I'm not convinced that increasing the number of Representatives in the House is a better way to improve our democratic process than it would be to remove a state's number of Senators from the allotment of electoral votes. The House represents the people, and the Senate represents the states. Let our democracy be based on the people's voice alone.
47
I used to think so too, but the amazing horrifying influence that fascists like Limbaugh and Hannity have had over the people makes me afraid, very afraid, of the people. Would the people choose to tighten up the 1st and 2nd Amendments and prevent them from being weaponized, as they already have been?
4
Why not do both?
5
Mary, have faith in our changing demographics. 48 percent of registered voters are Democrats, vs 44 percent who are Republicans. That is changing over time to favor Democrats even more, which is why the GOP is working so hard to repress voting. That said, the trick is to get out the vote so that Democrats can capitalize on that margin. The energy seen in this recent election shows that Democrats are waking up. And that energy is directly a reaction to Trump. So, in a way, Trump has been good for the country, because he's gotten the left to vote again. Of course, we need to spread this positivity to the 45 percent of the electorate who doesn't vote at all, even though they can. We're getting there.
Fifty thousand financially independent Democrats can turn a Red state Blue!
The real key to the future of American democracy lies in making the Senate representative of the majority of Americans. In the short term it is ridiculous to believe that any formal legislative process is going to succeed in achieving any actual change to the representative quality of the Senate. Only direct action can result in this vitally important objective and that objective would make every other democratic reform much more realistic.
There are now five states in which 50,000 new Democratic voters could ensure that within a few years, those states would be solid Blue, with two Democratic senators in place. Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin have all shown with the results in 2016 and last week that 250,000 determined Democrats with newly issued drivers licences and voter registrations could dramatically change American politics.
What does that look like? Well, you're 26 and you have a solid contract gig in the IT industry that makes geographic location irrelevant so long as you have high speed internet access. You're 66 and looking forward to an active retirement, you're going to be travelling and enjoying yourself for the next 20 years so where you have your American base really doesn't matter. You're 46 and you just got that big promotion to the office in London. You're packing up anyway, why not buy a condo in Pittsburgh for when you come home?
It's doable, so do it!
8
There should also be finance reform for campaigns with a time limit for the campaign. I would also like to see the current voting system that Maine has. No campaign should last longer than 2 months. I person should equal a one time donation to the person's campaign and the donated amount no greater than $10,000.00 and the person making the donation must have American Citizenship and be currently registration to vote. Gerrymandering should be outlawed and voting areas should be defined by the either school districts or law enforcement precincts. Finally there must be term limits on every voted in official in government and that term should be limited to 2. They need to go back to work where they live for 6 months before they begin their next campaign for a different position than one that they have already served in. They also must live in the region they are going to represent. The President should not be able to choose their own Vice President. The Vice President should be the one who did not win the Presidency.
21
Sure, add some house seats but the Real Change needed is in the Senate.
That is blatantly unfair, unequal representation.
Why are there two Dakotas? Why does Wyoming get a Senator?
Convert all the 1 House Rep states to 2 house reps and 1 Senator....problem fixed.
21
yeah, they do such a great job, so we should want even more of them.
23
what? we need more people who do nothing all day except solicit for more $$$? More $$$ spent on campaigns -- and of course more congressional staffers. Then we'd probably have to build a bigger capitol building, a new congressional office building. Then think of all the additional lobbyists, the campaign staff. The mind boggles. Traffic in DC would get worse.
And let's not forget the number of new investigations that would be possible.
Why don't we shrink congress instead -- get rid of all the loafers, the demagogues, the partisans, the bloc voters, the corrupt,the incompetent. Those beholden to special interest groups. Oops. Who would be left?
22
Denmark isn’t comparable to the United States. Denmark is a unitary state. It is divided into five non-autonomous administrative regions. The United States is a republic divided into 50 sovereign states, each with its own legislature, executive branch and judicial branch. For example, Montana has only one representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, but Montanans have 100 representatives in the Montana House of Representatives and 50 senators in the Montana Senate. More populous states have more state representatives and more state senators.
The United Sates already has so many federal laws that they cannot be enumerated, much less enforced. The notion that we need hundreds of new representatives who would justify their existence by proposing new legislation is absurd. The Constitution mandates that Congress assemble at least once a year. Once a decade would be better.
21
Excellent suggestion. The Lobbyists ought to be on board for it too, since it expands their feeding troughs and we know they love to eat and give to campaigns. The Electoral College also needs to be tailored to fit today's body politic: (take in a little from say, Wyoming and let out the seams on more populated states). And of course, the Supreme Court needs more Justices. If we expect Cost of Living increments in our Social Security checks, we need to have a reality check on the House, just as you say. Thanks.
2
Increasing the size of the house is one of the better ideas for achieving more effective representation. For one it is doable, does not require a constitutional amendment and is in keeping with the intent of the constitution. I also believe it will reduce the influence of outside money in elections. Anything that allows voters to actually get to know their representatives would seem to stimulate voter turnout and encourage representatives to listen to their constituents. The small town I live in, has very high voter turnout (80% in the most recent midterms) which I believe is due to the fact that most candidates on the ballot are known to the residents so you feel your decision will make a difference.
5
I think the increase in competitiveness is because the algorithm doesn't gerrymander, not because of the increase in districts. And the comparison between the cost of a representative (annual cost) with the purchase of an F-14 jet (one time cost) is an apples to oranges comparison.
But I have a better solution. How about 330 million representatives? Let the current house propose legislation but then require that it be approved by the entire electorate before it becomes law. Unless someone is willing buy off the entire country, the influence of big money is severely diluted.
3
More reps is meaningless without finance reform for elections and unnecessary with it. Americans do not in fact have more views or needs for which more reps would be more representative. They have collective problems of education, a Pentagon that sucks the life out of the tax revenue, a health insurance system that is a welfare system for insurers, and foreign wars that are playthings of Presidents. We have collective infrastructure issues, gays straights women and men and trans people all use the same roads bridges and lousy public transportation. The democracy problem here is not that reps can't "be in touch" with their people in their district, it's that they don't want to be, because they are doing the bidding of donors not voters.
8
Was this a problem when Obama was President and the Democrats controlled the House?
16
Thank you for expanding my civics knowledge. This kind of crucial "citizen education" should be mandatory in schools.
2
More seats equals more corruption.
11
Actually -- in my mid the House is too large. Too bulky -- too many staff - too expensive. Increasing the number does nothing to change the demographic.
What we need to do is bring back civics class -- so people understand the how and why. The ... "United States"
only 50% voted ..... just get your voters to the polls ....you win
6
America doesn't need more representatives, it needs fewer people.
11
There needs to be only one additional seat in the House.
"Beto O'Rourke for Speaker!"
Surely you jest...
Ooh - you're not...
Then how 'bout this – term limits for parties...
After 5 Congressional or 3 Senate terms of a seat being held by one party - they'd be ineligible to field a candidate for that office in the next election...
With this, the next Congressperson or Senator would generally be the person who wins the primary of the out-of-power party...
Census-based redistricting, no problem…
For any state adding Congresspersons, the term history of existing districts has to be preserved into a same number of districts – net-add new districts can start the count at zero…
For any state losing Congresspersons, the longest term histories of existing districts have to be preserved…In case of a tie at the cut-off point, term histories will be drawn as needed, by lot, from those tied…
For clarity, ties would be so infrequent – but possibly so pathological – it’d be counterproductive to try to enumerate all variants…
This wouldn’t cost a thing – in terms of government operations/administration…
The essence would fit into a tweet…
It’s what the love-child of those two great paradigms of Greek governance might just look like…
Democracy – and ostracism…
Let’s fix the problem of having two senators from each state at the same time. Lunacy that Wyoming has the same representation as California in the “Greatest Deliberative Body in the World.” Lol
3
What the heck? Why not load up the government with hundreds of more corrupt politicians who will do nothing more than rapidly increase the already gigantic national debt? The sooner the whole thing implodes the better.
9
"... a couple hundred representatives could be added for the price of, say, five F-14 fighter jets."
F-14? Interesting. Of all the military hardware available for price comparison, Ed. Board choses obsolete aircraft which is only in service with Islamic Republic of Iran.
But let's not dwell on that bit of technological illiteracy. Let's look at the underlying problem. The country is too big to succeed. (Well, unless we become more like China.) Instead of just upping the size of Congress, we should break up the country. And Canada, too. Some border states and provinces have more in common with each other than with far off national capitals and "foreign occupied" fellow states/provinces. Let Confederates be Confederates. Texas and southwest can go back to being Mexican. (Or take over Mexico, if they wish.) Florida is gonna slip neath the waves. Along with Rhode Island and Delaware. California will, sooner or later, fall into the ocean or move north to become part of Alaska (which should be part of Russia anyway).
Much more practical, breaking to the "country". Treat the Constitution more like a marriage license. Replace "until death do you part" with "until whatever and whenever". KInd of a Trump thing, really.
Oh, BTW, how many folks were employed at NYT in 1920? Has size of your payroll kept pace with U.S. population and/or readership?
1
Please get serious. The problem is not the House of Representives, it is the Senate. You are igornant regarding one vote.
2
The U.S. has a winner-take-all electoral system for seats in Congress and, importantly, in (nearly all) states as part of the Electoral College system of presidential elections. If you win a plurality of votes in any contest, then you’re the winner. There’s no prize for coming in second, third, or fourth. So factions join together, sometimes held by duct tape and bailing wire. Head-to-head contests emerge.
If instead of a winner-take-all presidential system, the U.S. had a parliamentary system that admitted many political parties, shotgun intra-party marriages might not have to exist, and citizens would have party representation in the government that more closely matches their own political and policy views.
So while Congress and the president are going about the serious business of reopening the government in a decidedly unserious manner — Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, described, in public, the GOP’s plan for funding a children’s health insurance program as “a bowl of doggy doo” with a cherry on top — let’s distract ourselves by thinking about what parties we might have in a parliamentary system.
1
This is cosmetics and papering over the deep systemic flaws of single member district representation as it has evolved in the US. The idea of such a SMD system stems from centuries past, when local tribes and lords has to come to agreements, society was far less interconnected, and the role of parties as representatives of overarching political philosophies was hardly understood or relevant.
New sets of political questions, realities, philosophies, and priorities are reflected fluently in other parliamentary systems, or at least sets-ups that permit a multi-party landscape, by rises and falls of different parties. Including rise to power of Macron's party or Germans Green's -- but also creation of smaller right wing parties that serve as a valve for the extreme populist fringe rather than taking over an entire GOP.
In the US the collision of a tribal ancient system with a hyper-connected and ideologized society turns this country in a dream example for Duverger's law and on a hard, irreversible path of hyper-partisanship.
The fact that the current governmental system is undemocratic may be the least of our worries. The toxic blue-vs-red-team mentality, with zero flexibility for other political shades and colors, that the current constitutional system forces is pulling this country apart and into dysfunction.
2
Some good thinking here, but other solutions are at least as good as increasing the size of the House. 1. Forbid "dialing for dollars" during working hours for the Reps (creative solutions abound). 2. Pass Federal standards against gerrymandering. 3. Create - and enforce - limits on the amount of special interest contributions. 4. Subject Representatives to the exact insurance benefits their laws bequeath to all citizens.
Oh, and the one-person-one-vote equity issue really implies changing the distribution of Senators according to where and how many of those persons really are.
3
We don't need a bigger House of Representatives. We need a bigger Senate. I know it won't happen but it's time to amend the Constitution so that the number of Senators a state has reflects its population. Two could be the minimum but once the population reaches a certain number they need a number of senators that reflect their very different needs. The idea that Wyoming or North or South Dakota have the same number of Senators as California is ridiculous. Their needs and interests are not remotely the same. Cheyenne is smaller than the county seats of most middling counties in the US. How about trying to locate Pierre SD on a map--or try to get there in the winter? I have nothing against the people of states with small populations but I don't believe that they are somehow so much better than the people of larger states that they deserve to have their votes count multiple times what the people of California or other large states do.
7
We need to increase the size of the House. The proposal made by the authors of this abomination is dumber than dirt. We cannot cling to gerrymandered congressional districts whether or not we have multiple representatives and ranked choice voting within each gerrymandered district. The cube root formula proposed is an attempt to shoehorn observations into a mathematical formula. It is not a natural law. Try this out as a practical solution.
Increase the size of the House to 561 representatives. That would result in districts with populations averaging about 500,000. That would increase representation and give voters a more direct connection with their representatives in the House. That would result in congressional delegations ranging from about 74 in California, 50 in Texas, 41 in Florida and 38 in New York to single member delegations in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska and North Dakota.
It would also result in an Electoral College of 661 electors and make it more difficult for a candidate with less than a majority of the popular vote to be elected president.
Significantly increasing the number of representatives would require increasing the size of the House chamber in the Capitol Building or finding an alternative site for the House.
Drop the pretense and find a number of representatives that makes sense based round numbers and the total population
2
The Editorial Board writes, "One main takeaway: it would create a more competitive landscape, with 25 percent of seats qualifying as toss-ups, compared to just 10 percent today."
The Editorial Board hopes to reduce non-toss-ups from 90 percent to a hoped-for 75 percent. This is to be achieved by adding seats and eliminating partisan gerrymandering.
Yet a Nov 3, 2018 Editorial Board article states, "Whether or not the cynics believe it, every vote really can make a difference. An election in 2017 for a legislative seat in Newport News, Va. — a seat that happened to determine control of the state’s House of Delegates — was effectively decided by a single vote, out of more than 23,000 cast."
How could one vote make a difference in the current 90 percent non toss-ups? How can one vote make a difference in the 75 percent non toss-ups after the proposed expansion and ending of partisan gerrymandering?
Furthermore, in only very rare cases are toss-ups decided by a single Power Vote. In the vast majority to competitive elections, no Power Vote decides the outcome. Even if you cast such a decisive Power Vote for a House seat, the expansion of the House would lessen the likelihood that that politician would cast a decisive vote on key legislation within the House? The proposed reform wouldn't change the negligible chance of you vote being a Power Vote; it won't affect how voting, when your vote is not decisive, dis-empowers you.
2
Do you actually think that adding more to this broken Congress will fix things? Only term limits, 2 terms in each chamber, concurrent or not, will end our current problems. The Founders never thought for a moment that people would stay until they died. Being elected to Congress is an industry, and certainly not seen today as a civic duty to be relinquished in several years. And you folks want to expand that industry? Limited government places limits. Don't feed the beast, tame it.
6
The big problem, of course, is our archaic Constitution, held as sacred and unassailable by so many in our Country.
The LAST thing America needs is a larger, bigger Congress. The one we have now is a failed dysfunctional jingoistic disaster. The United States needs SMALLER government.
Ideally the United States needs to be broken up into separate nations. This was the idea behind the original Civil War. Hopefully we are beginning to foment another Civil War which will divide the current United States of America into separate nations once and for all.
The "Founding Fathers" were a bunch of lunatics who left subsequent generations of Americans with a completely unworkable system of government.
The present United States needs to be divided and sectioned like Europe and Asia. Britain is for the British. France is for the French. Italy is for the Italians. Etc. and Et. al. We need to go back to the original beginnings of America when New England was by and for New Englanders and its Native American Tribes. The same follows for all other sections of this land and its coasts. Let the South rise again as its own nation, etc.
The land mass as it has developed amongst the artificiality of the states is fairly easily divisible. It will not take much to divide and identify new nations amongst the various sections of the existing states. This land mass was never cut out to be "one nation" under God or any other entity.
3
I was actually working on the same idea - the only difference I came up with was that I set the ratio of representative to people at the population of the least populous state. Today that is Wyoming. So, one representative = pop of Wyoming.
Instead of throwing out the constitution, like so many intend, we should try using it as intended - i.e "Reading the directions". I know that's anathema to many Americans, but try... :)
3
I think the Senate needs to be smaller...ya know when a state like North Dakota with a population of less than one million people has as many Senators as states like California, New York, etc. with tens of millions of citizens. But that's the way, the Founding Fathers intended it to be...the rabble could have the House, but we'll still have our own House of Lords in the Senate. Same as it is now. Then maybe we'll have to look at the flaws of the Electoral College, or the many reasons Florida or Georgia can't seem to manage an effective reliable balloting/voting system anyone can trust. The game is indeed rigged, in way too many ways.
1
The proposal to increase the politicians in the House doesn't address the problem of classism, racism and sexism in Congress. The income and wealth of many politicians in Congress, as well as in the executive branch and on the SCOTUS, exceed the income and wealth of the average American. The race, ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, religious belief, education, citizenship status, work, etc., and other demographics of the rulers don't match up with America.
The article suggests the expansion would cost about the same as five Tomcats. So far the government has not made full restitution for its slave laws. Who has a better claim on its assets and income if not its victims? While responsible members of society take responsibility for the harm they cause others, government shirks its responsibility.
Perhaps the 13-memeber Editorial Board would have written a better editorial had the NYT expanded the Board by the cube root of their readers.
1
Rather than more House seats, how about creating 435 tossup congressional districts. Nonpartisan redistricting could be the answer. I think our founding fathers might be pleased.
James Madison was also the engineer of the Electoral College. By more representatives, he meant more representatives for slave states. He would not have approved of more democracy.
Having spent a couple of decades in Canada, with a UK style FPP parliamentary system, it's gradually come clear that (setting aside a ridiculous Senate of Lords anachronism) my initial biases in favor of US "checks and balances" were misguided: there's a lot to be said for an executive formed from the legislative assembly, and for having the Prime Minister and cabinet forced to run with the full House. There's much less "gridlock", a failure of legislative majority confidence triggers an election, and that disciplines both branches of government. Apart from the contemptible gerrymandering of Congressional Districts, the nearest the USA could realistically come to the mutual moderation of coordinated executive and legislative branches would be to extend House terms of office to four years and have them run with the President (that would also moderate perpetual short-run campaigning and exposure to fanatical ideological "bases"). The Opinion here seems a crude "workaround" for the current gerrymandering and over-representation of rural versus sub/urban instead of a neutral reform.
2
This is a technocratic fix to a political problem, which is that Republicans are overrepresented. It won’t be passed unless Republicans think it helps them or unless Democrats take back control. If that happens then we have the time to indulge in these silly political science seminar questions. Though actually, no, we won’t. We have a little over a decade to get serious about climate change. And I can think of numerous other issues that are far more important than whether we increase the size of the House by some fraction.
No. A bigger house would be even more ineffectual. That would make the Senate even more powerful. Rural, low population states ALREADY have too much power over our Federal Government. Dont give them even more of it.
