Posted on 10/07/2009 3:21:55 PM PDT by bsaunders
Watching the House of Representatives on late-night C-SPAN, you might have any number of reactions, including seppuku-inducing boredom. Depending on who's talking, you might also feel disgust, rage, contempt or, in rare cases, inspiration. But one reaction you probably won't have is: "Gosh, if only there were more of these jokers." That's too bad. Because what our political system may be lacking more than anything else is enough members of Congress. No, really. Seriously, stop laughing. Except for a brief effort to accommodate Alaska and Hawaii, the size of the House has been frozen at 435 members since 1911.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
and each with 100 more staffers and millions upon millions in annual perks. No way.
We 535 less Congressmembers
I’d rather have fewer Marxists and idiots in the one we have
I favor a House of 3200 Members, no compensation for services, fixed budget for office staff not to include public relations or advertising, 6 months in 2 years maximum session.
We pay 'em $100 a year in NH and it seems to work OK.
We need a Virtual Congress conducted on the Internet, with each of our 10,000 congresscritters never leaving his district, operating out of his home, and accountable 24/7 to his 30,000 constituents.
A five year hiatus from any governmental organization should be mandatory.
” We need a Virtual Congress conducted on the Internet, with each of our 10,000 congresscritters never leaving his district, “
Or, it might be kinda fun to see 10,000 congresscritters shoehorned into the existing House and Senate Chambers - preferrably furnished in “coach-class airline chic”.....
I don’t see how his proposal of a 5,000 person Congress would break the two party monopoly unless you got rid of the one winner per district elections and went to some type of proportional representation where if 10% of a state’s voters chose the Libertarians then 10% of the state’s reps would be Libertarians instead of the current situation where 10% loses in every single district unless Gerrymandered.
I like the idea of a two term limit. First term in the house, and the second term in the penitentiary. If that don’t work out, then both terms in the penitentiary.
Gads, no. Why would we want to make it easier to pass laws?
We need to mandate that every bill, and every proposed regulation that will have the force of law, be read before a full quorum of both Houses, twice.
And we need to restrict the Session to July and August, and forbid air conditioning in federal buildings.
Oh, the carbon footprint!
I think we should set the limit at 250,000 residents per district, the equivalent population of a small to medium city, and allow the number of congressional seats to grow according to population growth.
This would give us about 1,248 congressional seats today.
It's not the number of congressmen that are the problem, it's the fact that most of them think they own there seats.
We should have better representation AND term limits. No more then three terms in the house and Senate. And we should go back to having one senator appointed by each state and one directly elected by each states voters.
And we should develop a system of Instant Run Off voting. Each voter gets to vote for three candidates for each position up for vote, ranked by preference, and if the first one fails to muster enough votes to win a majority, the votes get transferred to the second choice and so on.
This would give a real viability to a potential third party being developed because people would not feel they are “throwing their vote away” by voting third party since if they can't win a majority themselves their vote would go to their second or third choice.
It would also eliminate the spoiler effect many third party candidates cause since if they can't win a majority themselves their votes would be transferred to the second or third choices which would more then likely be mainstream candidates.
/End rant.
Prop rep is a disaster. Seriously, you do not want it. Go with the NH model, 10k representatives, one for every 30k people in the us. It will also make sessions of congress very infrequent.
Interesting that you should say this. The last time Congress passed its budget on time was the year before a/c was installed in the Capitol.
Since then, it's been all downhill.
You gave me an idea: Washington DC needs to be required to go totally green on electricity. It must all be from wind, solar, or nuclear.
Environmental restrictions on nuclear power would disappear overnight.
Correct, more districts alone would not lead to third parties winning seats if we keep our current plurality system, NH has a huge house, only 1 independent. Who wants that anyway, all we need is 1 good party.
Smaller districts though would make congress more accountable and closer to the people. It's hard to argue "we need more congressman!" but the districts have gotten awfully big.
As a Republican trapped in Chicago I wouldn't mind some proportional system that would make my vote for the House meaningful. Until 1982 the IL State house had 3 member districts with all voters getting 3 votes (and you could cast all 3 for one candidate, hence there were Republicans in Chicago seats). With Chicago being so heavily rat though, today most Chicago seats would elect 3 rats while every GOP seat would probably have 1 rat under that inefficient system. At the time the system was abused with trojan horse democrats running as Republicans in Chicago (including the first mayor Daley).
Even without expanding the House, we could have a system of multi-member districts and proportional representation that would prevent the disenfranchisement of members of a party with as much as 49% of the vote in a district.
For example, Massachusetts has 10 congressional districts, all of which are comfortably Democrat. If instead MA had two 5-member districts, with each voter being able to vote for only one candidate, the GOP could elect one or two members in each district and thus there would be between 2 and 4 Republicans from MA in the House. Since 5 candidates are elected but each voter can only vote for a single candidate, the GOP would run 2 candidates and the Democrats 4, and third parties would run 1 each. If the GOP candidates evenly split 1/3 of the total vote (which would be doable no matter how you carved up the two multi-member districts), both would be guaranteed to be elected, while the Libertarian or Green candidate (or a candidate for a Pro-Life Party or the many other parties that might sprout up when the local GOP goes RINO) could be elected if he got maybe 14% (and would be guaranteed election if he got 16.67%).
A Republican living in the middle of the most Democrat precinct in Cambridge would actually have representation in the House, since at least one Republican would be elected in the 5-member district that would encompass, say, all of NE Mass. (including Boston). And unlike proportional representation in other countries, third-party candidates would need to pass a relatively high threshhold before being elected, thereby keeping fringe candidates out of Congress.
