Jul 14th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Representative Government, Now More Than Ever
US Capitol Building
I think Ryan Avent is thinking too hard here:
What’s the right amount of democracy? Progressives have become increasingly incensed at the anti-majoritarian rules of the Senate, which seem specially designed to avert popular, and often sensible, progressive legislation. On the other hand: ballot initiatives.
The answer is representative government. What the Senate does is combine an unrepresentative system of election with an arbitrary bias toward the status quo. And it’s not merely the filibuster—bicameralism plus committees is already a lot of veto points.
43 Responses to “Representative Government, Now More Than Ever”
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July 14th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
It matters not what the rules are as long as elected officials are corporate sponsored.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Yeah, but Ryan is from California. He has earned his right to detest ballot initiatives.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I think Ryan gets it wrong on California.
Initiatives wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it wasn’t for 2/3rds – ballot-box budgeting has been used primarily as an end-run around 2/3rds and Republican opposition to new spending on important policy issues.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Propose a SOLUTION, already: restore the principle on which the Revolution was fought — that population COMPELS representation.
That is, no state that gains population should lose a representative in the US House. We have more than tripled the total # of Americans since the 1910 census, added two whole states (and four Senators), yet not one US representative district.
That’s nuts. It’s the opposite of what the Founders intended, and reverses the practice for the first 120 years of the Republic.
If we returned to the practice of adding seats to the House every ten years, representative politics would automatically improve, because it would no longer be a zero-sum game.
Anybody wants to know more, email me.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I agree Ryan is making an apples and oranges comparison. The Senate rules only directly empower a minority of Senators, and only when they are defending the status quo. Now that may end up de facto empowering a minority of voters/citizens/people in some cases, but it doesn’t always have to work that way.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Didn’t we have the exact opposite opinion of fillibusters during the whole ‘nuclear option’ fiasco a year or two ago?
July 14th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Wait, didn’t the status-quo bias of the Senate save us a world of hurt back during the Bush days?
July 14th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
@3:
As a Californian I would argue that California is too large and diverse to govern with our constitutional structure. We should be 3 states. Bad ballot initiatives are just a symptom of a failed system.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
@6:
Isn’t the use of the filibuster as a routine procedural tactic for all legislation now just a bit different from those times when it was used to block a couple of judicial nominees?
July 14th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
theAmericanist – the problem is that there are 300 million Americans, and that number keeps growing. And there is an upper bound to the size that a legislature can get and still be a functioning institution. This also would not fix the problem with the Senate.
kid destroyer – I didn’t. I was all for eliminating the filibuster, because in the long run I knew that progressives want to change the status quo more than conservatives, and because I knew that the Democratic caucus was too weak to pull a real filibuster off on a couple of Supreme Court nominations.
Dim – seems to me that California was functionally governed, well up to the 1970s, and it was pretty big then. Given that we are constitutionally barred from splitting, I think it’s a waste of effort.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Did it? What legislation did the minority Democrats block during the Bush period? The Gang of 14 agreement, for example, was an agreement not to filibuster. The whole nuclear threat was the idea that if the Democrats ever did filibuster, the Republicans would just toss out the filibuster rule.
Yes, SS was left mostly untouched, but that was because touching SS was wildly unpopular, not because the Democrats successfully used the filibuster.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
4: Dude, it is pretty obviously a zero-sum game. Let’s slow down with the crazy talk.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Also, CA is definitely not too big. The problem is 2/3 budget requirement. It’s real simple. The best the public can do is throw out the party in power when things are bad. So they need to be able to do stuff or you can get caught in limbo.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Didn’t we have the exact opposite opinion of fillibusters during the whole ‘nuclear option’ fiasco a year or two ago?
I don’t know which “we” you’re referring to, but Matt certaintly didn’t. He thought they should go, but (as I recall) that they should be dispensed with according to the existing procedures for rule changes, not just by Republican decree, and altogether, not just for judges.
Wait, didn’t the status-quo bias of the Senate save us a world of hurt back during the Bush days?
What, you mean by preventing senseless wars? And destructive tax cuts?
July 14th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I wouldn’t call theAmericanist’s idea crazy, but I don’t see how having twice the number of Congressional reps (but the same number of Senators) would solve anything. The House seems to be working reasonably well and is pushing the ball pretty far on the progressive agenda. Plus, there’s the not insignificant problem of the fact that the House chamber would not be nearly large enough to seat 800+ members and expanding it is really not an option.
