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Congress Is Broken. Let’s Fix It.
The founders gave us a wonderful system, and it has served us well for over 230 years. This I must believe, as an American. Those people spent a lot of time working out how best, considering all of history, to make a nation last. So, what is this system they created? Broken down into relevant parts, it is the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Executive (no branch, they didn’t create the three letter alphabet soup that now is placed under the Executive), and the Justice System.
Why so many moving parts? First off, it’s true that the people, and what they think, matters. However, people are subject to flights of popular fantasy (see: Democrats), and our constitution respects this. So we get a lot of parts to our federal government to try and respect both what people think right now, but also to temper those thoughts with time.
The House is “chosen every second Year by the People of the several States,” by electors as necessary, and may impeach people. This group represents the Will of the People, and, at the time of election, not delayed at all. Whatever is in the popular mood will be represented here. At the first census, there were 105 representatives, for one representative per 37 thousand Americans.
State Legislatures, although not actually a part of the Federal Government, are a very important to the workings of federalism. Choose them as you please, People of the several States, and the feds will work with you. Perhaps they are chosen every year, perhaps every two, perhaps every ten. Whatever it is, this body represents the Will of the People, though delayed by some number of years (let’s call it at least one, due to my ignorance on these matters in 1788).
The Executive is chosen by Electors, themselves chosen in the manner dictated by the State Legislatures. The Executive represents the Will of the People, delayed by at least a year.
The Senate (as originally intended) is “composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof,” and they keep a term of 6 years. This body represents the Will of the People, delayed by (at least) one to seven years.
The Judicial Branch consists of judges that serve a lifetime tenure (let’s call it thirty years), and are appointed by a joint effort of the Executive and the Senate. Since only half the senate must confirm, the Justices chosen, at the time of their choosing, represent the Will of the People, delayed by at least five years, and at the time of their retirement represent the Will of the People delayed by, perhaps, thirty five years.
All in all, our government is pretty immune to the whims of the People of the Several States, while still respecting their wishes on current legislation. Except we did a few things to screw it up.
1913 – We passed the 17th Amendment, making the Senate represent the Will of the People delayed by between zero and six years, and cut the State Legislatures mostly out of the loop.
1929 – A good year, I’m sure, except for a little thing passed in June, called the Reapportionment Act of 1929, with which Congress gave up. Congress was tired of redistricting, and figuring out a new number of electors every time there was a census, so they permitted states to do their own gerrymandering, fixed the number of representatives at 435. With the 1920 Census giving us 106 million people, each Congressman represented 244 thousand Americans.
1940 – Congress decided that giving up was smart, so they decided that future reapportionment would be automatic. Each member of the House represented 326 thousand Americans.
By changing our Congress so completely in just 30 years, we have made a right mess of it today. With about 320 million people in the nation today, each member of the House represents 736 thousand Americans. Congress is slow, partisan, and hated by everybody.
Something cool happened between 1940 and now. We got computers. We can get 8 thousand people to vote on something in a matter of seconds, tally the votes, put them on screen, and record who voted for what for public records (to show no funny business while tallying votes). And this is how our House of Representatives should work.
We should pass a 28th amendment repealing the 17th. Of course constitutional amendments take time, so in the meanwhile we should declare that, with the 2020 census, Congress shall grow the House to represent 40 thousand Americans per member. That gives us 8 thousand representatives. Manhattan would have 41. Dallas would have 29. This will even get rid of those nagging for an abolition of the Electoral College, since with 8100 electors there should be a much more representative number of electors allocated to each state. Congresspeople would have smaller numbers of people to convince, smaller places to run campaigns, fewer dollars needed to reach those people, and life would get drastically better.
Let’s fix Congress: make the House of Representatives Represent us, and the Senate represent our States.
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You’ve got my vote.
Excellent post.
Footnote. This might even break the two party system, because once you get a representative enough group, even with first past the post voting, people choose people who agree with them more, rather than those under a convenient faction.
I and I think many need to educate ourselves on the 17th amendment. Does anybody know why it was thought necessary and created? There is a lot of great discussions about the original constitution by very great minds but the later change I am much more murky about. I know it was because of perceived state corruption but I would be interested in what actually pushed the law and some debate on its creation from many points of view. Any suggestions?
Essentially, State Legislatures were prissy children.
According to the illustrious Wikipedia, as many as 10 senators over time were found to have bought their seats on the Senate, and many legislatures could not decide on their new senators “a Senate seat for Delaware went unfilled from 1899 until 1903,” “a full third of the Oregon House of Representatives choosing not to swear the oath of office in 1897 due to a dispute over an open Senate seat.”
A quick fix to the latter: if you don’t choose a new Senator, it’s as if you elected your current senator again. Enough people would be willing, if things were bad enough, to replace their senator rather than keep disagreeing on new people.
Yeah I already google-fu the topic and got the Saturn view of the issue. I was hoping for a bit more. The dead lock issue is easily fixed by letting the governor appoint if the state legislature can not figure it out. The corruption issue is always there and is not removed by direct vote.
Seems to me the better method would be to allow the state to determine how they want to determine their senators, so they could have the legislatures vote,electorate vote, governor appointment or whatever the state determined.