1
and abolish the Electoral College
and Senate Seats should be based on population
The Dakotas have FOUR Senate Seats
really? This is a 21st Century Democracy?
2
Interesting idea with possible merit, however with the Senate and Electoral College so overwhelmingly stacked against the majority, why tinker with the one institution that doesn't (absent gerrymandering) absurdly favor the minority? This would not impact gerrymandering and only seems to put back into play the very body Democrats finally won just a few days ago.
Let's combine this fix with another democracy improvement: full representation for all U.S. territories. Admit Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as a single, politically combined new state. Politically merge Guam and the other Pacific territories into Hawaii. Retrocede the non-federal part of DC back to Maryland so DC has zero residents (except the White House residents, who will vote in their home state).
Let's stop leaving Americans out.
2
The population of our country has grown substantially. I think we need a second and third Harvard and MIT and so on too.
1
Growing the government in any way is wrong. We should do anything possible to shrink bureaucracy and administration. Services should be provided locally.
1
Great Caesar's Ghosts NYT folks!
The Congress-persons are already bumping into one another, and even within politcal parties they are locked in stalemates.
More we do not need. The House Chamber is already a full house of too many cards. How do we know this here in Lake Woebegon, MN? We are the only state in the union with a bicameral house and nothing worthwhile has been done in years.
1
In what in some good news for our democracy and having the people heard, the following statistics provide some hope.
Demorcats won 231 House seats - or 53% of the total.
Democrats got 53% of the total vote for the House.
1
Great idea, and while we're at it let's finally give the people of Washington, DC voting representatives. (Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands should be represented too, but at least let's start with the nation's capital!)
1
The only practical way to make this happen—while keeping it from making the rigged district problem worse—would be to begin by winning all 3 political branches, and then packing the Supreme Court—or maybe impeaching the lot of them and starting over at the same size.
So it's a nice idea, but pretty far-fetched.
This is badly needed. This and the elimination of the lock on a two-party system, which is broken.
1
The notes for the article say the expanded congressional maps were drawn by a computer algorithm. However, a person/persons must develop an algorithm (fancy word for formula or program), and his/her/their biases and instructions are built into the algorithm.
To use a decades-old computer acronym, I say GIGO. That is, Garbage In, Garbage Out. A computers is a dumb beast that will do what you tell it to do (via algorithm/program/software) and use the data and assumptions you tell it to use. If your software uses bad or biased data and assumptions, you will get bad or biased results. You can also make the algorithm/software give you the results you want by writing its programs this way or that.
I am certain that with other algorithms and data other programmers could produce any kinds of results and maps their masters call for. Using computer-generated maps and relying on the mythical infallibility of computers to justify increasing the size of the House of Representatives is really just a smokescreen to get more Democrats elected.
I am a life-long Democrat, but I have also worked with computers for 50 years, so I think it is pernicious to perpetuate the fallacy that computers are like oracles who reveal truths that are not apparent to mere humankind. Computers use data (often flawed or biased) with software (often flawed or biased) provided by humans with individual or group agendas.
Don't be fooled by computers: remember GIGO.
2
Republicans don't want us to vote in the races that exist today. How would they ever agree to expand the House? Unless of course they could find ways to gerrymander those new seats in their favor.
As a condition for the privilege of locating near Washington, have Amazon build a new much larger Capitol :_>
1
Who's to say the United States shall remain one nation? There really are at least three nations and probably five: The East, to Georgia; the West (the entire coast); South-Central with TX at the core and maybe the Central, with Chicago at its apex; and finally, the great 'emptiness' in the middle. This country is getting so big, there is little relationship between these parts and the asininely-called 'fly-over' states. NY, CA, MA et al are really tired of picking up the tab for the likes of MS, LA, AR and the many others. Balkanization can be a good thing!
This article seems full of ideas that strike me at nutty. This `cube root' rule is pseudo-mathematics at is worst. Um ... why exactly is this formula appropriate to use? And we ARE represented in smaller units of population: this is called state and local government. Finally, isn't the representation problem vastly, vastly, vastly bigger in the Senate, where, for example, someone from California has virtually no representation, while someone from North Dakota has tons more. And then there is the Electoral College to make us all wince.
1
You might be able to get that through the House, might, but not the Senate. So put this on the back burner.
Even the most basic reading of your cube root plot reveals that the oddball countries are the UK and Columbia, not the US. Percentage-wise, they are FAR more lop-sided than we are.
Since having Trump in the Oval Office is Absurdity Squared, a House that is the Cube Root of the population seems fitting.
To better represent the country, Congress must add many more seats in blue states to make up for the hoards in the cities.
America needs democracy that we preach but do not have. We have a Senate that can, on its own, block any proposed legislation, with only two votes per state regardless of population. We have an electoral college system that allows a president to be elected while trailing his closest opponent by 3 million votes. That is not democracy, it is a sick joke.
1
I have to shake my head when folks who are opposed to a popular vote for POTUS say "then the candidates would just play the game differently based upon those rules." FINE! LET THEM... See if simply "playing the game differently" would have let trump dig out of a 3 million vote hole.
2
Or we could change the electoral rules back to limiting the vote to land-owning white males. This would be very advantageous to the Republican party and makes about as much sense as many of the hair-brained ideas espoused by leftists.
2
And and we vote like it’s the 20th century
This is tantamount to stacking the deck. Nine of the 15 largest cities in the country are in California (4) and Texas (5); in those nine cities there are 6 (D) Mayors, 2 (R) Mayors and 1 (I) Mayor.
Should the voters Reps in TX and CA mean more legislatively than those in ME, NH, VT, RI?
Appears to be a plan to add more Democrats to the House.
...and let's require that half our elected representatives be women as well.
Expanding the size of the House of Representatives achieves several important outcomes. In 1911 each House Member represented 215,000 people, by 1940, when the size of the House was set permanently, the number was 280,000. Today the average is 715,000. As a result the actual ability to 'represent' is hugely diminished.
Second, as the population shifts, projections are that 80% of the population will live in 16 states. Current apportionment allows smaller less populated states to have outsize influence. (On the Senate side, it means 70% of US Senators will represent only 30% of the population) Increasing the size of the House and changing apportionment will allow much greater balance and fairness. (The Senate may require a Constitutional Amendment, but to get that requires a 15 year plan)
Third, the advocacy for ending the Electoral College is a losing cause. To pass a Constitutional Amendment is a Herculean task that takes years and, as the population is split in entrenched partisanship, the likelihood of a Constitutional Amendment is a fantasy. Expanding Congress and changing apportionment are legislative actions, and do not require a Constitutional Amendment; ultimately changing the balance of the Electoral College.
Puerto Rico and WA DC should be granted statehood. Giving four solid Democrat seats in the US Senate, granting a majority to get many of these things accomplished.
1
I believe the best way to make the house more effective is to elect better candidates, not elect more ineffective candidates.
How many times in the last 10 years has the congress passed a budget? Maybe start there.
The main problem is in the electoral college where most states]except Maine and Nebraska] use a winner take all algorithm for allocating electoral votes.
Under the present system if in a given state a candidate has a plurality [ no matter how large or small] of the popular vote in that state that candidate receives ALL of that state's electoral votes.
What should be done is that if candidate X receives XX% of that state's popular vote then X should be awarded XX% of the state's electoral vote.
In 2016 Trump won by very narrow margins the popular vote in each of Pa., Wisc., and Mich., but all of the electoral votes from these states.
The equal representation [the same number of senators per state] according to Article 5 of the Constitution can not be changed by amendment unless the state losing representation agrees.
The smaller states will not agree.
Forget that idea.
Expanding the House does not solve any specific problem. At best each representative would represent 500,000 people rather than 700,000. So, they would not be that much closer to the voters. That is about all you get from expanding the House.
And things like multi-member districts and ranked choice voting have almost no support in this country. Ranked choice voting is incomprehensible to 99.9% of the citizenry. People like primaries and general elections. That system makes it clear who you are voting for. And how many people are demanding multi-member districts? Pretty much zero.
I agree that better representation of The People's interest requires adding more members to Congress, both in the House and in the Senate.
How to do it and have Congress more effective, however, is not an easy lift.
With the number of representatives currently at 435, we have seen a distinct inability of the House perform in any sort of meaningful way. It is just too large and too unwieldy. Even adding another 220 members wouldn't solve the problems of productivity that we now see.
There is, however, a solution available in the Senate...Split stats with large populations into new states. California and New York are prime candidates of carving up, with number of senators increasing by two from each new state.
To get my full support of that sort of solution, however, I would insist upon a repeal of the portions of the 17th Amendment that provided for the selection of senators by the state legislature.
If we are going to be stuck with politicians who see living off the taxpayer for is entire working life with the specter of a truly generous pension on the horizon, we should at least be putting politicians in office who have demonstrated the abilities needed to navigate their home state's political structure; people who know how to get things done in the political environment.
We really don't want a Senate that is just an exclusive versions of the mob-like House.
The Senate is by far the larger problem. The founding fathers, in their concern for large states wielding outsize influence over the small ones, could not have envisioned that there would someday be nearly two dozen US cities who population exceeds that of the state of Wyoming, sometimes by many times, or that there would be nearly 20 states whose total population adds up to one other's. The Senate runs on tyranny by the minority. I won't even get into the problems of an Electoral College created to assuage slaveowners, which allowed 70,000 people in 3 states to put in office a President who lost the popular vote by millions. As much as this country would hate to admit it, we have a broken system of government.
2
As the author points out, expanding the number of house seats by passing a bill is attractive in that it would mitigate the current imbalance in the House and Electoral College without having to change the Constitution. That said, I'm not sure complicated math based on what Denmark is doing is the best way to sell it to America's heartland. The so called "Wyoming rule", which would base Congressional representation on that of the least populated district in the country--currently the state of Wyoming--would add roughly 110 house seats, and electors. This would reduce, although by no means eliminate, the outside influence of smaller, rural states, and been seen as fair by the majority of Americans.
THANK YOU, NYT Editorial Board!!!
I've been posting comments about this issue for years, but everyone is too focused on the Electoral College debacles to consider that the real problem might be further upstream.
Most people seem to think 435 is actually in the Constitution. It is not, but the EC is. It's a lot easier to repeal a Congressional Act than amend the Constitution, so strategically, reforming the House, not the EC should be out focus.
Further, eliminating the EC would equalize ONLY presidential elections. It would do nothing to equalize Congressional representation, which has just as big an effect on our governance and governmental oversight, which often goes unnoticed.
If the UK can handle a 650-member House, why can't we? Minority rule cannot sustain lasting self-government.
1
Interesting - with many pros and cons. The biggest pro, in my opinion, would be that House representatives would actually have a chance to do their jobs, serving far fewer people more personally. Can you imagine a Congressperson *listening* to constituents at frequent town halls because it is realistic to do that with a reasonable size constituency. Many of us would enjoy that!
Yes, certainly one approach to the unbalanced representation in the House. Or draw politically fair and balanced districts that do not have to stay within state boundaries in order to equalize the populations for each representative. Yes, this would result in some very very large geographical districts, but the importance is in balancing the population represented by each congressperson. In general, however done, it's past time for the House members to better represent the population's wishes, not a representation from the early 29th century.
1
The greatest opposition to this will come from big money whose influence would diminish with a larger house, and from know-nothings who automatically oppose anything sensible. While we are at it, I think the 2 senators per state rationale is past its expiration date and we should add 1 additional senator for mid-sized states and 2 additional senators for the largest states. Then decide the Presidential election based on a majority of all voters, doing away with the electoral college. All wishful thinking in this day and age.
I agree with the premise here. However, the district that would encompass the northern portion of Salt Lake County would probably become a fairly safe seat for Democrats (Salt Lake City is very liberal, for example). And the seat that represents rough the Treasure Valley in Idaho would be a toss-up district in which Democrats had a better than fair chance of winning.
There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a well researched answer to a vexing problem. This cube root idea has legs. But as long as we’re tinkering here, we also need to consider that the electoral college has outlived its usefulness. Interesting that the current house number was set in 1911 and it was in the same era that we arrived at direct election of senators. Time to up date voting by removing the electoral college while we’re at it.
2
Denis, I know this is a popular idea, but amending the Constitution is historically very, very difficult. Except for two relating to salaries and line of succession, the last major amendment passed was 50 years ago, the 26th, extending the franchise to 18-year-olds, in the upheavals over Vietnam. Before that were the Civil Rights amendments of the early 60's.
The Equal Rights Amendment, which simply prohibits gender-based discrimination, was proposed in 1923, revived in 1971, and has still not been ratified.
https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/history
There are numerous problems with our system, but increasing the number of parliamentarians is not a solution. You could just as easily suggest redistributing Senate seats according to population. Other countries in the world have hundreds more members of their parliaments than the US does. Better government is not the result. We are in a period of major social and political change. Bot changes in attitude and in political organization (such as objective redistricting) could help move things forward, but in the end our system depends on the wisdom and sense of responsibility of its chosen representatives. As our current mess makes clear, this factor has been sadly missing at least since the Gingrich takeover in 1994. Your examples are stillborn because they seem always to lead to additional Democratic representatives. Ever since the Snowden disgrace several years ago, the Times desire to pursue social engineering has led to half baked ideas which do us no good.
2
Fortson, the Senate allocation is Constitutionally mandated. The House is not. And, yes, the reallocation would currently favor Democrats, because they currently cast many more votes than Republicans, but still do not receive majority representation. The Constitution enshrines a majority-rule system in the House, not that Republicans and Democrats share power equally regardless of numbers, or that Republicans are entitled to majority rule with a minority of votes. It will get worse as our population continues its increasing shift into cities and suburbs.
The real "social engineering" is a system that takes House votes away from population centers and transfers them to rural voters. Total or near-total minority rule is incompatible with a stable, functional self-government, a fact now playing out before our very eyes.
2
Such an expansion would mean crowding in the House chamber such that all the desks will need to be rebuilt 25% narrower. This could be a win if it convinces their occupants to legislate against airlines' continual narrowing of coach seating.
3
I like your humor, but I've heard this raised as an actual argument. If you watch CPAN broadcast British Parliament proceedings, they use tiered galleries of bench seats to accommodate their 650 members. They seem fine keeping their [full-sized] desks n their private offices.
"The room is too small!" is an absurd argument for depriving large swathes of America of an equal voice in their government. The Constitution does not mandate that Congress meet in a particular room, nor that each member get a desk. For heaven's sake, they could cast votes in any modestly sized conference center. Is that too great a burden for our republic?
Adding seats would increase representation of city populations and is problematic. Just as in states such as California where the big cities swallow disproportionate amounts of resources, the increased representation for cities would place disproportionate burden on rural tax payers. The "fly over state" bias would be enhanced. I'm not sure how to fix this except maybe with elected officials who are at concerned at least as much for statewide issues as they are for their own district.
This is a huge country when compared to most others in the world. As the population continues to increase, we will struggle with solutions. My hope is that going forward it will be a civil struggle, expressed with eloquent debate and not finger pointing from the extreme minority who live in the very small opposite tails of the bell curve.
Rural areas already have too much influence and representation. Farmers and corporations are the largest benefactor of welfare in the country.
1
Very interesting. But in the end, you don’t make your case. Regarding the issue of representation it seems like that could be accomplished via redistributing the number we have. Use that computational power to end gerrymandering. (A slight increase due to admission of DC and Puerto Rico as states could be easily accommodated.) And you dismiss the issue of cumbersomeness far too lightly. Jammed committee meetings with more representatives droning on for hours? No thanks.
And, if you want to talk about one person one vote the only place to go is the Senate. The upper house is utterly unrepresentative, far beyond what the Founders could have imagined. It’s long past time to give the bottom ten states in population one Senator, and distribute the rest to the top ten. Wyoming would still have an outrageous electoral advantage compared to New York, but not enough, hopefully, to so badly skew the nation’s governance.
2
Delaware, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Hawaii might quibble about giving up their Senators. But, if it were for the good of California and New York, I'm sure Bernie and Mazie would patriotically do the right thing. I'll bet Biden would have gladly foregone his decades of Senatorial misrepresentation for a military career.
Successful reorganization of any kind depends on the party with the structural advantage at the time (currently Republicans, but historically also Democrats) to agree to give up their advantage in the name of fair play. Whether this NYT plan or some other reasonable alternative is offered, what are the chances that Mitch McConnell will let it get to the floor?
2
The Editorial Board makes the assumption that most Americans are interested in their government, its workings and require additional congressmen in order to be heard and represented. I would tend to agree if the facts supported it. However, with only 56 percent of eligible voters casting ballots in any election, the need's not there. The real issue is how are the American people going to be better served by more congressmen? If we add an additional 50 congressmen and that's good, wouldn't 85 be even better? Me thinks that the whole idea behind adding more congressmen is to dilute the congressional pool with the intent of giving political advantage to one political party over the other. That sounds about right and it's underhanded.
2
Certainly, if enacted, this would be a boon for the Airlines. How many billions of dollars will it take to expand the US Capitol?
Does more representatives equate to more representation?
Would expanding the House further diminish the changes that Washington DC or Puerto Rico receive any legitimate representation?
I agree with the idea that Congress should be "the Peoples House", however another approach is needed to make it happen. This simple change to the campaign finance laws would help tremendously - only citizens with the ability to vote for the candidate can make a campaign contribution. I think a 2 term limit for all elective offices as it is for the president would help too. Further, benefits for members of congress should be the same as those for our active military.
4
Term limits are a good idea but I would limit it to 12 years - so that senators and representatives can spend the same amount of time in congress.
3
I do agree that the House has too few members, for the population. I also agree that there needs to be a compromise size. The cube root of the population certainly does the job. It takes into account population growth., which the Constitution, and Congress never factored in.
What would be helpful here is to take the 2018 election results, and based on votes in the new districts, to see which political party this would favor. Also, if such a plan can be implemented, then redistricting should be done at the federal level, with a non-partisan commission. In many of the countries mentioned, politicians do not handle drawing district lines.
The Colorado example, still reflects the current state politics; "purple". Though, Arizona diffuses the Latino population, which is one of its fastest growing populations. Ir skews the state almost all Republican.
Finally, if this is done, it should be a constitutional amendment, and included in that, term limits for the House and Senate. The main reason for the country divisions is not too few representatives, but too many career politicians the Concept of the "People's House" does not exit, unless "people" are multi-millionaires, which is less than 1% of the population.
2
The complex set of checks and balances in our democracy was set up to avoid government by mob rule . Filtering population preferences thru a national system that gives a "some" leverage to regional interests has provided endurance and equity to our system, as well as avoiding the chaos that can result from a pure headcount, such as squabbling over close elections.
