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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.
Published in General
I think that should be for any government job. X years of government service then you get to go work in the private sector. I have seen too many government workers with little fiefdoms of their own.
Hey, you might even know your Congress Critter.
The Senate has to assemble, but there is nothing I could read in the Constitution that requires the House to all be in one place. Yes, it would be insane with that many people being active on a video conference, but we don’t need that: we just need them all to be present. Committees would be small, and numerous. There might be layers of committees. The representatives would quickly organize themselves by coalition, working to find ways to make their voice heard in the crowd, ideally with the crowd.
So some procedures would need to change. The roll as described here, if each name and “Yea” or “Nay” took 2 seconds, would take almost 4 hours.
174 thousand dollars each, we currently spend 93 million dollars a year on our Congress Critters. At current pay rates, that would be 1.4 Billion dollars. That is a lot of money, but I’m sure we could find things to cut. Like aides.
We need to give the States reason to take back power, and need to give Congress a reason to become less invasive. Both groups are guilty of handing off their jobs to the voters.
For any government job… except the Justices. They get forever.
By the way, I say this because it seems like no one realizes this, but the House of Representatives already does electronic voting.
Roll call votes do still occur, but they’re rare, usually for things like impeachment or declarations of war (or similar war resolutions). They also elect the speaker by roll call at the beginning of a new Congress.
Not just aides and staff salaries. They get housing allotments, and funding for their offices in DC and back in their state. This inevitably means staffers, if you keep all these offices open.
Their are other perks for clothing, haircuts, travel, etc, that are all on someone else’s dime, not out of their salary. Imagine how little we’d see of them – and I say that with great relish – if they had to pay for travel out of pocket?
Where I appreciate the sentiment of the OP, it’s not how many jerks per million that will fix anything. The fact is that the state budgets are intrinsically linked to the federal budget, via entitlements. That is what motivates the critters in Congress, and in the states, and why any discussion around number of representatives, how long they should serve, what color shirts they should wear, etc, is essentially meaningless without addressing the most critical of concerns, which is federalism.
It’s dead, of course. And without it, the momentum only goes one way. I think what’s been done is unlikely to be undone, until debt service as a percentage of the federal budget eats up all discretionary spending, including defense, and enough people decide to tar and feather whatever gaggle of idiots happen to be in office at the time, and return power to the states, and rectify a century of wrong.
New Hampshire’s House of Representatives has 400 members who each represent about 3,300 residents. By contrast the New Hampshire State Senate has only 24 members.