Google “article the first,” also known as The Congressional Apportionment Amendment.
It is the very first amendment proposed to the constitution back in 1789 and is one of the last remaining original constitutional amendments proposed by our Founders that has not been ratified.
During FDR’s presidency, the number of Representatives was arbitrarily frozen at 435. Prior to then, every 10 years, after the Census, the number of Representatives increased according to the population numbers. The spirit of the congressional apportionment amendment was followed, but it was thrown aside in the name of politics.
If you read the amendment, it would require one representative for every 50,000 citizens. If you’re doing the math, that means over 6,000 representatives by the current population numbers. I’ve proposed that we create National Congressional Districts (I.e. Atlanta for the southeast, St. Louis for the Midwest, etc.) where the district representatives meet via networking software to do the business of the federal government.
It would mean TRUE representation where money can’t necessarily buy a seat and every citizen’s voice could be heard.
It’s written as the very first amendment to our constitution and was obviously important to our Founders. It would revolutionize our government and would absolutely be met with derision by our media. It missed ratification by one state at the time. Ironically, I believe that state was Connecticut.
It’s an interesting notion, but I think it would be an unwieldy mess. Reapportionment would be a nightmare, and you’d have a huge number of rotten borough districts in urban areas and certain sections of the country. Imagine the city of Los Angeles alone with 76 Congressmembers, virtually all of whom would be either Maxine Waters or radical La Raza types.
Regarding balancing “the people” with “the states”...
Originally,
representatives were about 2 1/2 times in number as senators (65 vs 26)...
(now, that would translate to 250 representatives vs 50 senators...
currently, we have 435 vs 100 or about 4 1/2 times in number).
Originally,
representatives were 1 per 30,000 in population
(now, that would translate to 10,000 members in the house of representatives...
currently, we have 1 representative per 690,000 in population).
Thanks for pointing that out; I thought it was a typo or something. I would like to see a national discussion on a lot of things, the ratio of citizens to elected officials in the House being one of them.