2
Septickal, the "mob rule" argument is nonsense. Headcount was represented proportionately until 1911. Was 140 years of our history "mob rule"? That very expression "mob rule" was coined 2500 YEARS AGO to describe Athens, the first rudimentary democracy in the world. It resembles ours the way a bronze-tipped spear resembles an armed drone.
What you describe, equalizing regional interests, is why we have the SENATE. The House was intended to represent people, not regions. Did you even read the article? The Founders clearly intended proportionate majority rule there, with "headcount" equally represented. Why else would they mandate a decennial census?
And please explain to me why you think the equal votes of Californians and New Yorkers would be "mob rule" but the over-vote of Wyoming would not?
The inequities are worsening with a huge ongoing population shift away from rural areas into denser ones. We now have a 70% of Senators representing only 18% of citizens, a House where Republicans can dominate even when Democrats cast far more ballots, and a President who lost the popular vote by a whopping 3M, and won the EC by just 70,000 in three states.
If you think there's "squabbling" now, it'll get a whole lot worse if a minority of citizens can exercise absolute power over the majority, particularly those who pay most in federal taxes and take the least. Uncompromising minority rule is incompatible with stability, not an aid to it.
2
Evidently you haven't been following recent events. We have recounts in at least six contest as we speak. As for equity, when has that ever existed in America?
Why do y'all insist on picking on Wyoming? Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Hawaii never get mentioned. Why is that? It's surely not because those states are comfortably Blue, is it? And, this minority thing y'all carp about all the time. Nobody received a majority of the popular vote in 2016. Nobody. Clinton would have represented an "uncompromising minority" had she had a campaign instead of a rock star tour of wealthy donors. Furthermore, Democrats represent only about 1 in 5 Americans. What gives y'all the right to Minority Rule?
How about not counting non-citizens when apportioning seats? Only citizens should matter for this analysis.
8
Not only should we revise the 435 limit, it should be revised every 25 years. Every 10 years is too frequent in this day and age; 50 year changes are too slow. If the nation could actually agree on something, we could apply other methods to keep the size under some (whatever) level. Every 100 years, we could address the whatever level.
1
I'd actually like to see fewer representatives and term limits.
3
I'd rather see the definition of what constitutes a majority from 50 + 1 to 53 percent, and there Speaker of the House, not necessarily the Majority Leader in the Senate, should be elected by 60 percent. Both changes would require compromise and moderation, which is the implied goal of broadening the number of seats as discussed here. A larger congress does not solve the representation problem. If we figured out a way to have Gallup Poll or Pew Research conduct policy polls, and their findings were factored into the legislative process, there would be real change. As things stand now, Congress is required to get the analysis and "approval" from the GAO before proceeding funding legislation.
This doesn't compute. A house member currently represents something like 500,000 voters. The Times proposes a change that would reduce this to 330,000 voters (rough math). I simply don't think this makes a significant enough impact to justify expanding a body that already does nothing except bleed the American public through through corruption, big expense, accounts, pensions, and premium healthcare. I'd much rather see the effort go into the implementation of party-neutral districting using academically developed algorithms. More of something that doesn't work is not the solution.
4
This would be one piece in a larger solution--combined with its ramifications for the electoral college--that aims to make American democracy actually a *representative* democracy, which it is not right now. To this we would need:
- The Senate numbers should also be tied to the population of each state. This should involve an expansion of the Senate, not a redistribution of the current 100 seats.
- Campaign finance reform--a cap on the amount of money any campaign can raise. All power to Beto for raising $70 million, but imagine if we spent that money on other areas of the economy or, shock horror, something that lifts up the less fortunate in American society? e.g. affordable housing programs, vocational training, scholarships, etc.
- Automatic voter registration in all states and a fine for not voting (see Australia as a prime example where turnout is regularly 75-90%)
- Voter education programs. Non-partisan programs federally mandated in every school and pushed very hard for adults. Focus would be on how to understand policy proposals, political news stories and debates (e.g. the logic of arguments), the different philosophies undergirding each party, and political history (not just a recitation of the Presidents, etc.).
Of course, none of this will happen, because it's America. The current Congress, party aside, is too self-interested to expand the House or Senate, let alone campaign finance reform. Republicans would demonize any kind of voter education.
1
"All power to Beto for raising $70 million"
Uh huh. Progressive money is pure as the driven snow. It's that ugly money that nationalists raise that is destroying democrazy.
Uh hum.
I agree that congress should be more representative of the people they represent and much of the problem is related to the fundraising the corrupts the attention to the actual people and not just fundraisers and fundraising. Perhaps the solution would lie in rather than expanding government, provide a requirement for congressmen to behave responsibly to citizens in their district via citizen based initiatives and referendums. It would be easier to put these on the ballot and bypass the sitting legislators and also save the costs of 150+ more useless politicians doing the bidding of their patrons.
2
This idea has popped up many times in my memory. If the Congress ever gets around to acting on it, I think it would make sense to index by percentages the House membership to census data, rather than legislating a specific number. (This wouldn't affect the current numbers, but would obviate their becoming outdated again when the population expands.) If the House doubles in size, of course, Pennsylvania Avenue likely would be HOBbled by a new office building, maybe forcing the VA to relocate.
I completely disagree. The government is too big now. Adding more seats will balloon the budget for all the new career politicians and their staff. ( Entourage )
1
What America needs is to revise the 435 limit in the house and change the apportionment so that an equal number of people are represented by each electoral vote in each state. That would repair the current out of balance electoral college where low population states have an outsized effect on the outcome.
1
If the original framers of the constitution envisioned a representative for 30000 citizens, then the Heritage Society should support 11000 representatives. While new office space will be necessary, we now have the electronic technologies to make this work.
My main criticism of this article is framing it in a partisan way. For me the main argument for expanding the numbers is keeping the federal government within reach of each citizen and their concerns.
2
America not only needs a bigger House, but it needs to move to a parliamentary democracy instead of a Senate and Electoral College that have given us two disastrous minority Presidents since the start of the 21st century, two ultra-conservative Supreme Court justices, one frivolous major war, a Great Recession, tax cuts for the benefit of the wealthy and a Senate that continously distorts the meaning of the word "democracy." If we had a parliament we'd have new Democratic government being formed, an end to the human degradation of Trumpism, expanded health care, immigration reform, gun safety regulation and many other policies overwhelming favored by "we, the people." So, while you're at expand the House, eliminate the antiquated Senate and the Electoral College as the dysfunctional organs that a robust 21st century democracy no longer needs.
3
@Paul Wortman: 100% agree. The framers allowed two mechanisms for changing the constitution, amendments and a constitutional convention. They are there to be used. Parliamentary systems do have some problems with frequent elections and the need for coalitions, but I think these very factors allow the government to be more responsible to the electorate. Our electoral system causes third parties to swing elections in unintended ways (e.g. Nader). In parliamentary systems, the minor parties can use their votes to participate in coalitions. Time for a change.
1
There is no way this makes sense. That is like adding more lanes to highways that are quickly filled up with gridlocked cars just like the highways before it was expanded. We need public campaign finance (no private money at all), an end to any sweetheart deals for people in power who suddenly "win" at every lame investment, and real time enforcement of corruption rules in all three branches (people with high clearances agree to be watched and so should Congress, the White House, and the Judiciary). Adding more people to a totally broken system is like dumping kerosene on a house fire.
2
It will never happen n today's political climate. The parties could never agree on what the number should be, let alone how to draw the map. And only a few would entertain giving up any constituents to another representative.
1
Bigger is not necessarily better. What America needs is a truly democratic form of government. That means getting rid of the Electoral College, apportioning Senate seats based on population density, and electing our lawmakers by popular vote. Mandatory voting, as in Australia, would help, as would campaign finance reform, outlawing all forms of voter suppression, redrawing gerrymandered districts, eliminating lobbyists and enacting stiffer ethics controls to root out corruption and conflicts of interest in the legislative and executive branches.
4
I couldn't agree more with all your suggestions. But in our polarized environment these ideas would never be implementd. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it's going to be a long hard slog......
Let me suggest that at least some of the (I presume) underlying assumptions you have may be a tad off.
First, you presume that our elected representatives are aware of us voters. I live in bright red Indiana - as a Democrat I'm nearly invisible.
Second, the assumption is that representatives are of good conscience. They don't appear to be.
What might help is having representatives collectively be for the entire state, as seems to be the case with Wyoming and Montana. In that way, if a state has ten congressmen/women the top ten vote-getters would be elected. If nothing else that would remove the value of gerrymandering.
And lastly, overturn Citizens United. The Supreme Court ought to hang its head in shame for that one. Or if that can't be done limit the maximum donation that a "person" can make. Maybe a maximum of 25 dollars, some number that approaches the average individual political donation. At least in that way, my voice would be as loud as the next person.
1
Of course. I am one of about 700,000 constituents represented by my congressperson, can you imagine ? I did receive an invitation from him for a sit-down, but that was only because I contributed a non-trivial sum to his campaign. Personal contact with one's representative is dictated by money. Will increasing the size of the House change that ? We won't know in this millennium, as Congress has become intractable. Change is no longer an option.
1
There is more pressing business, frankly.
Far more harmful to representative government are the Senate (and the Connecticut Compromise) and the electoral college. House reform is distinctly a second tier issue compared to the Senate and electoral college. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, the largest state had 10x the population of the smallest state; today it is about 70x. The (mostly) big box states - with so much acreage and so few people - should as a first step pool two senators - instead of a Wyoming being represented at the same level as a California.
I'd support the idea, at least in theory, if we also support redistricting reform, which aligned the state's districts with its voters. No gerrymander for either party.
And I'd support it if we outlawed the practice of spending any in session time soliciting donors on paid time. No telemarketing, 8 hours of actual work per day. Imagine how much more connected to us they'd be if they disconnected from the donor phone.
But I really do not want to pay for another 158 telemarketers, elected by carefully engineered minorities. Since I have become more cynical in my later years, I'd have to say adding another 158 members would be an expensive losing proposition.
I agree with Times Editorial Board that American desperately needs an expanded House of Representatives. It too believe this would make the nation more democratic and representative of the will of the majority and less the victim of the tyranny of the minority that we are saddled with today. America also needs a greatly expanded Supreme Court, a much larger and reflective tribunal of learned jurists reflecting the greater diversity of America today and tomorrow rather than yesterday.
What America really needs is infrastructure, and a new version of the Fairness Doctrine. The divisions between red and blue fall along the same lines of infrastructure. We have regions of haves and have nots in this nation. So as people flee rural areas to find jobs and cities engorge with a huge influx of people it is physically divisive.
When media have not requirement to be fair and balanced, they often just pick a side and spew out some gossip. That exacerbates all existing divisions.
These problems are solvable, we know because America has solved them before.
Interesting article, but I think the Senate also needs new membership rules. Why should Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas have the same number of senators as CA, FL, NY, and TX? And lets eliminate the Electoral College completely while we're at it. The Senate should have a base of two members per state, but grow proportionately with the population. Finally there should be term limits on both houses of congress.
1
What we need to do is re-think the Senate. Currently, the principle of 'one person one vote' is trampled on. I am hardly an expert, but if I remember my civics classes, the Civil War was fought so that the national interest would prevail over the rights of states. North Dakota has the population of the East Village, yet it sends two senators to Washington. Rather than expand the House, perhaps we need to shrink the Senate: for example, 2 senators from both Dakotas. One from Montana. Doing so might reduce the need to eliminate the electoral college, and go with a popular vote for president.
1
I'll be curious to see part two. For a long time I shared the conviction that the House needed to be expanded. However, given the technologies available for drawing districts in a partisan way, I fear that smaller districts will lead to even more importance of primaries and consequently yet more polarization. In short, this could cause us to lose the middle.
Congressman preside over a $4T budget and we pay them ~$200k per year. Even with all the other trappings of office, this is a paltry amount. We get what we pay for. Any businessman with comparable financial responsibility is paid millions. Heads of major charities make more - Red Cross for example.
To get to one representative for every 50k people will take a house of ~5000 people. It strikes me that this will lead to other problems. Adding a few hundred congressman won't make a significant difference, but it would be very nice to feel I have a congressman who might actually have time to listen.
Or is there another alternative? Direct, town-hall democracy instead of representative. Not only is the number of reps. a problem but so is their integrity. We didn't have the technology in 1789, but we do now. The public airwaves, internet etc., could have debates under the direction of a board selected like jurors. We could keep reps but they would have little actual power. The power would rest with the public---we could call it government by the people, or, democracy. We could vote on war, education, healthcare, minimum or maximum wages, even climate change. People might even get interested in their government...but who am I kidding---this is just a dream some of us had. Like the dream of abolition, suffrage or gay rights.
1
How about 1500 seats Each district would be small enough that "nearly" anybody could run and term limits would dis-empower lobbyist $. Might even be able to have more than 2 parties, or EVEN non partisan independents that can follow their common sense rather than the party bosses.
I completely agree with the opinion piece. However as an outside observer it seems such a faint hope that a political system, so resistant to change, would ever make such dramatic changes like increasing representation so substantially and especially changing the voting system (part 2).
Probably, any change would be gradual with a dozen or so new representatives coming in every 2 years. The problem I would forsee with such a change is that the political lines may be redrawn to give political advantage.
The 1st step for America is to put a non-politically neutral body in charge of managing elections. It is abhorrent that districts can be gerrymandered to suit a political parties, and that this is just 'part of the process'. More so that it seems controversial to count every vote.
The electoral college is also not fit for purpose. For a nationwide, 1 person 1 vote, winner takes all election - not to simply have a 'most votes wins' system is completely undemocratic. And it's easy to say that, yes Gore would have won in 2000 and Clinton in 2016... but of course the campaigns would be completely different. Every vote would count and every town, country and state would suddenly become a battlefield.
3
I have been looking at this problem for a while now and I agree with the basic premise of increasing the number in House. Our bicameral system was never meant to work with such anemic numbers int the House. However, increasing the house size by 158 seats absolutely will not fly. I've talked to a lot of people, and the majority treat the whole idea with disdain. They are all stuck in the 435 paradigm.
However, I think the solution is a moderate increase and to change the math. Allocating seats using the process of Equal Proportions is overly complicated, flawed and weighted to favor smaller states: dump it. Allocating seats is not rocket science it's simple. Using a simple excel spread sheet you begin by calculating the percentage of each state's population of the whole US population. You then use those percentages to calculate the states's allocation of seats in the house starting with a house size of 435. You slowly add seats in the house until Montana has 2 seats. Round up or down using the mathematical mean (.5). Using 2017 population stats I come up with a house number of 466. (will be a few more by 2020) Everyone should be happy. Even spread of reps. No states loses a seat so the 8 states who are slated to lose a seat in 2021 will certainly vote for it. States picking up seats will get a few more. They'll vote for it. (probably) California will gain seats instead of remain at 53; they'll vote for it. And everyone might just buy a paltry 31 seat increase.
1
And while we're wishing for things, the Senate should be elected at-large from the entire nation. That way it would continue to serve its tempering function but without today's wretchedly uneven representation. And, of course, get rid of the Electoral College; the President should be directly elected by popular vote.
2
To abolish the Electoral College would need a constitutional amendment, and could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population.
Instead, state legislation, The National Popular Vote bill is 64% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
It simply requires enacting states with 270 electoral votes to award them according to the nationwide, rather than the statewide, popular vote.
All voters would be valued equally in presidential elections, no matter where they live.
4
Excellent idea. Also, Kevin Cummins earlier suggestion of apportioning Senators, similar to Representatives but by state and not by district, is much more workable than a national at-large election. Without some more-even representation the Senate would have to become an advisory body with no legislative power.
Another way to increase popular representation is simply to take the Republicans at their word: Less federal government; more State autonomy. Keep the tax money and power in the states. The Blue states, which pay most of the taxes, and get fewer benefits compared to the Red states, can keep their money to spend it as they want. The Red states can go their own way. People who don't like living in the Red states, can go live in the Blue states, and vice versa. States' Rights actually benefits the Blue states.
3
The GOP follows a very simple principle: less people voting, better it is for them. The Senate, which is definitely not a "democratic" body, clearly shows the power of "land-voting" rather than people voting. So long as this is an advantage for them, they will block any possibility of "equal" representation.
Always wanting to change the rules, editorial board. Why not just propose that Dems learn to win in the areas of the country that count and that Republicans keep winning. Expand SCOTUS because conservatives have majority? Expand Congress because Repubs exert influence over vast geographic areas in country with smaller populations? Just learn to win, instead.
5
Amen. It also dilutes lobbyist power to some extent.
3
It would be simpler to combine states into blocks with similar-sized populations. This would help equalize representation between urban and rural areas.
2
this has got to be a joke. i note the article does not discuss how congress actually functions--it doesn't. members don't care what their constituents want. they are responsive only to donors and their party leaders. all we need are a few hundred more do-nothing representatives, complete with outrageously high salaries, bloated staffs, ridiculous perks like subsidized gyms and barber shops, and solid-gold health-care and retirement plans. that way we can have a more expensive legislative body to pass only laws required by their campaign contributors.
5
See the UK Parliament which has far more members per capita and is far less corrupt.
1
As an ex-staffer, I find this the kind of idea a publisher and editorial board or a political scientist might think good, but not someone with practical experience. Cube roots - gimme a break! Some arguments make little sense - that lesser populous districts will lead to less lobbyist influence? - So our state legislatures must be paragons of citizen-driven legislation. That a bigger house would offset the less representative Senate? if so enlarged and encumbered, the House would be weaker in conference committees and more easily manipulated. As others here have pointed out, the core problem for our democracy is the Senate, where, driven by demographic change, by mid-century, 30% of voters will be electing 70% of Senators. This Times proposal is a best a palliative. I understand the Times prefers not to have to take on the Constitution, the Senate will need to be addressed to avoid a Constitutional crisis, and it only can done by the citizenry since the institutions cannot reform themselves. As for second choice voting, perhaps, but check out PNG, which has it. OK, Australia. Arranging deck chairs is not what's needed.
4
Being an ex staffer does not make your vision any clearer. Some State Houses are far less corrupt than the House.
1
Re: America Needs a Bigger House of Representatives, I agree and propose a different number and format. The number of House Seats should double to 870 by establishing a “Majority Rep” and “Minority Rep “ within each existing district. Each district would retain one total vote, and it would be pro-rated between two candidates with largest vote totals. If district vote went 65/35, then the Majority Rep vote is worth .65 and the Minority Rep vote is .35. In some districts, GOP would be Majority Rep and Dems would be Majority in others, both being somewhat restrained by their Minority Rep. This structure provides these benefits: 1.More incentive to vote as everyone’s vote will actually count. 2. The aggregate in the House will more closely represent “We, the People” with gerrymandering effect largely neutralized, as packing districts will offset. 3.Losers in new structure? Those outside the consensus, clever electoral mapmakers , ‘safe seats’, and dark money .