No, the problem lies with the anti-democratic senate. Not only have Republicans successfully introduced the notion that the minority should be able to stop any bill from coming up for a vote–the Senate is inherently anti-democratic in its composition. Whites and rural voters are MASSIVELY overrepresented. There is currently one African American senator, and after the 2010 election it is not unlikely that there will be none. This is a major problem.
A step in the right direction would be DC statehood. This would give us one majority black, majority urban state to slightly counterbalance the affirmative action for whites and rural areas that is the current US Senate.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
What, you mean by preventing senseless wars? And destructive tax cuts?
DTM made this point yesterday better than I will make it today, but these are bad example to use for your point.
Iraq was a biparitsan decision, so no Senete rules mattered one way or another.
The lack of 60 votes for the tax cuts resulted in them being temporary instead of permenant. This lets Obama “allow the cuts to expire” as opposed to “raising taxes” a distinction without a difference in real terms, but one that has real political implications.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
@15: First of all making DC a state would be massively and blantantly unconstitutional (as opposed to giving DC a Representative which is only run of the mill unconstitutional.)
Secondly, the overrepresentation of rural areas is one of the explicit goals of the Senete, to give them a voice and not cause their issues to be drowned out by the superior numbers of the urban areas which by dent of their population will always control the House. This is a feature, not a bug.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I agree that to some extent, the Senate is working as it was designed, though I cannot say with any certainty that the current situation is as the founding fathers would have wanted. All that said, just because the Senate was designed to give rural/low population areas a greater say in the government doesn’t mean that the Senate isn’t “buggy”. That just means it is flawed by design rather than by accident.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
DTM made this point yesterday better than I will make it today, but these are bad example to use for your point.
Your observations are fair enough, but my point was simply that (contra Anthony Damiani) “the status-quo bias of the Senate” did NOT in fact “save us a world of hurt back during the Bush days”. The war and the tax cuts (permanent or not) brought a hell of a lot of hurt.
Secondly, the overrepresentation of rural areas is one of the explicit goals of the Senete, to give them a voice and not cause their issues to be drowned out by the superior numbers of the urban areas which by dent of their population will always control the House. This is a feature, not a bug.
To the extent that this is an accurate rendering of the original purpose of the Senate, it’s still a bug. You say rural “issues” but that’s just a euphemism for “interests”. Why should the constitution provide an extra layer of protection for a particular set of interests, regardless of the (shrinking) portion of the population which shares them? “Because Thomas Jefferson thought farmers were more virtuous than other people” is not a good enough reason. Representation should be based on population, period. If cities are where the people live, so be it.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Hey Americanist – the count is 4 whole states since 1910.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
You could have an upper house that debates but doesn’t so much legislate.
In Ireland though they made Yeats a senator and here they’d give away seats on reality TV and to people who made a fortune on parking lots, and mail order cleaning products.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Secondly, the overrepresentation of rural areas is one of the explicit goals of the Senete, to give them a voice and not cause their issues to be drowned out by the superior numbers of the urban areas which by dent of their population will always control the House.
Interesting re-write of history there, JD. Maybe you should go back and a Google on the “Connecticut Compromise” – the issue back in 1787 wasn’t rural vs urban where “overrepresentation of rural areas is one of the explicit goals of the Senete” – there weren’t enough urban areas or states back then where that would even be an issue.
The idea of what was meant by a “State” (as an sovereign political entity all it’s own as opposed to just an administrative unit of the federal government) and the “sovereign rights” of States was much different back then than it is now. The reason why the Senate is the way it is has everything to do with protecting the rights of the small states vis-a-vis the big states. Back in the day a larger state such as Virginia or New York was probably as much rural as a smaller state such as Delaware or New Jersey -except that because the larger states geographically had much more land. As that land was settled (presumably as rural areas – the impact of the industrial revolution wasn’t even considered at the time), the fear was that the geographically larger States would naturally also end up with the most Representatives because they had room to grow and add to their population at the expense of the smaller states without room to grow. Putting it into rural/urban terms is wayyyyy off-base.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
You guys haven’t really thought about it much.