The hardest part would be how to make sure that if there are two Republicans running that you don’t have one with 22% of the vote and the other with 13% and have only one Republican elected despite the party getting 35% of the vote. The best idea I’ve been able to come up with so far would be for both GOP candidates to appear under the party name (in the order in which they finished in the primary), and allow people to cast their vote for the party, with the top candidate getting the party’s votes (after each candidate being allocated the votes they got directly) until he got to 1/6 +1 of the vote (enough to guarantee election in a 5-member district) and with additional votes going to the second candidate.
Another way to have proportional representation is to have 3-member districts with each voter casting votes for 2 candidates, thereby pretty much ensuring that the GOP will be able to elect at least one Representative in each 3-member district. (We could have 5-member districts in which everyone gets 3 votes, but that would prevent the majority party from ever getting more than 60% of the vote in any multi-member district.)
There are two problems with multi-member districts irrespective of which of the two potions are selected. One is that in case a Representative dies or resigns, one would have to allow only members of his party vote in the special election to replace him, since otherwise it would deny that party proportional representation.
The other problem is that proportional representation only works well for districts of 3 or 5 members. Districts with 2 members are too small for proportional representation; one could end up with one Republican and one Democrat (thus no net GOP gain) in a 66%-Republican district or with two Democrats and no Republicans in a 32% Republican district, and third-party candidates would not get elected even with 30% of the vote. Districts with 4 members would result in an equal number of Democrats as Republicans even in a 59% GOP district. And districts with 6 or more members would comprise regions with well over 4 million residents. Only districts with an odd number of members allow for proportionality, and only those with 5 or fewer members are small enough not to be ridiculous. While that would allow states with, for example, 13 Representatives to have two 5-member districts and one 3-member district, that creates a problem for states with 2 Representatives and for states with 4 or 7 Representatives, since creating a 3-member of 5-member district would leave a number of Representatives that could not be placed in another 3- or 5-member district. How could proportional representation be applied to such states? There are several possibilities (for example, two 3-member districts and one single-member district in a state with 7 Representatives), but none are optimal.
So, in conclusion, there is no easy way to have proportional representation in Congress.
As for the number of Representatives, I think that while it is true that districts have gotten extremely big a bigger problem is that the ratio of Representatives to Senators is too large. At the Founding, there were 65 Representatives and 26 Senators, or 2.5 Representatives per Senator, which made the “2-Senator bonus” in the electoral votes for each state more valuable than it is today when there are 4.35 Representatives per Senator. I would like for the Constitution to be amended so that there are 3 Senators per state (which would also allow states to elect a Senator at every biennial election, thus giving voters in every state a voice in the composition of both houses every two years), and for the amendment to provide that the number of members of the House will be 3 times the number of Senators (and could not be varied through legislation). That means that with 50 states there would be 150 Senators and 450 Representatives; if a 51st state is admitted, there would be 153 Senators and, commencing after the next census, 459 Representatives (prior to the next Census, the new state would have the number of representatives to which it would have been entitled undre the prior Census, which is how it is done under current law). Not only would such amendment return to small states a little bit of the presidential electoral power that they lost when the House was expanded in the first decade of the 20th Century, but it would also eliminate the artificial disincentive that members of Congress have for the admission of new states to the Union since no longer would states lose House members at the next Census solely because a new state is admitted (unless such new state happens to be entitled to more than 9 Representatives).
Wow, that’s a long post right there. I feel like DJ writing about 19th Century gubernatorial elections in Vermont. : )
Hey ! :-P I've thought over proportional representation, especially for states like MA, which are ludicrously out-of-whack with respect to its elected officials vs. the actual overall voting preference (which really should be anywhere from 30% to 40% with serious candidates, but we almost never run any because it's so daunting). But there are, of course, downsides. In the case of IL, at least for the legislative, you had Democrat stooges running as R's in urban districts where the GOP ceased to exist over time, and perhaps even a few R stooges running as Dems in heavy GOP areas.
If we had that proportional system in TN, the Dems would not have held a majority of seats based on very tricky gerrymandering (now, in the last election, the Dems won more votes for the U.S. House, 1.2 million to 978k - which might justify their 5D-4R delegation, but there's a problem here, since the Dems fielded candidates in ALL 9 districts, the GOP didn't even contest the 6th, 8th & 9th, the first two for which we carried for President and should have GOP Reps. sitting in the seats, so we actually underperformed by almost a half-million votes, since McCain won the state with just under 1.5 million (to Zero's 1.1 million) - Lamar! got even higher with 1.6 million (for which my vote was not one of them).
If I was to do proportional, I wouldn't even want districts, per se, but statewide as a total percentage, but you'd have to arrange it so candidates elected resided in different areas of a given state (rather than in one clustered geographical location). I guess "de facto districts" just without set lines (if that makes any sense). Of course, this is still complicated, and I haven't thought out the problems with respect to selecting nominees, either (nevermind if this system would be Constitutional, since they frown upon at-large style selection with the exception of states that only have just 1 Rep).
I think, too, that if you have 3 Senators, they be elected from 3 separate districts within a given state. Such as for CA, 1 for the coastal South (L.A.-based), another for the coastal North (S.F.-based), and another for the non-coastal interior (presumably GOP leaning). That would mean a Boxer and a Feinstein couldn't serve concurrently. A Feinstein would win the SF seat, a Waxman (or Riordan) type from the L.A. seat, and McClintock from the interior.
The problem with statewide proportional representation is that in mid-sized states you’ll end up with Congressmen elected with 10% of the vote, and in large states they could get elected with 5% (less than 2% in CA). That’s why I think that multi-member districts should not have more than 5 members.
As for Senators, I don’t think that they should be elected by districts. Could you imagine drawing three Senate districts in VT? Senators have always represented the entire state, and I wouldn’t change that. As for CA, I would split it up into 5 states and solve the problem.
No, we don’t, Jonah. We really, really don’t.
FAIL.
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