The logic sounds good, but there is a reason why a typical committee should strike a balance between having enough involved to brainstorm good idesa, yet not too many to discuss and meld the good ideas into a final position. This is why you don't put 600 people in a room and design a car. The result probably would not work very well.
See UK Parliament. 650 MPs. Case closed.
Absolutely, adding more house members is a better way to better representation. Just not getting much done the way it is now and what is needed is more fingerpointing across the aisle to break the log jam. Am fairly confident that there is ample lobby $$$ to double the size of both the house and senate.
The Senate is a far bigger problem. According to some figures published by Statista (The Statistics Portal) The top 5 states in population by 2040 will have a population of approximately 151,667,298 people (CA,TX,Fl.NY,PA)) and the 5 smallest states (VT,WY,AL,ND,RI) will have a population of just 4.262.905. Thus the smallest states will control cabinet positions and Supreme Court appointments unfairly for all time. I think this is a far bigger problem.
9
Indeed. There will need to be Constitutional Amendments or the country will be unworkable.
1
If Democrats ever get back the whole congress and presidency (which may never happen again) the first order of business should be a raft of reforms to safeguard democracy itself. Health care can take a place in line. It will probably be the last chance short of a constitutional convention, which the Republicans would be happy to go for seeing as how they would handily hijack it. Not only should Democrats create the plans for this coup in detail, they should advertise it. And indeed the Senate is the larger problem. The simplest solution is to make more states. Divide up the blue states and admit some PR and DC. Then use that larger, bluer Senate to do the rest. Without that nothing else will happen.
Absolutely along with the electoral college the Senate needs to be no longer.
Both are antiquated holdovers meant to appease slave states.
Amen.
After the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Senate is the least democratic branch of our divided limited power constitutional republic of united states. Followed by the President of the United States. In the beginning the Founding fathers intended that only white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men who owned property were divinely naturally created equal with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And the only representative that they directly voted for and elected was their member of the House.
1
The basic idea is a good one, but not if districts are as extremely gerrymandered as too many are now.
How about weighted legislative voting? That is, the legislators don't have equal votes in the chamber, their votes are weighted by the population they represent. Senate votes could be weighted by the population of the state, and House votes could be weighted by the number of votes the representative was elected by.
My concern is not so much the House, but the Senate. I believe if anything is to change within our legislative branch it is more crucial to recalibrate our Senate seats to be in harmony with and more representative of each state. Think about it...we in California only have 2 Senators while less populated states, e.g., Montana have the same number. It borders on the unfair, especially when we are forced to endure this present paradigm, a GOP majority which is spineless, questionably ethical, and lusts over the green-back dollar.
This is a Republic after all. And just as our Electoral College and House are archaic, so is the Senate. However, the reality is no matter how we rethink what would be better for this particularly increasingly diverse nation, I do not imagine any change will happen soon. For this present generation, the "old ways" are too entrenched in its ideologies. But there is always the young adults of today. They seem to get our nation better than we.
4
This is not a bad idea and it is not revolutionary. For example, Canada expands the number of seats in the lower house of parliament with every census so that the numerical relationship between a member of parliament and the number of people he or she represents remains roughly the same.
However, any plan will also have to figure out a way to stop the ruthless gerrymandering that has destroyed democracy in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere. There is no way in the world that the five GOP justices of the Supreme Court will ever do anything about gerrymandering that favors the GOP.
1
Not to make an essential change to the House any more complicated, but how about getting rid of gerrymandering as well?
1
I fear that you lost all but the most erudite when you talked about the "cube root" - even college graduates.
Yet another in the apparently never-ending litany of feeble diversions to try to evade reality: Even with massive PR, huge campaign fund-raising, and by the worst US president ever to run against, the moribund Democratic Party cannot even come close to winning the American heartland. Instead of examining why that is, here comes yet another preposterous constitutional amendment fantasy.
For those who slept through American government and history classes in high school, to amend the US Constitution requires a two thirds approval from each house of Congress and a majority vote from three quarters of state legislatures. In other words, a huge swath of national and state Republican politicians and of legislators in smaller states would have to vote yes for an amendment plainly design to reduce their political power. Of course nothing like that has ever happened in US history (except, one might say, for the three amendments passed during the Civil War and Reconstruction) and probably never will.
Why even suggest such a non-starter?
Simple. The imperative for the do-nothing Democratic establishment is to find any excuse at all, any straw to clutch at..to avoid having to discuss why most states refuse to vote Democratic, even with the Republicans led by a dishonest, corrupt, bigoted, shamefully arrogant, and profoundly incompetent wrecking ball president in the White House.
1
The reality is that more Americans voted for Dem Senators, Dem Reps and a Dem president, and got none of them. America is ruled by a fanatical minority.
The real proportionality problem in the US is the senate. There are other ways to tinker with the House without increasing its number yet making it fairer. These include a computer algorithm that would overlay a rectangular grid on each state and allow that grid to be shrunk, magnified, rotated or shifted until the right number of congressional districts were laid on the state map with approximately equal populations. This method would render gerrymandering an anachronism. It would require adoption by all of the states individually or a federal constitutional amendment, but since it has no obvious political affect such an amendment might pass.
But the Senate makeup distorts the electoral college and the makeup of the Supreme Court. Without attacking the Senate's unequal distribution of power between the largest and the smallest states, no change in the makeup of the House is likely to have more than a cosmetic affect. I do concede that increasing the size of the House would begin to address the Senate inequality in the electoral college, but it would do nothing to help change the makeup of the Supreme Court to be more reflective of the Nation as a whole.
1
I am not buying the argument that we need more representatives because of an increase in population size. The politicians of today are able to use technological advances to communicate with and monitor the wants and needs of their constituents more effectively than ever before. More does not equate with better.
Having more districts would obviously lead to more isolated populations of voters, and thus, more extreme candidates would be able to be elected. The second largest political party in The Netherlands is now the Party for Freedom, an extreme right-wing nationalist party. Not exactly what I am looking for in our government right now.
Underrepresentation is an unfortunately necessary check on mob rule. Power corrupts even the best intentioned. Hyperpartisanship, money in politics, and a decaying culture more tolerant of crassness are the issues bringing our nation down.
I commend the editors' focus on improving government rather than a blatant politically motivated stunt. However, despite the seemingly even-handed graphics, this interesting proposal seems like an ill-advised attempt by the justifiably frustrated editors to gain majority rule for their favored party.
This is a good start whether using the cube root formula or some other method. But the problem is money in politics. If the money keeps flowing to politicians the way it is now, then over time, it matters little if the number of reps is large or small.
The country needs to get itself educated about the definition of free speech -whether corporate money is free speech or not. It will take leadership to provide this education. We do not currently have such leadership. If a strong public opinion forms that corporate money is not equal to the voice of the people then the Supreme court will come around to interpreting the Constitution this way rather than what it has done recently in the Citizens United case. The SC follows public opinion and also forms it. Knowing that public will not accept the equation of money with free speech the SC will back away or reverse. In the current political climate, we cannot expect the SC or the Congress to take the lead. A leader has to take the lead. I do not see a leader with character to reshape the public mind on the horizon right now. But things have to get worse before they get better.
This NYT suggestion should be welcomed.
1
Forget the House. Let's start our tinkering with with the Supreme Court. Why should a (rural) minority of the US population be empowered to set the rules for the (urban) majority?
1
Thank-you NYT editorial board for making this case so easy to understand and facts to back up this reasonable suggestion. How do we get Congress to act on this? We need better representation in the halls of our government.
1
The senate is the much bigger problem. Two senators represent less than 600,000 people in Wyoming, while two senators represent approximately 40 million in California.
4
Apparently the NYT wrote this because the House adjustment is not constitutionally prohibited, thus making it low hanging fruit. This, despite the fact that it would equate to mere tinkering around the edges when the real inequities lie in the Senate. How many functional democracies have jurisdictions as under-represented as California and as over-represented as Wyoming?
1
A more representative Senate by population should be the first order of business. Two Senators for Wyoming population 574,000 vs. two Senators for California population 39 million; two Senators for North Dakota population 755,000 vs. two Senators New York population 19.85 million is not equitable...
1
You forgot the senate when you came up with cube root. Alaska has the same clout in the senate as California or Texas; talk about distortion. In fact Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Vermont are the states that have only one representative in the House or Representatives, but have two senators. The seven largest states are California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Georgia. An easy way to balance this distortion would be to grant these seven three senators. Another way would be to have only one senator for those seven low population states. Look the national legislature represents people, not rocks and trees.
America needs a democracy for the people.
Democracy is all about the wishes and will of the people but the presidential election is not rooted in democracy where the majority of votes wins.
The Senate seats must reflect the number of people/voters in the state,
and not have small States with a few million people and have 2 Senate sears,
and California with nearly 40 million people only have 2 Senate seats.
The House of Representatives should be larger to reflect the diversity of America, and not just white old men.
America needs a democracy for the 21st century.
#Has America the courage to change?
4
You couldn't find a bigger backer for the idea of expanding the number of seats in the House except...
Some contend that Article the First - the original amendment to set a proportion between the number of citizens and the number of seats in our House of Representatives at 30,000 to 1 - actually was passed by the ninth state, Connecticut, in 1790. See the case of LaVergne v. Bryson, an attempt to get this ratified but un-enacted amendment recognized.
Growing the House to 593 seats would barely require a change in our current practice. Whereas, growing the House even larger...2,000, 6,000 or even the Article the First target of 11,000 would require we re-think our concepts of the complete role of a representative. C/Would they all have staffs and offices in D.C.? No. C/Would they all need to be physically present to make a quorum? No. C/Would they each serve on a committee? No. C/Would they all get pensions? No. C/Would they all have staffs and offices in D.C.? No. C/Would they all need to be physically present to make a quorum? No. C/Should every congressman be due lifetime healthcare and a pension? No.
The op-ed sells the American people short because it presumes the roles of power, fundraising, constituent services and all the rest of it would essentially remain unchanged. How could that be?
Lastly, the Grumman F-14 has not been in U.S service since 2006. It is most seen today in 'Top Gun' re-runs. Don't use out-of-date references to make your points.
Going back to the founders original plan. I'm not good at math. That would be 11,000 Representative's? Where would those qualified and williing to do the job be found? Going from 750,000 to 500,000 seems more like a numbers game. What would be right number be? If it ain't broke fix it until is?
Most people wishing "fix" the Electoral College and the Senate want to do so to rig the system for their candidates. If they controlled both Houses and the Presidency they might be pleased as punch with things staying the same. I think the founders saw this coming and made the Constitution purposely difficult to amend.
>>> "I think the founders saw this coming and made the Constitution purposely difficult to amend."
Fortunately, for those of us who would like to fix this situation (it is definitely broken), no constitutional amendment is necessary, as the Constitution only requires that the number of representative not *exceed* one per 30K population. A simple majority vote of Congress is all that's required.
1
I meant a constitutional amendment to fix the electoral college and senate. How would changing the numbers from 435 to five and change solve anything. Look at the charts. If my party wants to get rid of Trump the could find a viable candidate. Not O'Rourke and Cortez.
Well, I don't know what to tell you if you think a progressive Democrat who comes within 2.5 points or so, in Texas, isn't a viable candidate.
And expanding the House, as suggested, would be a move toward solving the problem of unbalanced representation and under-representation. That seems a worthy goal, to me.
The problem with seeking a constitutional amendment to change apportionment for the Senate and the EC is that you'd have to secure the approval of states and populations who are over-represented under the current arrangement. Unlikely.
1
To those who argue that the Senate is un-democratic, that is a feature, not a bug.
Let's review a little US history, with the basic concept of independent states forming a union. The founders then desired some significant degree of autonomy for States, as do many people now who see their favorite agenda advanced at least locally. By design, the Senate is a body that represents the interests of States, not the collective population across the country.
So unless you wish for (or already think) that States are just boxes on the map with funny slogans, or wish for a monolithic government and society, then States with some degree of autonomy still have importance. And they deserve equal representation at the federal level.
1
There's already a much better solution for that, and it's called the tenth amendment and the _State_ Legislature. "Tenth Amendment - Reserved Powers. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
1
Nonsense. The founders could not have anticipated that we would one day have fully formed, mature states with some having 500k in population and some having 36M. They were trying to encourage frontier states, particularly in the west, to join the union by assuring them an equal voice in the formation of said union and its makeup. It's an archaic, antiquated, and pointless situation at this point. And one could argue destructive.
1
What we need is a representative Senate. It is bizarre that a state with less than a million people can be represented by 2 senators, while a state with 30 million has the same number. There is no fairness whatsoever that way. That's why there's a packed supreme court for as long as the eye and mind can see. It's just plain wrong.
2
Umm.... You do understand the protection of minority, right? And this is why we have the House.
Rather than just scream it's wrong, understand why it is the way it is. And once done, if you have a suggestion offer it. Otherwise, you may come off as someone not too versed in our Constitution or basic civics.
Our own previous representative, in a very safe district, was lousy. Would this fix that? For example, though we contacted his office several times, we never ever received a reply. On the other hand, the office of our senior senator (Murray), who represents many more folks, has helpfully responded to each and every one of our queries. Is this typical?
I see. The greater granularity of having more representatives (along with getting rid of gerrymandering), would result in (a) a larger number of competitive districts, (b) districts that are more similar in size, (c) a fairer Electoral College, (d) (sometimes) more safer districts, and (e) possible a tighter connection between representative and constituent. Simply getting rid of gerrymandering could fix some but not most of this.
The Trump Republicans are the principal beneficiaries of the unfairness. Why would they want to give that up? Why would their rich donors want to give it up? It has given them tax cuts, essentially zero punishment for corporate wrongdoers, etc. What would it take to make them want to go along? They do not value our vital democratic institutions and traditions. They have aggressively pursued the disenfranchisement of voters. The present scheme permits them to be fundamentally dishonest, e.g., promising populist programs but delivering policies that help only the very rich.
2
I do not understand all these people who seem to think one type of reform precludes another. It's not as though a genie showed up and said "you are allowed one wish to change exactly one part of the governance of the United States."
1
You picked the wrong issue. The problem is not the House, it's the Senate and thereby, the Electoral College. One Senator represents anywhere from 15 million Americans to one-fiftieth of that number. It is undemocratic. If there is ever a new constitutional convention, the top priority should be the Senate.
2
Rescinding the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 doesn't require a constitutional convention, merely a majority of the House and the Senate. It would go a long way toward diluting the power of the small states in the electoral college as well as making yhe House more representative of the people. Unlike fixing the Senate, getting rid of this outdated 1929 law is quite achievable.
California has already joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which would direct its electors to vote for the popular vote winner once enough states have joined making the EC moot without a constitutional convention as well.
5
"You picked the wrong issue."
Why is there only one right issue? Seems to me this article makes legitimate suggestions for constitutional reform that does not preclude anything you are talking about.
No matter what any speculative new number of members of the House may turn out to be, unless the Electoral College is abolished, there will never be a one-man, one-vote equivalency during a presidential election. The adherence to 2 senators per state assures the rural states will always have an outsized say in the ultimate contest.
2
You seem to have overlooked the sentence describing how Electoral College votes are apportioned - by the number of house representatives, nothing to do with the Senate. Also, if we could get just a few more states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact then those electoral college votes will be distributed by percentage of the vote. For every state, if one person won 60% of the vote, she would get 60% of the electors, and vice versa. This would go a long, long way towards democratizing our presidential elections without needing a constitutional convention.
It would be easier to get small states to agree to that than for them to agree to senators being apportioned by population, and would greatly decrease the disproportionate power that the rural minority has over the urban/suburban majority.
By replacing state laws, without changing anything in the Constitution, the National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the majority of Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency, to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by replacing state winner-take-all laws for awarding electoral votes in the enacting states.
Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps of predictable outcomes. There would no longer be a handful of 'battleground' states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in 38+ states that now are just 'spectators' and ignored after the conventions.
The National Popular Vote bill would take effect when enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—270 of 538.
All of the presidential electors from the enacting states will be supporters of the presidential candidate receiving the most popular votes among all 50 states (and DC)—thereby guaranteeing that candidate with an Electoral College majority.
Sorry, Krispi, there is also one Electoral College vote for each senator. Do the math.
1
We don't even have representation for the whole country yet. One would think statehood and actual Congressional representation for DC would be a higher priority than adding representatives for extant states.
It might be worth a broader discussion of representation in the halls of government(s). Counting up, I find that I've got seven folks representing me. Two county supervisors (one district, one at-large), one state delegate (lower house), one state senator, one congressman, and two senators. And these folks all interact with each other to make sure I get what I want (or not!). Too much, too little? Where's our academic community to help us sort this out.
1
Sure, we could increase the number of Representatives, and make them both more accountable and connected to their districts. But this still does not address the issue of having only two entrenched parties. If we want to make some significant, if not radical change, how about intra-state elections that would award Representative seats based on proportional voting, and give us some third (and fourth or fifth) party representation?
2
A larger house would be better. But it doesn't solve a problem that where people sleep at night is a horrible way to divvy up representation.
On a given day in the Denver metro area today, people will often have a home in one congressional district, do their shopping and dining in a second, while work in a third. I am sure that this is the same for most cities where the vast majority of Americans live.
The self-segregation of sleeping, both by desire and economic necessity, leads to the packing of votes of dense sleeping areas, while those who live in less dense areas get cracked into being combined with true rural voters who have very different interests. No one ever divides up the inner city, unless they have to, but a suburban city or county often gets divided all in the search for competitive versus representative.
Further, it often leads to poor representation for any sort of minorities because if the only intersectionality is where you sleep, it will not represent the vast majority of your identity unless you self segregate into a sleeping ghetto. Let's face the fact that Congressional districts don't support integration, they don't support diversity, and they do support extremism.
They don't represent you or your dreams, they don't represent your waking life, we just sleepwalk towards a poorer almost democracy.
A fair point, which also highlights Americans' obsession with not sleeping in the same place that they work and/or play.
We Americans are very proud that Democracy was born in America, the cradle of Democracy. But it is very sad that we are still in the cradle and refuse to outgrow it. But just look at the other real Democracies in other parts of the world who were inspired by America. They evolved to make their government truly representative. But we got stunted not growing up, the representation staying in the 1920's!
I agree with your main point, but remember that even the "birth of democracy" thing is a significant exaggeration. I mean, the United States revolted from the United Kingdom, which already had a Parliament.