1) “…there is an upper bound to the size that a legislature can get and still be a functioning institution…” Unchallenged assumption.
Sez who? And why accept without questioning that 435 is the magic # for America? Britain has fewer people, and half again as many in the House of Commons. The effectiveness of a legislature is a function of organization, not size — go to a city council meeting sometime, where you’ll often find 7 people who can’t get a majority to agree to proceed to consideration of any damned thing.
2) “…there’s the not insignificant problem of the fact that the House chamber would not be nearly large enough to seat 800+ members and expanding it is really not an option.”
Yeah, that’s why we HAVE to betray the Founding premise of the United States: one room in Washington (built nearly a century later) is just too small.
When you’re looking at structural problems, consider structural solutions: if you pose “the problem” as a continuum that’s somewhere between direct democracy through ballot initiatives (much beloved by the Wall Street Journal editorial writers cuz it means democracy is reduced to corporate ad campaigns), and the minority obstruction allowed by the rules of the Senate, it just seems sensible to consider, yanno, that quaint concept of “representative” government — a republic, if we can keep it.
A couple points:
First, the Senate was intended to be a distinct and essentially anti-democratic body. But that wasn’t because of the filibuster (which nobody anticipated), it was because Senators were not directly elected, but rather chosen by in effect by their peers: state legislators. FDR’s first campaign be damned (to his own state legislature) — much of the problems with modern American democracy are directly related to the incredible pace a Senate candidate must raise money. Why? Because they’re directly elected. Want to break the back of corporate control over American politics? Repeal the direct election of Senators.
Second, House districts are not drawn to be ‘representative’, in any ordinary sense of the term. They are drawn so that politicians pick their voters, rather than voters choosing their politicians. That’s why the zero-sum character of apportionment after each census is so pernicious.
There are a lot of ways to deal with that. My own proposal is simply to require that no state that gains population should lose a representative — as NY and Massachusetts have for half a century now.
But you could even triple the size of the House, for example, which would mean roughly 1,200 US representatives for 300 million people, about where the ratio was in 1910. (For comparison, Britain has 646 MPs representing 60 million people.) For those who cannot imagine such a… democratic form of a representative government cuz of the size of the room, well, you can always take the view “the problem is that there are 300 million Americans, and that number keeps growing.”
How do you solve THAT, I wonder: Eugenics? Close the borders? Some “modest proposal”?
Get serious — there are more Americans now than they’re used to be, and there will continue to be more of us indefinitely into the future. So the question is whether we really believe in this “We, the People” thing, or not.
Well? There’s a damned well-funded approach to making it all just corporate ad campaigns — see anything written by John Fund, the friend of the common man.
Finally, if you want a real solution to the difficulties posed by greater representation (requiring greater party discipline) based on the ACTUAL principle of the American Revolution — just use modern communications: let Members of the House (but NOT the Senate) cast floor votes from their districts.
(wicked smile) But Committees should continue to be required to do their work IN Washington — thus forcing members to choose if they want to be workhorses or show horses.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Secondly, the overrepresentation of rural areas is one of the explicit goals of the Senete, to give them a voice and not cause their issues to be drowned out by the superior numbers of the urban areas which by dent of their population will always control the House. This is a feature, not a bug.
This can’t be an original goal of the Senate structure, because back at the time the Senate was devised, rural areas collectively had greater population than urban areas. In fact, the national flipover point (from majority rural to majority urban) wasn’t until between the 1910 and 1920 Censuses.
Moreover, this theory also doesn’t make sense of cases like Rhode Island, an overrepresented state which is basically a city-state. In fact, in addition to Rhode Island, Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah are all substantially overrepresented in the Senate, and yet have substantially above-average urban population percentages.
Rather, rural overrepresentation in the Senate is actually an unintended byproduct of allocating Senate representation by fixed geographic areas. That necessarily means that over time, the areas that experience less population growth will gain greater per capita representation. In turn, because urban populations have been growing faster than rural populations in the United States, that means the more rural states will end up having less population growth. Put all this together, and voila: you get rural overrepresentation. And this unintended effect will just keep getting worse as the urbanization process continues.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Secondly, the overrepresentation of rural areas is one of the explicit goals of the Senete, to give them a voice and not cause their issues to be drowned out by the superior numbers of the urban areas which by dent of their population will always control the House. This is a feature, not a bug.
