You Are Not Well Represented in Congress, But You Should Be!
Congress is broken by design. The Reapportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of Representatives at 435, making it less the People's House and more the Powerful's House.
The New York Times has an opinion piece titled How to Fix America’s Two-Party Problem. Unsurprisingly, the opinion article’s authors, Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman, identify the problem and then pinpoint the wrong solution.
Wegman and Drutman are correct, we are all prisoners of the two party system, dominated by Democrats and Republicans, that has calcified itself in the House of Representatives. And that calcification has spread its way down through state houses and city councils across the country.
Now, if you are a billionaire oligarch or CEO of a large corporation, this power duopoly suits you well. You only have to buy off the two parties, which gets you all the representatives who pledge their allegiance to the parties for their existence. This is also good for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as it ensures their reason for being.
We are left with an illusion of choice. Candidates work hard to get our votes, but end up in Congress representing their party and business interests, not you and me. This disfunction started with the Reapportionment Act of 1929 that capped the number of Representatives at 435.
As the article notes, “From the beginning of the House in 1789 until the early 20th century, its membership grew roughly in line with the U.S. population. At the start, there were about 34,000 constituents per representative; by 1911, that number had grown to more than 200,000 — much larger than the founders intended but still manageable. Today the average district holds more than 760,000 people, which is far too big for any one representative. As a result, tens of millions of Americans are represented by House members they did not support and in a highly polarized environment that leaves people feeling that they are not represented at all.”
Unfortunately, the article then turns to a secondary solution, Proportional Representation, while glossing over the most obvious and necessary solution: expand the size of the House.
The authors then give a pseudo-social scientific path forward on increasing the size of the House as necessary for Proportional Representation to even have a shot at working, "The fix for this problem is to expand the membership of the House of Representatives to reflect the size and diversity of the U.S. population in the 2020s rather than the 1920s. According to many political scientists, the optimal total number of members of the House and the Senate combined is equal to the cube root of the nation’s population. Legislatures in democracies around the world roughly align with this ratio; the U.S. House did, too, until its size was frozen by law at 435. Today the cube-root rule would give us a House with 593 members."
We actually have the clear answer to fixing the House. We must demand close to the same representation that Americans had in the 1920s. The House should triple in size to 1,305 members to achieve a ratio of one representative per 250,000 residents.
After doing the primary work of expanding the House, ideas like Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) or Proportional Representation are playing around the edges.
If we really want to get nuts, keep the Senate at two Senators per state, but make the Senate a veto only body. If the House passes a bill, it will go to the President to sign unless 3/4 of the Senate vetoes the bill. Additionally, the Senate would keep its role with the House to override presidential vetoes with a 2/3 affirmative vote by each body.
Now, neither Democrats or Republicans are going to increase the size of the House, because the parties and their backers know that doing so will increase the power of the people and decrease the power of the billionaire oligarchs and corporations.
In order to create the needed governance change, we need to elect independent Americans to Congress to pass the pro-American policies supported by the large majority of Americans. I hope you will join me in creating a truly independent movement.
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