During the 1920's and 30's the Europeans with their more democratic mullti party sytems were at each throats giving their people the choice of Fascism and Communism. To much Democracy perhaps?
While we have our wish list out. How about doing away with the Electoral college. Let’s banish the EC to the dustbin of history where it can cause no more harm to US.
Is there any logical basis to the so-called "cube root law". The points shown on the chart don't even seem to fit the curve very well, looking at Poland, Turkey and the UK (and a bunch of other unlabeled points).
I think they fit the curve passably, but to your point, so do we. We're below the exact curve, but we're in the ballpark. It's not like we're at half like Colombia is. I don't know how well-accepted this "cube-root law" is, and in any case there's no clear reason why we should accept an extrapolation out from the smaller countries to a population of 300M+.
In the end, it's an opinion piece. I came to the comments specifically to hear opposing views. I think the most enticing point this piece made is that it would shift some power back from lobbyists to the voters. Lobbyist money gets spread more thinly, while individual votes become slightly less insignificant.
In other words, we don't like the outcome, so let's change the rules.
2
You seem to think you just made some sort of knock out point, but why? Why shouldn't the rules be changed if it is not producing the results of justice and equal representation. You are aware "the rules" have been changed plenty of times before, right? The United States Constitution has had 27 amendments.
1
The First seat we should add is to upgrade Eleanor Holmes Norton from Delegate to voting Representative. D.C. needs representation. They pay taxes!
4
"States that are already underrepresented in Congress have a weaker voice in choosing the president, again violating the principle that each citizen should have an equal vote.”
We currently count all residents to determine how many congressional seats to assign to a state, and to divide a state into congressional districts. Citizens who live in districts with lots of undocumented residents have more influence at the polls than those who live in districts with no or few undocumented residents. This violates "the principle that each citizens should have an equal vote".
If the undocumented were not counted, then each district would be composed of the same number of citizens and each one of them would have an equal vote.
When it comes to determining the number of congressional seats to assign to each state, and to drawing district lines, the undocumented should not be counted.
2
Some manner of reform seems more necessary than ever - a reformed House as proposed here; a Senate that is more proportional to population and not state boundaries could help as well as abolition of the electoral college. But in the current political climate, well-thought-out, reasoned reform seems less likely than ever.
1
It is absolutely time to expand the House to be more representative. However, we also need to make changes to the Senate, which is extremely unrepresentative. At some point, we are going to have to amend the Constitution to make the Senate more representative.
We could keep the base level of two Senators per state, but then add one Senator for each five million people in the state. Under that system, California, with a population of 39 million, would get an additional seven Senators, for a total of nine. (And if/when the population hits 40 million, California would get one more Senator.) New York, with approximately 20 million people, would get an additional four Senators, for a total of six.
Smaller states, like North and South Dakota and Wyoming would still have two Senators each, so there is still a counter-majoritarian effect. But it isn't nearly as extreme. And most states would get at least one additional Senator, which would make it easier to get the amendment passed through 38 states. (And no states would lose a Senator.) The hard part will be getting this measure passed through the Senate. It may take a number of years, but the people can eventually win.
4
The real problem with American democracy is something barely hinted at in the article: The cost of elections is so high that members of Congress must spend a significant amount (a majority?) of their time raising money for their next campaign from wealthy donors. The need for so much money means our elected officials have little time or interest in the needs of constituents who don't write them large checks. That effectively puts wealthy donors in the position of controlling shareholders in United States, Inc. And they naturally expect the best return on investment.
No matter how you jigger the number of members, the districts, or the voting scheme, the fact remains that our elected officials disproportionately represent the wealthy donors whose investments allow them to obtain and retain their offices. That's the reason our ostensible representatives so often take positions and pass legislation at odds with the interests of the people who voted for them. Our democracy is, in practice, a "one dollar, one vote" plutocracy.
Without a major change to campaign finance practices, adding more House members or other adjustments to the electoral process will only change the details of how donors invest their money. We need to free our representatives from the treadmill of fundraising, so they can represent all their constituents instead of just the wealthiest. Only then should we make further adjustments to make Congress represent the American people as equitably as possible.
8
I've thought a lot about the structural reforms we could make to repair our democracy. Expanding the House is absolutely one of the biggest. So is abolishing the electoral college. Giving full representation to citizens of overseas territories and the District of Columbia is another. As important as any of these - more so, given its influence on the judiciary - is reforming the Senate. I would give one senator to each state and territory and add another Senator for every additional two million people past the first two million in each. Ranked choice voting would be one of my reforms, and, critically, all House districts would be drawn to be compact and follow existing natural boundaries.
To this, I would add an amendment giving all citizens the right to vote, for free and by mail, and to have their votes counted. It would be revocable for high treason alone.
Another amendment would say that, while an individual human has the right to organize, to petition their government, to attempt to convince their fellow citizens - they have zero right to pay another to do this on their behalf. You can meet with your representative - but you have no constitutional right to pay a lobbyist to do it for you. You can craft the most eloquent argument for a candidate that your talents allow - but you have no constitutional right to hire an ad agency. You can organize your fellow citizens into a group to support a ballot measure - but you have no right to hire professional canvassers.
1
In your Monday piece on ranked choice, add in non-partisan primaries. These two together would mean centrist candidates would be most likely to win, and all districts could potentially be tossups.
4
In California, with non-partisan primaries, we often have members of the same party running against each other in the general elections. Be careful what you wish for.
To abolish the Electoral College would need a constitutional amendment, and could be stopped by states with as little as 3% of the U.S. population.
Instead, state legislation, The National Popular Vote bill is 64% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
It simply requires enacting states with 270 electoral votes to award them according to the nationwide, rather than the statewide, popular vote.
All voters would be valued equally in presidential elections, no matter where they live.
Candidates, as in other elections, would allocate their time, money, polling, organizing, and ad buys roughly in proportion to the population
Every vote, everywhere, for every candidate, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election.
I agree. But what the US really needs is a representative Senate, just as the senates in all the states (except Nebr., which doesn't have one) are representative. The exception would be that each state would get at least one Senator. This would require a constitutional amendment, and therefore probably decades of jawboning, but in the long run I think it is the only thing that will save the great American experiment .
2
What might make American democracy better is not to add to the House of Representatives but to have independent state commissions draw the electoral boundaries of congressional districts. It isn't likely to happen but the obvious gerrymandering of both parties would create districts of simplicity and fairness.
1
While we are at it -
could we make the terms for the House of Representatives
last 3 years with 1/3rd of the House Elected every year.
[ They barely get elected and they have to start fundraising. ]
Then make the terms for the Senate 4 years with 1/4th of the Senate
elected every year.
Then make the President eligible for one term of 5 years.
While we are at, limit Federal Judges to 12 years
and divide up the 9th Federal Circuit - talk about a relic from the Past.
1
Excellent op-ed. It echoes what I've been saying and arguing with friends and family members for years. This country is operating under an artificial law of scarcity. Whether it's House seats, court appointments, or re-apportionment at census time, we're a 21st century country acting as though it's still 1787 and the wolf of disunion is at the door. Expanding the House would be a great step in reducing this sense of "Ohio got more than Maryland, but Maryland has better and smarter people!" whine. One quibble with the op-ed: the F-14 was retired over a decade ago. A better plane metaphor would have been either an F-22 of an F-35.
1
This editorial leaves out a major population center: the District of Columbia. The District has a larger population than either Wyoming or Vermont yet its citizens have no representation at all in Congress. The District sends one delegate to the House of Representatives, but she has no vote. No one represents the District in the Senate despite that there are over 100,000 more people in the District than there are in Wyoming. So when the Senate votes to confirm or deny confirmation of Supreme Court nominations, Wyoming and other sparsely populated states get 2 votes each while the District's citizens have no voice at all.. The demographics are also telling. While the percentages of women in Wyoming and in the District are comparable, the African American population in the district is nearly 50%; in Wyoming it is 1.3%. Gee, could this have something to do with the refusal of Congress to grant the District representation commensurate with its population?
41
Linda,
DC is not a State and never will be a State.
Let the residents of DC opt to either be citizens of Maryland or Virginia.
1
The most important reform, and the simplest to explain and understand, is statehood for DC, which has more people than Vermont or Wyoming, and no voting representation in Congress at all.
16
DC is an artificial construct as an entity created by contributions of land from Virginia and Maryland. Back in 1846, Virginia took its part back in a retrocession (present day Arlington County). If the people of DC want to be represented, they should have a similar retrocession back to Maryland - NOT be created as another state or given representation in the House.
3
Puerto Rico should also get statehood. There are more than 3.3 million people living there who have no voting representation in Washington D.C. And the results of that lack of statehood become obvious when Puerto Rico is hit by a major hurricane, and then neglected.
4
More correctly progressives want a larger house, nobody else does. This country needs less federal government, not more. Reduce and combine many of the departments that deal with internal issues, and send responsibility to the states. In many cases there is already a duplication of effort, states have laws just like the feds. Stop spending on government and release these employees to the private sector, thus eliminating the idea we need more employees from foreign countries.
3
America does not need a bigger house or a bigger government. As it is our national debt is rising over the 20 trillion following the Bush Obama years. What we need is houses for the homeless that are already in America and increasing even before caravans and refugees get housed. I am disappointed that the Trump administration has been unable to cut the budgets across all the Departments and pay down the debt. With the number of natural disasters that have been occurring, FEMA is most likely underfunded.
If Europe wants to defend themselves fine, America's involvement in the world that began with world war I which ended 100 years ago has progressively increased. It is never too late to drastically reduce funding for the misadventure around the world and closing wars in the middle east and Afghanistan. We need governing by direct representation of individual Americans through online referendums. For example, if we the people want to end all wars forever as the Armistice was supposed to be then if majority of Americans want to vote to end all wars and expect the government to do so then the government should abide by the people's expectations. If we the people would like national debt reduction a top priority then we should be able to get it. If we the people want meaningful tax cuts not crumbs as Pelsosi describes it then we should get it by direct votes for policies and action without the highly paid middle persons who misrepresent us and just follow their party leaders.
5
Perhaps a fist step would be for each district to have a population no larger than the smallest state - Wyoming's 500K or so. For 2020 that gets you to something above 600 states and would generally mean that each vote cast in a House election has equal value.
2
The number of representatives should be set at a ratio of the smallest state population with Wyoming having 1 representative for 579,000. This would be a simpler way to make the house more representative.
10
The cube root is a Pareto curve. If I were analyzing this graph from a business perspective, I would obviously start asking questions why the US and the UK were so far from the norm. Statistically speaking, these countries are extremely abnormal. It would appear the UK is drastically overstaffed while the US is tragically understaffed. Budgets would necessarily realign accordingly.
However, I find politics described as a Pareto curve is a shocking revelation. The theory makes perfect sense. I'm not exactly comfortable with the implications though. In short, Kevin Bass is describing a natural system where the minority of political inputs determines the majority of political outcomes. You may have heard of the 80/20 rule. That's a Pareto curve. What Bass is saying is the US is an outlier in that less than 20 percent of the population determines more than 80 percent of our political outcomes. Consider this though: Even if the US were "normal" only 20 percent of the population would determine 80 percent of our political outcomes.
Food for thought.
5
Should consider term limits for House Representatives, IMO. 6 terms total (whether back to back or scattered).
Breaks up the cronyism.
2 terms for the senate is enough, too.
4
Why not make the House 600 representatives ?
Nice even number.
As for the Electoral College
If you let each Congressional District's Electoral Vote go to
whomever won that District and then
let the Two Senatorial Electoral Votes go to
whomever won the State
then you would have an improved Electoral College.
Can the New York Times find out how the Electoral College Vote
would have gone under those conditions ?
1
The Senate is really the legislative body that needs to be expanded. Wyoming has one senator per 275K persons, while California has one senator per 20 million persons. Sixty two senators represent about 25% of the US population (smaller and more rural states), while thirty eight senators represent the remaining 75% of the population. The populous states are wildly underrepresented, while the rural, low population states are wildly over-represented.
The Senate has unique responsibilities, such as the approval of federal judges and cabinet members. Rural areas are generally more conservative that urban areas. The disparate representation has resulted in the appointment of conservative judges totally at odds with the the lifestyles and mores of the majority of the US population. This problem is only getting worse.
There are at least two solutions to the problem. One is to abolish the Senate (good luck with that) The other is to decrease the number of Senators from the least populous states, and increase the number of Senators from the most populous states, so that the population is represented more equally in the senate.
4
Though the House of Representatives can be bigger, the Senate is the least representative of the nation as a whole and its decisions affect, among other things, Supreme Court appointments and, of course, the president's cabinet.
It is absurd that the more populous states--California, New York and Texas among them--get the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming. No disrespect to Wyoming or Vermont or other states, but it is ridiculous that these less populous states have a disproportionately greater impact on critical appointments that affect the entire population than the more populous states.
While we are at it, let's get rid of the electoral college. Please!
5
"No taxation without representation."
Recall: that was the rallying cry in 1776.
Th american citizen has not been adequately represented for at least 40 years.
High time that imbalance was fixed. Perhaps we can refuse to pay our taxes since our Constitutional right is being violated.
Where in the constitution do you find that quote? Same as some that appear nowhere in the actual constitution. How about we just return to the Articles of Confederation with a national defense only at the federal level?
1
That system was tried and failed miserably.
"The software considers population, contiguity, and compactness, among other factors, but the results may not pass muster with laws governing representation, such as the Voting Rights Act."
With smaller districts of more regular shape, there may be less need for that aspect of the Voting Rights Act, because people would automatically be grouped in smaller, more representative districts. It is a testable fact question how small we must get to eliminate the problem of dis-empowering chosen voters.
3
While we are expanding the House (good idea!), we need to add two more seats in the Senate: specifically for the District of Columbia. Our nation's capital has 703,608 citizens who pay taxes and serve in the armed forces but have no Senators. Compare this to Wyoming (pop. 573,720) and Vermont (pop. 623,608), each of which has two senators and a member of the House with full voting privileges. DC has one representative in the House who has limited voting privileges. In effect, the citizens of our nation's capital are subject to taxation without representation. Can you imagine citizens of London, Paris, Berlin or Tokyo accepting that? In the past, when this issue was given slight consideration, Republicans said that DC (largely Democratic) should be represented by Maryland senators while Democrats said that DC should be represented by Virginia senators. This was just a ploy on both sides to condition the impact of additional Democratic citizens on politics. In fact, Washingtonians have their own needs and issues and deserve to have full representation. If I lived there I would start a campaign to not pay any federal taxes until DC got two Senators and a voting representative. By the way, since 2017, the DC license plate bears the slogan "End Taxation Without Representation." What are we waiting for?
7
How would more districts result in better representation?
Compared to 1911, representatives have skype, email, YouTube, C-SPAN, and Twitter to reach and hear back from constituents. They also have commercial air to facilitate face-to-face communication with voters. Representatives today are closer to voters than ever before.
As for the problem of varying district size, more districts won't solve that. You'll still need to fit 593 districts into 50 states. There will always be districts that vary from the average as lawmakers attempt to protect incumbents while presenting rationality to voters. The problem of irregularly sized districts exists at every level of government where population is the determining factor in district size.
More majority-minority districts will not serve America well. The fundamental tribalism that underlies the Supreme Court's implementation of the Voting Rights Act is what's causing political polarization. It assumes that minority races vote as blocks that will never assimilate and never attract voters outside their own races or ethnicities. Attempts to build consensus around issues like health care, economic growth, and education will always fail until the Supreme Court stops literally dividing us on race.
1
The bigger issue is that Washington DC has no representation and the total mismatch in the senate with the small states like Wyoming and Vermont having less population that Washington DC which is not represented and having less than 1/50th of the population of California. This lopsided power in the selection of the Supreme Court and decisions on other key legislation is no longer acceptable. Finally, a simple approach could at least make the President represent the majority. All states, or at least those controlling 270 electoral votes, could pledge their votes in the Electoral College to the Presidential candidate with majority of votes. No wonder people lose faith in our Republic system that is more and more moving away from the essence of a democracy.
1
We need a different kind of representation, more along the lines of a European parliament where other parties are represented....there are many independent voters but almost no other parties represented in Congress. Our system is a sham, it is not a democracy.
4
Correct we are a Republic, not a Democracy. Why folks don't know this always is a great question.
2
Democratic republic. Leaders make decisions for the people and the people choose the leaders. In China, leaders also make decisions for the people, but Chinese Communist Party chooses the leaders.
Making any changes along these lines will be nearly meaningless until the voting age population votes at say 85% or more. Or we make voting mandatory and make it a holiday. Only when an actual super-majority of voting-age citizens vote do you get representation.
4
US House should also extend terms to 4 years with one third subject to election similar to the way the Senate staggers terms. Initially, give current members an automatic 4 year term and determine the expiration dates by lottery by state.
Thank you, Editorial Board!
Expansion of the House is a concept I've been advocating for a long time, often in these comments sections, and it is long overdue.
I do think the Editorial Board is too meek in their proposal - a House of 5000 members would be much more representative, dynamic and, yes, even chaotic. That would be about 60,000 citizens per representative. Most neighborhoods in places like NYC would have their own Representative as would small town. And, for rural areas, you would have just a few counties needed to make a district, not whole states such now for Wyoming and Montana.
Further, there is little to no reason in our modern age for the national legislature to be seated in one place, that is Washington DC. Hearings, meetings, etc. could all be done via teleconferencing and/or on line. Thus, Representatives (and Senators) could work from their district/state, that is staying more in touch with their constituents everyday. Think how many more may run for office!
Both the House and Senate could assemble for one month out of the year, rotating from one arena to another around the country.
Would it be spectacle of democracy? Hopefully. May it be a carnival of chaos? At first, likely.
But, I can't imaging a traveling House of 5000 members could be any worse than the ossified and moribund body we now have in DC. And, such an expansion would definitely make the House as well as the Electoral College more representative of the will of the people.
6
Truly an expanded House would be more democratic, but the most serious problem is the Senate. Designed as a compromise in the 18th century to give power to smaller states to get them to agree to the Constitution, the Senate will soon have 16 senators representing 80% of the population; conversely, 84 senators will represent 20% of the population -- mostly the vast spaces of the West and tiny states like Vermont.
Election to the Senate was originally left to state legislatures as a brake on the more populist house. That was so blatantly undemocratic that it was amended in 1911 after about 20 years of protest to allow for the direct election of senators.
Large and medium states by population are now at the legislative mercy of empty and small states. Though currently the advantage is to Republicans, the problem is not party but the 18th century structure of the Senate. Even if Democrats became the preferred party of rural areas, the anti-democratic distortion would remain.