Yes, and it’s a bad feature. It made sense when the drafters of the Constitution wanted to prevent a political climate like those common in 18th century Western European monarchies and hold together a loose union of nearly-independent states, but those are moronic concerns if you’re still worried about them these days.
The superior numbers of urban areas, assuming other anti-majoritarian and pro-status quo biases also built into the system, is supposed to drown out the votes of areas with less population. That’s democracy, if you’ll make allowances for great simplification.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Yeah, Andy is right — it’s four states since 1910.
IIRC, the actual sequence is the 1910 Census, the last increase in the House to 435, the 1920 census, the proposal to add seats again (which was routinely done after EVERY census up that point), by which time New Mexico and Arizona had been admitted (1912?).
So I was thinking that since 1920, the last time Congress even CONSIDERED its reason for existence, we’ve added two states and four Senators, but not a single additional US representative. (There were a few years when there were more than 435, but the got DE-apportioned after Alaska and Hawaii.)
BTW, since nobody has brought it up: the reason why rural members (the majority in the 1920s) voted down additional seats was because, for the first time, the 435 US Representatives in the 1920s realized that THEIR power was a zero sum game. In those days before one man, one vote prevailed, the balance of power in the House was rural districts, who realized that continuing to expand the House simply diluted their power and shifted it toward the urban districts that would be created if the House had gone, as it would have had the history been followed, to 475 around 1926. So they stopped that, with the temporary advantage that rural representatives (i.e., those who represented fewer people) held the balance of power in the House until one man, one vote prevailed.
But the literally unAmerican idea they injected into the system, that more and more Americans could be represented by precisely the same # of Representatives — a literally zero sum approach — has persisted to this day, for ONLY two reasons: One, no member of Congress wants to admit that their district could be better served by being smaller and having another, equal representative, and two, “We, the People” don’t love our Congress — I actually had Ralph Nader tell me once that he’d rather we have FEWER representatives in Congress, so America could be governed by lawsuits and street demonstrations.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
The superior numbers of urban areas, assuming other anti-majoritarian and pro-status quo biases also built into the system, is supposed to drown out the votes of areas with less population. That’s democracy, if you’ll make allowances for great simplification.
I don’t really disagree with this. Rather I think that giving each State an equal number of votes raising impact of the opinions of the less populated states is a very simple anti-majoritarian measure, and I think a pretty good one. Other anti-majoritarian measures like the filibuster end up being pretty gimicky and open to being gamed. Simply having a system where half of the bicamerial legislature is structures in a way that increases the relative voice of smaller areas while decreasing the relative voice of larger areas seems a more elegant solution IMO.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
there is an upper bound to the size that a legislature can get and still be a functioning institution.
You could go from 435 to 650 in the House, I’d suggest, without massive dysfunction. The argument that large states should continue to be under-represented in the population-apportioned House on account of interior design really does have its problems.
All of the discussion on the federal government misses an important element — that state legislatures are usually fucking hopeless. How do you change that?
July 14th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
This is nonsense. When the Constitution was written, all states were rural. Virginia had by far the largest population, and had about 3% of its people living in urban areas. The most urban state was Rhode Island, with about 20% of its people in urban centers.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
“…the discussion on the federal government misses an important element — that state legislatures are usually fucking hopeless. How do you change that?”
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had thrown away the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
If you don’t like how the people who win elections vote, run for office.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
1. Sez me. And sez most of political science research on the topic. I’m not defending 435 particularly, it could probably go up to 500. But after a certain point, there’s so many people that nn one knows anyone else (think of the difference between a small liberal arts college and a large state college), you can’t fit everyone in the same building, either committees are so large they can’t function or there are so many that they don’t do anything, etc. Prove me wrong. Show me a well functioning legislature with the number of reps we’d need to get rep-to-pop down to a reasonable ratio in a nation of 300 million people.
2. The direct election of Senators is a good thing, and has increased, rather than reduced democracy. You don’t think corporations can’t buy state legislatures? Read the history of the 19th century senate, and you’ll read about an institution crawling with corruption because no one was accountable to anyone but their cronies.
3. Another solution would be to eliminate election by district and move to a state-wide or nation-wide party list system. No less democratic than any other system.
