think that’s largely a function of the antiquated way in which Congress conducts business. For example, there’s no reason today that Congressmen need to be physically present for votes. I’m sure if we looked into it more deeply, we could find a number of ways to change the procedures to make things more efficient (and transparent).
Personally, I think the number of reps should be increased to 5000+, but I’m fine with something around a doubling in number.
State legislators are invariably corrupt, incompetent and/or insane on an even greater scale than their federal counterparts.
Now, picture all those people who send racist horse porn to their employees and the occasional journalist being sent up to the federal House of Representatives. Is that really what you want?