3
A question on my mind: what is the physical capacity of the space where the House meets? It does have to be large enough to accommodate both Houses of Congress, if nothing else for the State of the Union address. Is there enough space for 138 more members?
1
A well maybe point - but are we to be ossified in the way we run our government merely to pay homage to an antiquated building constructed over 100 years ago?
See my post for a recommendation that representatives and senators work from their district/state and convene only one month per year, traveling from arena to arena around the country. Now, that would be dynamic democracy!
I wonder about all of the infrastructure in Washington -- not only the congressional staff but also the staff of the committees on which they sit. Sure, nearly everything could be done over the Internet, but there's an important element of meeting people face-to-face. And how would committee hearings work?
Something that never gets taught in civics classes is how a bill actually gets written. Certainly it's not written by the members themselves. Staff is a major part of the process, but lawyers are involved and a lot also comes from lobbyists. I can only guess how this really works, and I've never seen anything written about it.
1
Dear Editorial Board,
A larger House may be in the best interest of the country, but I doubt it will decrease the acrimony between the two parties. I would like to see the Board advocate for any of the following:
• term limits for members of Congress
• if the first option is unpalatable, then repeal the 22nd Amendment
• members of the House and Senate sit as delegations by state and not by party
1
I did not include this in my primary argument, because it is a distraction, but this sure feels like a "sneaky" way to tilt the Electoral College in favor of Democrats, since Republicans tend to do better in most small states. This essentially guarantees that it has no chance of actually happening with bipartisan support, unless there is a third Senator added from each state to compensate.
More seats would make the Electoral College more fair, and is a far more elegant and wise remedy than a national popular vote . We seem to have lots of trouble precisely counting votes and keeping elections secure.
Congressional seats, however, are primarily for making Congress work well, not for weighting the Electoral College. If one party makes the former happen, odds are it will have no trouble overcoming the distortions introduced by the latter.
2
@Alan: The Electoral College is "tilted" the way it is only because both parties in 48 states have enacted "winner-take-all" laws for the state's electoral votes. "Winner-take-all" is not mentioned in the Constitution. If both parties weren't so consumed with power in Washington this could be more easily solved.
7
Winner-take-all maximizes the influence of a state. Since the state sets the rules, they have every incentive to choose this.
This is one of many problems with a national popular vote. When the states set the rules, there is every incentive for a state to distort the results in the presidential election. One can imagine a "pre-election" to determine which one candidate gets on the ballot, resulting in a unanimous vote in the official election. Many more subtle games are possible. There is just no reason to work through all the many issues that this would entail just to get rid of the Electoral College - especially since we have already realized the worst possible outcomes of the EC in the 2000 and 2016 elections. If these two awful presidents have not taught voters a lasting lesson, a mathematical tweak to the system will not save us.
@Alan: "Winner-take-all maximizes the influence of a state. Since the state sets the rules, they have every incentive to choose this."
But it takes two political parties to make that happen, right? There may have been a few exceptions, but both Dems and Repubs see the advantage of "winner-take-all". Electors were supposed to apolitical free agents who could best determine the state's interests over some big-mouth politician who talked a good game but was essentially a con man (sound familiar)?
"There is just no reason to work through all the many issues that this would entail just to get rid of the Electoral College - especially since we have already realized the worst possible outcomes of the EC in the 2000 and 2016 elections."
If we didn't have "winner-take-all" in 48 states, we might have had different outcomes in one or both elections.
What America truly needs are more political options to better accommodate its growing proportion of ‘independent’ voters. There’s a reason why people choose not to align with the two parties which currently fail to
represent our 330 million citizens. Such disparity will likely intensify
as our nation’s future population grows in numbers and diversity.
Also, let’s abolish the electoral college which is little more than political affirmative action that created the very problems it was designed to prevent—small concentrations of people and special interests wielding influence on elections.
15
Independents (actually, I am unaffiliated) are generally moderate voters who are forgotten in the current two party system. We get to choose from the "left overs" of the bitter partisan primary feuding. We are often relegated to going into the voting booths and holding our noses while we vote for the lesser of two evils.
8
While I think a bigger House of Representatives is a good idea, I think a bigger problem is in the Senate. There, we are approaching a situation where 70% of the people will be represented by 30% of the Senate and 30% of the people will be represente by 70% of the Senate.
This is obviously undemocratic.
One solution might be to allow a house vote of 70% or more majority trump any resolution from the Senate.
For all practical purposes, the House of Lords is nothing more than a figment of history in England. Eventually the Senate is likely to go the same way.
4
@Tim Kane: "While I think a bigger House of Representatives is a good idea, I think a bigger problem is in the Senate. There, we are approaching a situation where 70% of the people will be represented by 30% of the Senate and 30% of the people will be represente by 70% of the Senate. This is obviously undemocratic."
There is a two-house legislature for a reason. Larger (more populous) states have a bigger voice in the House. Smaller states have EQUAL say in the Senate, regardless of population. Unless you think more populous states should have their way in both houses of Congress, this is the best solution.
7
" Unless you think more populous states should have their way in both houses of Congress, this is the best solution." The problem is you're thinking about it in terms of states, not people. The government is a body of people elected by people to provide for people. States are not people. If states somehow become sentient and decide to form their own government, sure they can elect each other to congress. But I don't see how an actual state is going to vote in such a congress - they are a geographic region, not a sentient being. On the other hand, in our congress, people vote, not states. And those people should represent other people, in proportion. One person, one vote. Not one state, one vote.
1
"The problem is you're thinking about it in terms of states, not people."
You are thinking about it in terms of individuals, rather than as regions full of people with differing interests and views. There is a need to protect the minority, and minority interests and views. It is not all about total empowerment of the majority. That is especially so because our larger states are also opinion leaders, and tend to get far out ahead of the rest of us.
5
I'm always frustrated about Alaska being forgotten. We also have only 1 US Representative, and have about 739,000 people, putting us in between Montana and Wyoming.
2
Possibly a good idea, but I doubt it would change "divides" much once settling has set in.
And prior or part of doing so, a non-partisan method of delineating districts is a much more pressing matter. (Use mathematicians, demographers, statisticians, engineers, surveyors, etc to set the lines - never let the party in power do that job).
Another pressing issue is the low population states with 2 senators having outsized representation in the Senate. One way would be to admit Puerto Rico to statehood. It has a population more than large enough. The GOP hates this idea because of the 2 senators that would likely lean blue and of course even more seats in the house likely to lean blue.
We should have a drastically larger House. Thanks to technology voting can be done remotely, as can debates and committee meetings. Make it a part-time job again with a per diem and a small travel budget, and cut the staffs drastically.
Congress spends too much time as it is naming post offices and engaging in worthless special order speeches and one-minutes. They can get the work done in far less time and concentrate on constituent services.
Convert the existing offices into residence halls where they must stay while in DC when necessary. Lobbyists will have hard time influencing that many members. Campaigns will be local or even hyperlocal.
Citizen politicians. What a concept. Given how poorly DC works, what do we have to lose?
1
It need not be so high tech or remote. The House already functions by committees and caucus, to manage numbers. That could expand quite effectively.
I agree with a larger House. But I'd also like to suggest that we need to think about the Senate too. The "big empty states" have far too much power in the Senate.
4
Just to toss out an idea for an algorithm for discussion. Have the number of senators equal to the number of representatives but with a maximum "cap" of two.
If we have another hundred or more people qualified to and interested in serving competently and ethically in Congress, I would much rather they replace some of the current officials than making more seats to appoint them. Senator Menendez of NJ and Representative King of IA won their seats again, which says a lot about the status quo.
The most difficult and compelling issue of the day seems to be global warming. As the name implies, it needs officials thinking about big systems, large scale and the needs of a wide range of Americans, rather than more staunchly and effectively defending NIMBYism and other narrow interests. Secondarily, more seats will likely lead to more and more effective gerrymandering.
In some settings, quantity simply cannot substitute for quality.
I would argue for doubling the number of representatives. The only reason for the 593 is that it fits a cube root formula. Doubling knocks the house district population from about 700k people to 350k. The constitution had it set as 60k.
1
Diminishing returns on actual representation and the effect of that representative on legislation at some point...
Per the founders rule there would be over 5000 congress critters in the House alone ... far too many.
1
No. We need a smaller one. The house is too big and responsibility defused. Each representative should be responsive to more, not fewer people.
Better yet, arrange the house around regions instead of states (yes it's a constitution problem) and bring the number down to a manageable number responsible to a larger population and that can be kept track of by the people.
The notion is that every citizen should have access to his or her representative. It's pretty much impossible at present. Your suggestion makes it worse.
Further, it would likely empower the smaller population seats even more than they are now with 2 senators regardless of population or economic contribution. (And yes, that means federal taxes too ... which mainly come from the coasts.)
2
Right, let's add even more bodies to the House so they can spend their time fundraising, campaigning, tweeting and posturing. Seriously, think this through.
67
The author addresses this. Campaigning in the revised, smaller districts will cost less. Less wholesale, on-air campaigning. More retail and in-person. Less money to raise. Less beholden to special interests.
8
It might be less expensive to run in districts representing a smaller number of people.
3
But still more money needed for elections overall, to cover so many candidates. Less per candidate, possibly, but more altogether.
I've been in favor of this idea for decades.
12
These ideas make sense. The bigger problem, however, is with the US Senate, where representation isn't even approximately fair. With populations 40,000,000 people in California and 500,00 people in Wyoming (both numbers rounded to the nearest half-million), and both states represented by two senators, Wyoming residents effectively have 80 TIMES MORE SENATE REPRESENTATION than California residents have. This is absurd; it should be ILLEGAL.
170
I make this comment so often the moderators are probably going to start tossing it out.
The House is meant to represent the people proportionally. That's what the article is about. The Senate is NOT. It's represents the administrative regions we call states. Wyoming is no less a state than California, with a governor and executive (secretary of state, attorney general and all that), legislature, and judiciary.
Rhode Island or Delaware was tiny compared to Virginia and the Carolinas at the time of the founding. As long as we are a United STATES of America, the Senate is supposed to represent the concept that each state has its own government and sends two senators to D.C. to represent it. That's why originally it was the state legislature that chose US Senators. Not so the House.
Wikipedia explains this pretty well: The idea of the bicameral legislature is to have "one chamber represent people equally, while the other gives equal representation to states regardless of population ... two Houses that could act as an internal check on each other. One was intended to be a 'People's House' directly elected by the people, and with short terms obliging the representatives to remain close to their constituents. The other was intended to represent the states to such extent as they retained their sovereignty except for the powers expressly delegated to the national government. The Senate was thus not designed to serve the people of the United States equally."
3
RR, it's really hard to change the Constitution. The House limit is just a Congressional Act.
@C Wolfe: "I make this comment so often the moderators are probably going to start tossing it out."
I'm with you on that, but keep saying it anyway. Too many commenters here have no clue about the Constitution.
2
The people who suggest elimination of the Electoral College, proportional voting, ranked choice voting, expansion of the House, adding members to the SCOTUS and other substantive changes are all Democrats, who do not like the fact that they are in the minority, and think they would do better by changing the rules. They are single phase thinkers and view all choices as binary. They want different outcomes for particular elections and do not recognize the extent to which changing the rules is likely to change voter behavior.
For 40 years, Democrats held a majority in the House, which changed while Clinton was president. [Clinton, who was elected with 43% of the popular vote, to 46% for Trump.] Since then, the House flips back and forth every few election cycles, which is distressing to Democrats.
If you go to a parliamentary system, the prime minister is subject to being discharged on a whim. That may be fine for countries that are one tenth to one fifth of the size of America, but would be destabilizing in the US.
Obama would have been thrown out of office in 2010.
10
It's got nothing to do with self-interest. It's to make things more fair and equal and proportional and democratic. You want to live in a democracy, right? You want to have representation in your government, right? That's what these ideas help do.
Stop seeing things in hyperpartisan terms and start thinking about the overall benefit to everyone.
20
As an other commenter points out, Wyoming has an 80:1 senatorial power advantage over California.
I doubt very much that is an outcome that the framers sought.
The existing system, overall, is fine. But it is severely out of balance where Senate representation is concerned.
2
"Clinton, who was elected with 43% of the popular vote, to 46% for Trump."
Your argument sounds convincing on first read, but falls apart upon further investigation: it leads one to believe that, like Republicans, Democrats too win elections without winning the popular vote. But here's the rub: Bill Clinton did in fact win the 1992 election with only 43% of the popular vote, but only because the remainder was split between G.H. Bush (37%) and Ross Perrot (19%). So again, more disingenuous rationale coming from the right.
4
An expanded House leading to fairer representation of the real US population would be an important step toward restoring democracy. But the are many reasons why our electoral system has been corrupted.
The Electoral College system is no longer functional since, for example it gives 200, 000 people in Wyoming the same electoral power as 800,000 people in California. This is fundamentally wrong.
The Roberts Court Citizens United Decision opened up the electoral process to unlimited dark corporate money. These funds from the Kochs, Mercers Adelsons, etc., were used by the Republican Party in state and local elections where a little money goes a long way to buy state legislatures and governorships across the country. These same Republican-controlled states have engaged in systematic computer-driven gerrymandering under the RedMap program headed by Karl Rove since 2010.
These same Republican-controlled Red States have also engaged in massive voter suppression as witness in Florida, Georgia, and North Dakota and elsewhere where various laws and even illegal voting practices have taken the vote away from millions of Americans that woud likely vote Democratic.
Social media spewed enormous volumes of lies and propaganda targeting Democratic voter by attacking Democratic candidates throughout the US. Both Republicans and Russians have spent millions engaging in these calculated and effective smear campaigns.
Americans need to wake up to reality: US Democracy is a myth.
32
Maybe we could fix those other problems of the House was more representative and the races more competitive.
Expanding House numbers makes sense, but clearly amending the Constitution to change the Senate numbers is in order. I would propose that each state have a minimum of one senator, and then additional numbers of senators be based on population. Small states such as Wyoming and Montana would still have over-representation consistent with the founding fathers intentions, it just wouldn't be as extreme as it is now.
31
Article V of the Constitution specifically prohibits depriving a state of "equal suffrage" in the Senate by amendment.
Can't be done, Kevin. Not without a whole new Constitution.
As long as we are tinkering with the constitution....Originally the states’ government’s elected the senators, not the people directly. It was not until 1913 when the 16th amendment was passed that senator were elected by a democratic election instead of a republic one. Is it not reasonable to think this also had an effect on the change of the balance of power among the government, voters, and money. It seem with the 16th Amendment, the erosion of the representation in the House, and Citizens United the balances on the scales of democracy are much different then before WWI.
Start with the House. The Senate requires a Constitutional Amendment, and I would point out that the ERA has been kicking around for nearly a century, ever since women first got the vote, and in 2018, it's still not ratified.
I have no problem with expanding the size of the House to 11,000.
I further suggest that the Representatives not go to Washington at all, but have an office in their district. With modern technology, they can all vote remotely.
This would restore the true intent of the founders, which was very imperfectly realized at the time due to limitations in communications. Now we can have a system where each member is closely aligned with a constituency.
This would solve both the gerrymandering problem, and the incumbency problem. Salaries would be lower, and people would expect to go back to their regular job after a few years of service.
59
Note: The National Popular Vote bill is 64% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.
It simply requires enacting states with 270 electoral votes to award them according to the nationwide, rather than the statewide, popular vote.
All voters would be valued equally in presidential elections, no matter where they live.
2
The Great Compromise was that to satisfy small states the Senate would have two members from each state. This was easy to "hard code" into the Constitution. To satisfy the large states, the House would be proportional representation based on population. The census was built into the Constitution to prompt Congress and the President to reevaluate the number and distribution of representatives every 10 years. This part of the compromise could not be hard coded. It depended on responsible statesmanship.
By refusing to reapportion in the 1920s and freezing the number at 435, the great compromise was negated with the result that the small states gained an unfair advantage. A change of this magnitude should have required an amendment to the Constitution.
6
The House should be enlarged, but not according to an abstract calculation. Originally, the size of the House depended on the optimal size of the district Congress sought. Now each district should be allocated in line with the population of the smallest single-district state, now Wyoming. That would eliminate the advantage for the smallest states, which are guaranteed a single House seat, adding to the power they have through the Senate. The resulting size would be about added 100 seats. The result would also more closely validate one person, one voter nationally. The size would be recalculated at the time of each decennial census.
1
I agree completely that we are all underrepresented. The people that read these comments know me better and understand my views much more than any of my representatives in Congress or the State government for that matter. I would venture to guess that in the course of one week, millions read my comments. My representatives don't know I'm alive. They only know their big donors. They don't have time to read this paper, let alone look at a few comments. Their staffers filter out the news for them. They are too busy working the phones, trying to get donations for the next election.
So yes, we need more representatives. But we also must get rid of this ridiculous, jagged border gerrymandering. Currently, the representatives choose who they represent instead of the public choosing them. There should be federal regulations that establish how these boundaries are set. My idea is to use fixed county lines to set the borders. String counties together in groups so long as they share at least one common border. In highly populated counties, add more reps and they all would be elected at-large. Then candidates would be forced to be more moderate and reasonable, forced to please all instead of just a few.
Then we have to get money out of politics. Our elected representatives spend many hours each day working the phones in what are essentially call centers to get money for the next election. They should be working for us during that time, not begging for money.
180
"My idea is to use fixed county lines to set the borders. " The problem with this is it amounts to pro-Republican gerrymandering, due to self-sorting; Democrats tend to sort themselves into cities. And counties tend to keep cities whole. So this amounts to packing Democratic votes.
3
There already is a reasonable criterion that would minimize gerrymandering. Read about "wasted votes."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/03/upshot/how-the-new-math-of-gerrymandering-works-supreme-court.html
The problem with minimizing wasted votes is that it assumes that winner-take-all elections result in proportional representation They don't, they systematically over-favor the majority. They make a seats-votes curve that resembles an "S". So instead you need a criterion based on making this "S" curve symmetric. Or change the tallying to a multi-member proportional system...
1
yes yes yes
4
And senate as well.
Senator should carry as much power as their constituent size, specially towards allocation of $$$. Those bring in more $$$ should have first call on that money.
I see that Mitch M has built roads in TN like no other and here in East cost we're started the funds.
1
If you decide to go with a bigger House of Representatives make sure you never get caught between them and a bank of microphones.
3
Yes, it does. I've done a fair amount of research on this topic, at least for a layperson, and believe this is a critical way to restore something approaching one-man, one-vote in America. We desperately need to restore popular legitimacy to our wounded nation.
And we don't need a Constitutional Amendment.