The 17th amendment wasn’t the right solution.
There is a retired history professor named Larry Schweikert who has said some very interesting things about this topic. One of his points is the direct election of Senators means that their number one purpose is to steal as much from the treasury as they can and give it to their constituents. What a mess.
Along with the 16th Amendment, it was a “Revenge of the
NerdsRobber Barons” moment in history. And the Income Tax gave them much more to steal.What I would propose is that state legislators have the power to impeach a Senator with a 60% vote and a Governor’s signature. Thus someone like Murkowski could be removed for her lousy vote on Kavanaugh. Here in Indiana, Joe Donnelly is up for reelection, so we wouldn’t have bothered.
This is the first creative thing I’ve heard about this.
Schweikert is the only conservative that I’ve ever heard say that they really did have a problem back then and that they had to do something, but clearly, the direct election was a bad idea. I really wish one of the ricochet podcasts would interview him on this topic. He has a great Twitter feed.
The enemies are centralization, cultural Marxism, and the media. Every Republican politician should be focused on that.
I first read of this solution maybe 20 years ago by George Will. It could be done through a convention of the states, but my guess is that you’d never get congressmen to vote to dilute their power by a factor of 20.
But why would they do that in (Liberal) Republican Alaska? There is a reason she won election as a write-in and it doesn’t involve Establishment Conspiracy, as least not more than minimally so.
If they were more small r republican and less partisan they would do so. I blame Republican Primary voters as they (we) are the ones who could fix this if we would do so. I’ve been registered as a Republican for decades for the sole reason of being able to be involved in the process early enough to occasionally help a good (or less bad) candidate get the nomination.
That’s what I always thought, but someone from Alaska said it was more complicated than that, here on ricochet. I don’t get why they didn’t come up with a plan for Senators that had to switch their position on this. It’s outrageous.
Having said that, I would think the delivery of medical services in Alaska would be a pretty complicated problem.
If the ACA were wiped out we would still end up with universal multi payer. Everyone would get covered. They should’ve chilled out for year, if they weren’t ready politically. Just do a bunch of Town halls, first.
Lisa Murkowski’s Republicanism is pretty tenuous. She lost in the Republican primary last time, then won as an independent in the general election. I’m surprised she caucuses with the Republicans.
One of the points that guy made was the other senator is pretty conservative. I have a feeling machine politics and graft play a role.
Some role for sure but not, I think, the largest one. Alaskan voters are pretty Liberal (Statist is the term I think most descriptive here) not withstanding the election of Sarah Palin as Governor, that was an outlier. Alaskans have the image of rugged individualism but they like their State subsidies just fine thank you, not a small r position.
While there are many reasons for this, some I’m surely not aware of, the expense of living in such a challenging climate must be a major contributor.
Didn’t Joni Ernst say she would “fix” Washington?
If the GOP doesn’t get realistic about universal multi payer and the unique problems some states have, we are going to get single-payer the hard way. If they would just go with a transparent subsidy system and be very frank about how it could get hijacked by the Democrats, that is the best you’re going to do. They should just put Avik Roy in charge of all of it.
John McCain was honest in 2008 about discussing the possibility of wiping out employer-based insurance for a different system. Then Obama of course pounced that McCain was going to take away your healthcare. Now the ACA, with its Cadillac tax is wiping out employer-based insurance without telling anybody. That is not my view that is the view of an expert. In addition to that all of the cross subsidization and gigantic deductibles are nothing but redistribution done by regressive taxation. Then throw in the narrowed networks. It’s a dishonest way to force single-payer. Everyone is going to cry uncle at some point and submit to the socialists.
The GOP has to get realistic about this.
Currently the Constitution demands only one thing of the state governments: that they have a Legislature. And currently the Executive is chosen by whatever means the State Legislature thinks is necessary. The Senate is chosen differently, on purpose.
That would effectively eliminate the balance between states and popular vote. A populate vote is a bad thing. It leads to big urban areas dominating rural states. The founders faced that situation and purposefully avoided popular election of executive. If we are going to change it, the fallback to Electoral College deadlock, is one vote per state, is the direction to move.
Also, I don’t buy the premise that Congress is broken. It is only supposed to do a few things that most of people agree on. Where there is not consensus (or scope), the states are there to do what needs to be done. We don’t need a parliamentary system at the federal level. Nope!
Expanding the House was the subject of literally the first Op-Ed Jonah Goldberg ever had published, in teh Wall Street Journal, back in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
And it hasn’t happened yet? What’s taking us so long?
With the Senate back with the States, we’d have the House be popular, and the Senate be the slower moving, People of the State Government.
At this point though, the Federal level is where we focus our attentions. The States sort of play a back burner role – a role that would be much increased should the States be responsible for the Senate, instead of the people.
To quiet the “Electoral College is Unfair” crowd, we could make every state follow the Nebraska / Maine model – 2 EV for the winner of the State, and 1 EV per congressional district. The democrats can cheat in big cities all they want – some rural votes will get through in big states like California and New York. And the President would need to get very close to a majority of the congressional districts to be elected, even with the extra 100 EV votes for the states.
What would be the ramifications of expanding the Senate – instead of two Senators per state, have 10…