7
Yes, but your cube root theory will fail at some point in the future, won't it? Today's population, according to the editorial, would yield another 158 seats in the House using the cube root theory/method. What happens in 25 years when the population reaches perhaps 50 million more? Pick your time span and whatever estimates demographers predict for population increase, at some point we would perhaps have a House with a preposterous number of members.
And then there is the real problem: the Senate in which Wyoming's 500,000 residents get the same two senators as California's 40,000,000 residents. Short of Constitutional Amendment there's no way to fix that and how would you do it, if you could?
3
Even with a constitutional amendment you couldn't fix the "two senators per state" imbalance. See Article V.
1
Unfortunately, if I understand what you did correctly, your argument is flawed. To demonstrate the virtues of a bigger House, you change 2 things: the number of representatives *and* the way redistricting is performed. The algorithm you apply for redistricting is designed to maximize fairness. So it's no wonder you find more fair redistricting under your proposal. But it cannot be confidently ascribed to the larger size, as you surmise. It could just as easily be due to the mechanism you used for redistricting.
A better way to investigate your point would be to apply the algorithm to states A. with the current number of seats and, B. with the larger number of seats. Then compare the competitiveness and partisanship of of the states before and after. That would isolate the effect of increasing the size of the House from the effect of altering the way redistricting is performed.
We all know districts are currently unfairly gerrymandered. This is more than likely the cause of the differential fairness you find between the two House sizes.
1
I actually mentioned that as an option. Problem is, this is such a broad and complex topic, that it's hard to decided what parts of it to talk about when you're limited by space.
Too bad the minority holding the power to make this happen will never give it up. Such is the tyranny of minority rule majority gripe in a democratic society
1
Between the Senate, the Presidency, and the House, the latter is the one with the least problems.
The biggest divergence from equal representation is in the Senate. The Senate should have a national constituency, not one based on anarchistic boundaries. The Senate should be a national election for one-third of the seats up for election every two years and with ranked voting so that all voices, even minority voices, are heard equally. This would give a national, rather than a regional tone to the election for Senators.
The Presidency should also be a national election based on popular vote, not the electoral college. Presidential candidates now can ignore minority votes concentrated in non-competitive states rather than making every vote equally important.
Your suggestion for the House might have merit, but there is an upper size to an effective body and it is not clear if the House has already exceeded that size.
As an interim step once the Democrats regain both branches of Congress in 2020 they should immediately admit Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states ensuring a fairer representation of Democrats in the Senate. How many more people voted for Democratic Senator candidates in 2018 than Republican candidates?
3
Thank you for stating the obvious. It is not even remotely close to being a representative sample from strictly a data point of view. However, while we are on the subject, it is the Senate that needs an overall, and the "one man one vote" principle be reinstated as a fact. If Utah deserves two, then New York deserves 40. It is minority rule that is killing us as a country. I'm sure there is some way to make it more fair for everyone, and we should work on it.
8
November 10, 2018
The costs benefit analysis is acceptable and as well It might be advantageous for this topic to obtain select scholarly studies to share in the insights as outlined in this Editorial offering . The more discussion the basis for the population solutions in terms for the management of how we America is best to govern and inclusive with what might be best legislation to proper review on the timelines and analysis to the House of Representatives itself and then in conformity with the as always bests in Editorial valuations in service to the best to live well, smart and adaptations with effective gains to the nation.
1
We should get rid of the Electoral College and elect the President by popular vote, which is how most people think he(she) is elected anyway. USA is not a very representative democracy.
1
If you want to go with a popular vote, it would have to be a popular majority, with a runoff if no one got a majority.
If a popular plurality is the only thing required, which is what Democrats prefer, in 2016 we'd have had Trump, Hillary, JEB, Bloomberg, Rubio, and ten other candidates on the ballot if we tried it for the first time.
If the first time occurred in 1992, Clinton would not have become president with his 43% of the popular vote.
3
I'm all for it, if it will pave the way for more 3rd party and Independent candidates.
With the current system of electing the President, none of the states requires that a presidential candidate receive anything more than the most popular votes in order to receive all of the state's or district’s electoral votes.
Since 1828, one in six states have cast their Electoral College votes for a candidate who failed to win the support of 50 percent of voters in their state
There is no evidence of any widespread public sentiment in favor of imposing a runoff requirement.
If the current Electoral College type of arrangement were essential for avoiding a proliferation of candidates and people being elected with low percentages of the vote, we should see evidence of these conjectured outcomes in elections that do not employ such an arrangement. In elections in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most votes throughout the entire jurisdiction served by that office, historical evidence shows that there is no massive proliferation of third-party candidates and candidates do not win with small percentages. For example, in 905 elections for governor in 60 years, the winning candidate received more than 50% of the vote in over 91% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 45% of the vote in 98% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 40% of the vote in 99% of the elections. No winning candidate received less than 35% of the popular vote.
I think it would be better to establish a commission to oversee the creation of districts so they best represented the citizens and not the political needs of the greedy. California has one and it created much tighter districts.
I agree with the Editorial Board most of the time, but you missed the dock on this one. I have worked for a Congressman and known them for 40 years and the quality today is lower than at any time in my memory, and you want more of these people who have who qualification other than having at one time or another worn some sort of uniform or served their party loyally. More of these rag-a-muffins is not going to do anyone any good. Look at the senate, a lot of states, like Arkansas or Oklahoma, have a difficult time coming up with two good people let along a dozen or more. In missing the dock you fail to recognize the changes in transportation and communication and density since the Founding. Its a lot easier for a representative to stay in touch with their consitutients today than when they had to ride a horse out into the countryside and the fastest means of communication was a letter. Look fort a better solution. Like eliminating gerrymandering, and voter suppression.
3
Next fix the Senate.
1
As the article cited below demonstrates, it isn't the votes but how they are counted that accounts for the Congressional -- and especially Senate make up --
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/08/democrats-republicans-senate-majority-minority-rule
Democrat Senators received 1.5 times the number of votes as Republican Senators. They elected 23 Senators and the Republicans elected 11.
Shouldn't the Democrats have needed two times as many votes to elect twice as many Senators?
It is one thing for a reporter in the UK to not understand that only one third of the Senate is elected every two years. It is another for a Democrat American to demonstrate absolute ignorance of American government.
Your analysis is absolutely correct, but also incomplete. Not only is the House size inadequate because of population, but also because of responsibilities. Since the House was last increased in size, consider how the oversight responsibilities have increased. For instance, before 1920, there was no:
Social Security Administration
Medicare
Air Force
Department of Education
Department of Energy or nuclear energy
Threat of global warming
Internet, cable, broadband, television, etc.
Fracking
Federal minimum wage
United Nations
American troops permanently stationed in foreign countries
Electronic voting machines
This list could go on and on, but the point remains that while the issues and "products and services" provided by the federal government has increased exponentially, the number of elected officials to provide legislative guidance and approval has not. Consequently when people wonder why nothing ever gets done in Washington, part of the problem is that there aren't enough legislators for a vastly expanded plate of priorities.
22
The 435 individuals in the House, and the 100 in the Senate have staffs of thousands. Even the smartest guy in the room does not know everything he needs to know about every piece of legislation that comes before him, nor does he necessarily understand the nuances of every issue that comes before him in his committee that oversees an executive branch agency. Staff members and input from constituents, executive branch employees and lobbyists provides additional input. And the smartest guy in the room, who potentially has the best solution, still only gets one vote on the final legislation, although presumably his opinion is given greater weight by his fellow legislators.
The reason legislation doesn't get passed has nothing to with not having enough members of Congress. Some legislation should not pass because it is bad legislation. Passing legislation that makes things worse is better off not happening.
Agreed they should expand the House. Also:
-Four year terms, so they aren’t immediately campaigning again.
-State wide races with reps divided up by percentage, to get around gerrymandering.
-Fixed amount of money per candidate, ads only permitted one month before election.
-Get real reps for all US citizens, including DC and Puerto Rico.
2
Are you kidding? What we just learned from the last two years is that we get NOTHING from these people even when they control both houses and the presidency. They can't pass an actual budget, pass legislation, or even have bi-partisan discussions of our problems. We get even less when they are gridlocked by split control. And we are paying a LOT of money to support the Congress. Why would we choose to send more slackers up there?
We would get as much good out of Congress if it consisted of two old geezers we paid to sit in the Capitol rotunda playing checkers every day. Think of the money we'd save.
6
Well this proposal sounds like a slow movement to one person, one vote. How long do you think it would take before the citizenry was overly taxed to pay for "A Bigger House"? When the safest income producing position was to be a representative? When the heavy tilt of monies was to pay for government so the public does not, will not or cannot escape giving all over to feed the beast? One person, one vote gets a better result IMHO.
1
As long as the districts are fairly drawn to represent the community and not the party. That can be done dispassionately using computer models or non-partisan redistricting commissions.
2
I think that as much as coastal states citizens doesn't like to be represented in senate by the same number of people elected by scarsely populated rural states, those won't like coastal states to be over-represented in the House.
And 2 more senators from Wyoming and North Dakota can't make up for +100 more representative from coastal states. That's a massive difference in numbers.
3
Also by expanding the number of representatives you have diluted the voice of any single one of the electee, with the result of empowering the Parties they belong to ( and their brass members) and in the process you end up like in France where is a large parliament ( over 900 members) and the power is concentrated in the hands of the President of the Republic, which is a very logic consequence of having such a large legislative body
1
The House and the Senate are different chambers of Congress. Their votes don't cancel each other out.
1
Intriguing, and an eye-opener to learn that 1 member of the House represents on average some 3/4 million people. The proposed solution to an admittedly officially unrecognized problem is one possibility.
Another would be to cut the link between the Federal popular representation and the states and have districts delineated to comprise a set number of voters without regard for state boundaries, i.e crossing state lines.
A third option would be to have an intermediary tier (think of a system in which each state has as many representatives as it has multiples of 250,000 voters, but these comprise a chamber by themselves who delegate something like the current number of Representatives to act as their proxies and to vote as the bigger group has determined).
This is a very interesting exercise and there are undoubtedly many more variants possible. The findings that (a) the number of citizens represented on average is unworkable and that (b) there are great variations between the number a given member may act in name of should be a spur to action.
Finally, this is the highly polarized USA of the early 21st century in which each current Representative is tied and and foot to one or more special interest groups or superrich donors who depend on the system's continuation. Don't hold your breath expecting anything to change...
1
There may be no constitutional limit on the size of the House, but there is a practical one: They have to fit into the Capitol building. There would not be enough space to seat 1400 representatives, which would be roughly the number if it were expanded based on 1920s proportions. Congress might have to meet in a basketball arena under these circumstances.
But more importantly, it is my sad experience that any committee that has more than 20 members rarely if ever arrives at a rational common sense decision. Imagine getting 1400 people to agree on something - anything.
Thus, expanding the number of representatives would not be my primary concern. Much more important would be having proportional representation, not a winner takes all concept.
And, we need an Independent Party where the members are explicitly not forced into submission by the party line, but truly vote their conscience. That party would be the most powerful in the House, since the extremists would need them to pass anything and by its sheer existence it would make for a much more measured, gradual and politically more equitable legislation.
Of course, that will never happen, since it is against the interests of both the existing major parties. If you want to see Republicans and Democrats vote unanimously on a bill by resolutely rejecting it, set up a vote for changing the system as outlined above.
4
We can manage a bigger room, if that becomes the issue.
Good idea. How about doing something with the Senate where Wyoming and Vermont, each with about 600,000 people, have the same numbers of senators as California, with 40,000,000? The Senate can still be the saucer that cools the House, but with a more equitable representation spread among more local areas or regions.
18
"For starters, how does a single lawmaker stay in touch with the concerns of three-quarters of a million people?"
This point is a red herring.
Given improvements in communications technology no doubt a lot better than was possible with the less populous districts in 1789.
1
More politicians??? Oh boy, that's just what we need!
5
Exactly! And what is the cost of added salaries and benefits for an extra 158 members of the House?
Nice solution, but the kumbaya moment necessary to have this happen isn't likely to happen, especially when our elected officials at state and federal have their own survival in office (and endless search for money) as their first priority. Big money rules the nation. So you'd have the junk the Citizens United ruling and put the clamps on the 0.1% who tell us what to do. Then you'd have to get all 50 states to agree to a fair reapportionment plan - do you think they would give up their right to determine their own district boundaries? Is Iowa going to be okay with a couple of new blue districts just because some other state is going to make up the difference? I wish there were a way to have something like this happen, but I also want to be 21 again, and have a full head of hair.
49
We have a House majority, and the limit was imposed by an Act of Congress. No harm trying, is there?
1
"There’s no constitutional basis for a membership of 435; it’s arbitrary, and it could be undone by Congress tomorrow. Congress set it in 1911, but following the 1920 census — which counted nearly 14 million more people living in the United States — lawmakers refused to add seats out of concern that the House was getting too big to function effectively. Rural members were also trying to forestall the shift in national power to the cities (sound familiar?), where populations were exploding with emigrants from farm country and immigrants from abroad."
Actually, in 1921 the Congress did not even reapportion the House based on the 1920 census, in part because the rural areas did not want to give the urban (and immigrant) areas more representation. And the 435 figure became effectively the permanent amount thereafter.
Also, why not go from 593 to a more even number of 600, 601 if you want to keep it with an odd number of seats, or 650/651, the size of the House of Commons?
It is time to drag Congress into the 21st Century.
5
Yes, Yes, Yes, just as Bruce Bartlett showed in these very pages 4 years ago:
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/enlarging-the-house-of-representatives/
It is such a critical concept - adequate representation - that G. Washington (talk about Founders' Intent) held up the Constitutional Convention in order to enlarge the House, making Representatives more accessible/closer to their constituents.
The enemy of this concept will be our 2 large political parties, who co-operated to artificially limit the size of the House in the 20th century, as noted.
25
There does not seem to be any mathematical reasoning for the optimal size of the House of Representatives. You cite one paper from 1972, long before the rise of the internet, which hardly seems like a good way to propose a system for 2018. At any rate, the cube root plan does not fit the data points very well for nations with populations above 50 million.
Furthermore, you say a House of Representatives of 1,600 members is probably too big. If so, what is the maximum practical number?
2
What the article fails to emphasize is how the current number of Congressional Districts, frozen since 1911, biases the country towards rural (Republican) regions, like the Senate did from the beginning.
The House was supposed to be the People's Chamber of Congress. Instead, it has become less representative since the population has exploded in over 100 years, and even worse, now gives disproportionately higher representation to America's low population rural areas, a problem which will only grow worse as the population increases and more people concentrated in cities are represented by fewer Representatives, while declining populations in rural areas get better representation.
79
"The House was supposed to be the People's Chamber of Congress. Instead, it has become less representative since the population has exploded in over 100 years, and even worse, now gives disproportionately higher representation to America's low population rural areas..."
The House is the People's chamber - that's why it was designed to be the only one of three federal offices to be directly elected by the people and for only two years. They are, theoretically, more susceptible to being ousted at the next election. Political parties have pretty much destroyed that idea - people often vote for (D) or (R) rather than the person, further polarizing the nation.
As for disproportional anything, each member of the House still represents about 750,000 constituents, no matter where they live. Seven states have only one representative - how is that disproportional?
Exactly! Since every state gets at least one rep, regardless of how low its population is, the high-pop states must then divvy up the remainder, and there just aren't enough to give them an equal voice. Theoretically, if climate change turned my little state into a puddle, and all but 3 people left it, those three would still be entitled to 1/435th of Congress.
Maybe politics feels like zero sum game because we have not chosen to increase the number of congressional seats in close to 100 years despite the amazing growth and number of changes our nation has undergone.
The number of representatives in our government can no longer accommodate the breadth of ideas and population size of our country. It has the effect of squeezing an ever expanding foot into an unyielding shoe. There are bound to be blisters, raw skin, pain and a willingness to throw the whole thing away.
For the safety of our nation and its future we have to stave off disenfranchisement and disengagement. We need to expand the size of Congress and Legislative bodies.
If our political tent was expanded in thought, class, ethnicity, ideas and number we could safely release the poisonous fumes choking our nation and its downward slide into a banana republic.
We haven't outgrown our political system, just its size.
The Democrats are rightly chided for their lack of platform and message. I think any platform they come up has to include upholding the tenets of our democracy and giving every American a political voice. It's just as important as healthcare, education and jobs.
So yes to apportionment. Yes to voting as a national holiday. Yes to stronger voting rights laws. Yes to democracy.
9
I find this editorial thought provoking, and I am going to think about it. Many of the comments here not so much.
An interesting analysis toward a solution, and it makes sense. But if I were going to fight for something, first, I believe there are at least three simple solutions towards enabling voters' votes to carry their cast weight:
(1) end gerrymandering, and
(2) establish a single national criteria for voter registration wherein (3) no State could scrub rolls without first notifying the constituent at least 180 days in advance of any election to remedy the discrepancy.
Less popular but perhaps more meaningful to a nation that always "talks" about how great its democracy is and how we need to protect our democracy is to:
(1) implement public financing for all levels of elections, and
(2) make voting compulsory and enable systems to easily vote.
Just adding more people to the House does not address fundamental issues of fairness which are currently skewed - and easily skewable by the party in power - against those less well off and towards the incumbent power at the time.
3
The last thing we need are more egocentric, power hungry representatives. Rather, we need intelligent, ethical, and sane representatives serving under TERM LIMITS who commit to reading and studying proposed legislation and to compromise.
4
We have term limits - with the exception of the Supreme Court which needs them.
If the terms limits were curbed further candidates would have to spend even more time than they do raising money. That would lead to even less time doing their jobs. Congressional seats terms are two years. How much shorter should they be? 6 months?
Think critically.
What we need is true and accurate representation. Not every politician is a bum. (Although a lot of bums are politicians.)
5
OUR U.S. House is just fine. Let's concentrate on the real problems that threaten OUR country today.
OUR United States of America needs a bigger U.S. SENATE.
They hold WAY too much power. Tiny states have the same number of senators as the largest states so traitors like Mitch McConnell can take over and try to destroy OUR United States of America as he is doing today.
OUR United States of America needs a bigger U.S. Supreme Court in the next four years - when WE THE PEOPLE hire/elect Socially Conscious democrats and independents to manage OUR country - that is packed with progressive justices like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayer who understand that America is a work in progress and so is OUR U.S. Constitution. As soon as they put balance back into OUR U.S. Supreme Court they must pass a law or UNBREAKABLE RULE that says 60% of senators must approve new federal judges at all levels.
2
Altering the Senate in the way you described would require approval by two-thirds of the States and supermajorities in both Houses of Congress. Or open the door to a constitutional convention which would likely produce a multitude of horrors.
The House can be expanded to become more democratic and more aligned with our founders' vision through simple legislative action. This is a reasonable, achievable goal for Democrats after 2020.
2
@njglea: "Tiny states have the same number of senators as the largest states..."
That was by design. Larger (more populous) states have more say in the House because representation is based purely on population. The Senate represents the states, not the people within them, to give Rhode Island the same voice as California. Senators are essentially ambassadors from the states to the federal government and therefore represent state interests. Isn't one of the tenets of modern-day liberalism about protecting the minority? Why do you want more populous states to have their way in both houses of Congress?
1
I like the idea of multi member districts rather than new districts. members within a district would be able to represent disparate populations if elected proportionally and would have the opportunity to work collectively across party lines to represent their district.
I disagree with this proposal. It is nothing but a gimmick to place more Democrats in the House. Until the Democrats become less aligned with identity politics, America does not need any more of them. Too many already! This proposal is just like the Democrat's call to abolish the Electoral College, which will never happen. The Electoral College is part of the checks and balances established by the founders to ensure a fair and just democratic representation of all Americans. The same cm be said for the Hosue of Representatives. I am against it. I am against change. Things must stay the same MAGA! Thank you.
5
So then you're against the changes Trump has wrought?
1
It will NOT help to have MORE of the same kind of fools and nitwits in Congress.
The root problem is not the number of Representatives but the fact that, by and large, the American electorate is uninformed and gullible. All you have to do is wave the flag and say "God bless America" and add something about how "exceptional" Americans are, and swarms of voters will cast their vote for you.
With our culture formed, shaped and dumbified by those wonderful folks on Madison Avenue, we have been brainwashed to believe idiotic slogans rather that facts. Thus, voters will vote against their own self interest - people without access health care will happily vote to repeal ObamaCare because some candidate called it "socialist" - I'm sure most Americans don't even know what modern Socialism is all about. Voters will happily cheer massive tax cuts for the very rich, because they have been made to believe they will see $10 more in their weekly paycheck - which will all be consumed the next time they have to buy some medicine. Americans will accept one mass shooting after the other - all because of the completely misinterpreted meaning of the 2nd Amendment - it took Australia only ONE mass shooting to take decisive actions.
It is also a factor that the American Constitution, once the envy of the enlightened world, and especially the numbskull interpretation of it (gun control, Citizens United), is no longer up to regulating the governing principles of a society in the modern world.
126
"It will NOT help to have MORE of the same kind of fools and nitwits in Congress."
True. However, the premise is that smaller districts would change the fools and nitwits. They'd have less money, and more contact with their smaller numbers of voters.
Perhaps we need to test that idea, to see at what size district we get the positive effect. We could be scientific about it, rather than apply some arbitrary formula that sounds nice.
1
You may be right, but that too would take Constitutional changes and amendments. That effort I would rather spend making other modernizing changes to our constitution:
- Clarify the 2nd Amendment to prevent the idiotic interpretation that the first part (...well regulated militia.. ) cannot be ignored by Supreme Court Justices who pretend to be able to get into the minds of the original framers.
- Clarify the First Amendment to again prevent the ridiculous interpretation that "Corporations are people, too...", who/which are entitled to "free speech" the same as individual persons.
- Extend the term of Representatives, say to four years with a two term limit, so that our "democracy" is not constantly in campaign mode, taking PAC money, but that Representatives actually have the time to legislate.
District size and shape is not Constitutional. It is just a law, dating from 1920, mandating that things remain as they were before WW1.
The changes you discuss would be Constitutional. They would be much harder.
1
This is how the editorial board of the nytimes lost any residual credibility and moral high stand on politics.
The increasing number of districts would mean an increasing number of congressional districts which are obviously prone to gerrymandering.
After years advocating for the elimination of gerrymandering practise and voter suppression related issue, now the editorial board has showed its real intent: to own the gerrymandering process.
And not only that, it has even stated implicitly that it's impossible to get over it, by measures such as enlarging the dimension of the district, or increasing its population.
1
There is no reason that an expansion of the House could not be combined with laws against gerrymandering. We should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
107
On the contrary, the more representatives per person, the more difficult it is to gerrymander. Indeed, in the limit case of one representative per person, it's completely impossible.
Also be sure to check out part 2 of this on monday, which will talk about multi-member districts, which completely eliminate the possibility of gerrymandering.
7
@Len Charlap
the reason you can't do both exapnding House members and rein gerrymadering it's because they go in different direction. It's a mathematical principle that you can pick an homogeneous group of people when you get a bigger sample. The more smaller the group is the more dishomogeneous it will be- This will translate in more group of interest and promoting gerrymandered's interest.
@full name
i don't get your rationale. It's the opposite of what you think that will happen when fewer people choose a representative. Think about groups of interest. In the case limit of one for one, it doesn't make any sense because you will have an impractical congress large as US, that's why you use representative, and again the smaller the group the more particular it will be, and their interests will too.
On the second instance of multi-members, i think that since this article is about increasing the number of districts which ARE more populated, i highly doubt the multi-member will be fair game for all district.
I strongly suspect it will benefit only coastal densily populated liberal-skewed districts, as this article currently does.
1
"In 1929, Congress passed a law capping the size of the House and shifting responsibility for future reapportionments onto the Commerce Department. That’s why, more than a century later, we find ourselves with a national legislature far too small to fairly represent both the size and diversity of modern America. This warps our politics, it violates basic constitutional principles of political equality, and it’s only getting worse."
If this has not changed since 1929, or actually before, one might wonder why? Has he Commerce department never been run by liberal, progressive Secretaries for liberal and progressive presidents? If Mr. Trump had not been elected would this editorial be written?
There might be a need, but who is going to convince Commerce?
1
A few minor "notes" regarding the "Notes" section:
* "The program uses an algorithm..." sounds like it's deterministic. It isn't, it's stochastic. "The program uses an evolutionary algorithm..." would be clearer on this point.
* "the software does not produce intentionally gerrymandered results" understates things. The software measures gerrymandering and actively *minimizes* it. The measurement it uses is the total asymmetry in the seats-votes curve.
* The amount of gerrymandering in the current districts is also understated. The current amount of gerrymandering is unprecedented and the result of a nationally coordinated effort by Republicans. They even brag about it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP ) )
* The program has the ability to account for democraphics, to optimize descriptive representation, for VRA compliance. It is recommmened however that this is kept *off*, at least for single-member districts, since it produces a
gerrymandered result ( https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/how-the-voting-rights-act-hurts-democrats-and-minorities/276893/ ) Indeed, a judge threw out district maps for North Carolina because they were partisanly gerrymandered, despite Republicans claiming that they did it in order to achieve VRA compliance.
1
The root problem in America is that one major party supports representative government and the other major party supports political hijacking....and a substantial number of Americans consciously or subconsciously support political hijacking.
The hijackers will not concede defeat until decent Americans overpower the Republican cockpit of greed and selfishness smothered in guns, 'God', White-Makes-Right-Syndrome and authoritarianism that courses through Republistan like a Russian retrovirus.
Sure the House is a gerrymandered fossil, but it's a beacon of democracy compared to the ludicrously undemocratic Senate and Electoral College that are shrines to America's comprehensive rejection of evolution and modernity.
Add in the Corporate-0.1%-Christian-Shariah-Law Supremely Corrupted Court rigged by Russian-Republican vote suppressors that recently fed the Voting Rights Act into the 0.1% shredder, and America's 3rd-world Republican autocracy will require a political earthquake to reform.
Given the degenerative effects of the state-run-corporate Fake News channel, hate-radio channels and the alt-fact internet actively organ-harvesting America's brains and converting it to fear, foam and loathing, the outlook is a bit grim.
While it's true that Democrats have gotten sucked into the right-wing Republican riptide of 0.1% corruption, there's one party that has driven America off of repeated cliffs.
The Greed Over People party
D to go forward; R for Russian-Republican oligarchy.
96
I always appreciate Socrates' comments and juicy metaphors.
3
No, the root problem is that the D party does NOT GET EQUAL REPRESENTATION to counter the R party. Extremism is what happens when power goes unchecked. The R party wouldn't be like this if it actually had to compete for votes.I
I adore you, Socrates, but you're mistaking the symptom for the disease.
1
Always look for your comment, Socrates, and appreciate your passion and thoughtfulness.
One crucial element of this reform is that it requires legislation and simple majorities in the Congress, not amending the Constitution with required supermajorities in the Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states.
US citizens are far less well-represented than other advanced countries, as Pew Research reported earlier this year. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/
As a familiar example, the UK populations is around 67 million and there are 650 Members of Parliament, a ratio of just over 100,000 constituents per Member compared to the average of nearly 750,000 Americans per Member of the House of Representatives.
"Cube Root" sounds like a certain way to turn Americans away from this reform. It would be simpler to take the state with the smallest population (Wyoming has about 420,000 voting-eligible citizens) and divide it into the Voting Eligible Population of the United States.
Voting Eligible Population of Wyoming 421,722
Voting Eligible Population of US 235,714,420
# of US Members of Congress 559
559 Members of Congress is close to the Cube Root formula but much easier to explain as an equal representation for all. Each Wyoming voter is represented just as a California voter is, not more, not less.
The Democratic Congress that is seated in January can start this. Let's go.
63
There are two ways Democrats can get back into power:
1.) Blow-up the constitution and replace it with a system that guarantees Democrat victories.
2.) Put forth policy proposals that attract more voters.
Hmm, which to choose?
3
That's the point: they already have the voters, but their votes don't count as much as Republican votes. Anyone looking at our system objectively can see the unfairness of it.
10
The number in the article, 593, is close to the population of the U.S. divided by the population of Wyoming, 573, using the idea that the least populous state is the mark for equal representation.
4
This is just silly. For months and months and months, we were told the 2016 election was a fluke. That only racists and bigots voted Trump over Clinton. That the markets would crash, wars would rage, and life would be so much worse than when we were at perpetual war with other countries under Bush Jr. and Obama... Turns out, Trump knew what he was doing. Put the country back to work, stood up to foreign powers, and stood up for labor by announcing we would limit the "invisible" workers with no rights being imported by farms and restaurants for cheap labor...
Now we had the election. Still lots of red out here...
So the blue coasties decide that since they can't win under our Constitutional laws, they want to sell out the middle of the country like they have the coasts to corporate and foreign interests.
Sorry, but our forefathers foresaw this. They balanced geographical power of the country with the populist numbers. Import all the new Dems you like, but until they can live and support themselves in the center of the country, they will keep only their own blue states blue. That's called balance. That's called protecting American interests. Rural people have power too. You have dollars, we have land and crops and animals and natural resources.
We're not putting our piece of the country up for sale to outside interests like bi-coastal America has chosen to do. We're not for sale here. Sorry that you sold out, and now need more places to profit off of.
3
I remember the midwest. In the 1950s one could stand on the bridge over the Cedar River and see all the way to the bottom through clear clean water. It was crawling with large fresh water clams, teeming with fish that you could catch and eat. I learned to swim in the Cedar and Iowa Rivers. What happened to the fresh water clams? The beaver. The clear water. does anyone eat those fish now? Do people still swim in the rivers? And what about all those cute little towns that used to support family farms. I remember Steamboat Rock Iowa. Pop 350. They had their own school system and library. A cheese factory. Family owned grain elevator. There was a 4 block long mainstream with it's own bank, grocery, dry goods, hardware, mercantile, gas station and mechanic, drug store, soda fountain, dentist, doctor, lawyer offices, and 3 churches. The churches are still there. Your precious resource extraction economy has decimated a way of life that is now gone forever. Anyone who worked hard in school, graduated from college and looked for a job has moved to one of those coasts. Factory farms and miles of soybeans and pigs do not provide many opportunities for your young. Comments like Midway remind me of what went wrong, and continues to go wrong.
28
Midway wrote: "Turns out, Trump knew what he was doing. Put the country back to work, stood up to foreign powers, and stood up for labor by announcing we would limit the "invisible" workers with no rights being imported by farms and restaurants for cheap labor."
You are thinking too much in the here-and-now and not into the future. First of all, trump did not “put the country back to work.” Jobs numbers have been rising steadily since 2010, after the sub-prime melt down. Period.
Leaving negotiating tables by cancelling international agreements and partnering with despots and dictators is a profound failure of strategy of purposefully isolating America-leaving her in the cold. You may not feel it now, but in 5-10 years when the very job people are so happy to have has no customers because trump and Bolton shot-off America’s foot, that will be the end of America as a global player. The result is not “standing up to foreign powers," it’s weakening America for the future to come and it's starting now. China sees the on-ramp and it's entering the trade freeway at 100 mph while the US is putting-on its brakes.
On your count that trump will “limit the "invisible" workers with no rights” – Stop for a minute and consider that US policy of global sanctions and trade tariffs coupled with the unwillingness to establish a living wage in the US (roughly, about $40-$50,000/year) will result in locally higher prices paid for goods and services.
7
The Article I legislature has been a failure almost from the beginning. Envisioned as the primary branch of the federal government, it has proven unable to act except in the rare cases of responding to physical attacks on the US, or being browbeaten into action by especially strong Presidents. Its main task is to pass a budget for the federal government -- how's that been working out? I don't see that adding 150, 15, or 1500 members to the House would make it work any better.
1
But then Nate Silver's site would have to change its name.
And before the predictable comment arrives about how terrible polling is so good riddance, 538's predictions were actually extremely accurate in the midterms. In fact they weren't very far off in the 2016 election, it's just that most people weren't aware of just how fast the polling moved in the very last weeks, after Comey's last minute letter about "reopening the investigation" which I suspect is why, but in any case the balance changed quickly and hugely.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-chance-than-almost-anyone-else/
5
Here's a radical thought: For Federally elected officials, why not consider crossing state lines? We already cross county lines so why not state borders too. There's nothing magical about the state borders and House members are supposed to represent the people in their districts. Sure it poses logistical problems. But it would be more representational. Not gonna happen but it's intriguing isn't it.
10
It's unconstitutional which is probably an issue.
3
It’s crazy that Montana and Wyoming each have only one representative, but then they each have two senators. In trying to give voice to the lesser populated states, the voice of the larger populated states is being stifled. So yes, the fair way to bring some equanimity to this urban-rural divide is to increase House seats, where people feel that they are being fairly represented and the “one man-one vote” principle is being honored in a fairer manner.
It’s anachronistic that each one of our House members represents three-quarters of a million people, while in the U.K. each member of the House of Commons represents 100,000 people. Let’s revive the cube root law and apply it to America’s estimated population in 2020, which “would expand the House to 593 members, after subtracting the 100 members of the Senate.” After all, we are a government of the people, by the people, for the people and we should be represented as such – more the people, more the representatives to ensure that more of our voices are heard.
4
The idea is: people in different regions should be represented.
It's sad to some of us the way you have to live, all jammed in on the coasts and overusing limited natural resources. There's simply too many people on the land in California: that's why it is burning -- manmade problems.
There are still miles and miles of open acreage in the middle of the country. People who live here should get to make the decisions, including on the federal level, of how they are governed. Hence the two bodies of Congress.
We won't have California and New York, Texas and Florida dictating their ways of life to the rest of us. If you choose to live like that, wonderful. The rest of us do not. We live out here, and support ourselves, because we like freedom and do not want rich, removed others telling us how to live, when they cannot even take care of the problems in their own states.
We have guns too. I hope we will all work within a legal system, but with the open borders and lack of law enforcement, it is looking less and less likely that we will solve these problems, nationally, through elections. Let New York take care of New York, let Texas feed Texas, let California put out her fires and decide if it is smart to rebuild in forested canyons designed to burn every few decades...
We have the freshwater wealth here, and ultimately, our natural resources are richer than all the corporate dollars in the world. Lots of you have sold out to your wealthy "betters", but for what?
3
I think part of the problem is there are many non-citizens in the current population. Non-citizens do not get to have political representation in our country. They cannot vote, legally. They don't count as constituents. That's why they are so attractive to management, corporations, and politicians. No legal rights, but willing to be exploited for pennies.
We need to secure our borders before we go tinkering with any ideas of having more representatives. Again, non-citizens do not count when it comes to determining America's representatives. They are essentially invisible non-people, with no rights or representation here. Come in through the front door, like so many other legal immigrants do, and you can not only vote but call yourself an American too.
Wait and do it legally.
Smart for family planning, immigrating, and making a buck.
3
I thought of Paul Krugman's column about the real America and Senate America after reading your comment.
So people in your state have guns. Should we be intimidated, or merely impressed? Open borders didn't just murder a dozen people in Pittsburgh and another dozen in Thousand Oaks. American citizens did that. With guns.
No one is telling you how to live. You, like all of us, have the freedom to choose your own career path, religion, life partner, reproductive outcomes, and any number of other personal choices.
What no one is free to do however, is infringe on the rights of others. That includes my neighbors who cast the EPA as Nazis and insist that they have the right to pollute the air that I breathe because Freedom. If I believed in god I'd have thanked her a thousand times over for all the EPA has done over the years to protect the the systems which sustain us all, including your water resources.
3
Seems like it would be unwieldy to have that many members. Even the size of the office building would have to be increased. But districts do need to be equalized. Maybe district boundaries, there is no doubt Gerrymandering has to be stopped.
1
Maybe some of yous need to man up and relocate like the pioneers did.
If you're running out of open spaces and people to regulate in your own regions, pack it up and come plow your own piece of land...
When you live here, you can have a vote here.
Until then, you stick with your representation and learn to respect the representatives that other peoples in other regions choose to best represent our own interests. Hint: we don't need more government, we need less...
Congress does not address national issues until they are forced.
Let's not pretend these people really have any power... it's all artificial. Nancy Pelosi is 78, long past her days of power or decisionmaking.
1
Did you know that Mitch McConnell, over there in the Senate, is only 2 years younger than Sen Pelosi ? I trust you will be equally fair in assessing his "days of power or decision making". (Personally, I'd like to see all our senior statesmen invest in developing new leaders and let them take the reins.) As for your comment in your follow-up post- " We won't have California and New York, Texas and Florida dictating their ways of life to the rest of us." The point of this article is to show you how you folks in less populated state get to use your disproportionate power to control and dictate to the rest of us. Bad enough it happens in the Senate, but that is happens in the House too is unfair. If you actually care about democratic principles and fairness, you would be genuinely concerned about this lack of balance. This isn't a power grab. Its is about fair representation and I think the ideas in the article are worth serious consideration for ALL our benefit.
8
"Did you know that Mitch McConnell, over there in the Senate, is only 2 years younger than Sen Pelosi ?"
Rep. Nancy Pelosi is not a Senator.