4. One-man-one-vote hardly prevailed back before 1920. For one thing, women couldn’t vote. And blacks were actively being disenfranchised. And prior to Grey v. Snaders, one-man-one-vote wasn’t the law of the land.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
That would make the electoral college more fair, but it doesn’t really affect congress. Also, the degree to which large states get shafted by quantization effects of a small legislature are overstated. Montana has 1/37 the population of California, but gets only 1/53 the representation in the House.
The big problem is the senate. In 1789, the biggest state was only about 17 times the size of the smallest state. That disparity has grown by more than a factor of 4. California is about 68 times the population of Wyoming. There were not a lot of very small states in 1789- most were mid sized. The population of the smallest 7 of the original 13 colonies was about 30% of the population. Now, the 26 smallest states comprise about 16% of the population. If you’re only looking for a filibuster block, you can just have states with 11% of the population – less than the population of California. The congressional delegations of states representing only 11% of the population should not have the power to bring congress to a complete halt.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Abolish the Senate.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Show me a well functioning legislature with the number of reps we’d need to get rep-to-pop down to a reasonable ratio in a nation of 300 million people.
Certainly the example of the Galactic Senate gives one pause.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Njorl: I typed out and deleted much of what you said. Canada copes with the disparate size and population of its provinces by having a regional apportionment in the Senate. Russia has a fairly arcane hierarchy of administrative regions, which accommodates the population and expanse of the nation.
So if you want ab ovo innovation, then I think it would need to be through regional institutions between the states and the federal government.
That’s not going to happen, though; nor are California and Texas going to split into smaller states any time soon, in spite of the latter’s constant dick-swinging over the prospect. Restoring some degree of accountability to state legislatures, where the member/population ratios are manageable, might be the most feasible option.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Abolish the Senate.
Yes, so we can an urbanocracy. Those people who were unfortunate enough not to be born in the rust belt or the coasts can just go screw themselves!
/snark
July 14th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Other anti-majoritarian measures like the filibuster end up being pretty gimicky and open to being gamed. Simply having a system where half of the bicamerial legislature is structures in a way that increases the relative voice of smaller areas while decreasing the relative voice of larger areas seems a more elegant solution IMO.
How is something so arbitrary and capricious more “elegant”? There are an infinite number of ways you could draw state lines such that very different minorities of the population ended up overrepresented, so why would the particular distribution of representation that we have be the one that just happens to generate optimal policy results? That is wildly implausible.
Conversely, if you provided for equal representation but instituted a consitutional supramajority rule, that would allow Senators to freely form whatever status-quo-favoring blocking minorities they so desired on various issues. I personally think that is a bad idea, but at least it would have some basis in logic.
The bottomline is that if we were designing a system of government from stratch (including with respect to state boundaries), we would never in a gazillion years come up with the allocation of representation we have in the Senate. Accordingly, I really think it is just status quo bias (and sometimes vested interests) that leads people to attempt to rationalize the status quo in the Senate.
July 14th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
LOL — “Sez me. And sez most of political science research on the topic…”
Well, THAT settles it. The mothership Rochester has figured it out. Hell, just look at the Galactic Senate….
It is truly impressive, the number of you guys who have independently discovered the Connecticut Compromise. Good thing we have all those political science departments, huh?
What demonstrates how little you guys have actually thought about it (I excuse what you’re doing, cuz it’s not quite “thinking”, but you don’t know that yet), is stuff like: “Another solution would be to eliminate election by district and move to a state-wide or nation-wide party list system. No less democratic than any other system.”
Yeah — if you’re a moron.
First — people live in these things called “places”, which contain things called “homes”. Homes are generally grouped into particular places, which depending on size, are known as “neighborhoods” and even “cities”. It has been generally understood since long before folks who can’t demonstrate they can predict anything decided they were practicing “political science”, that people who live in particular places make up what are known as “communities”.
Second — communities are not like clubs. Defined geographically, they are inclusive: if you live there, you’re one of the people who lives in that place. So — as folks unafflicted by political science have understood for millenia — the most solid way to build a polity is to begin with people who live in a place.
Third — this is why it is flat-out wrong to have politicians pick their voters, as MUST be done with zero-sum redistricting, rather than restore the principle that voters choose their representatives. (I know, I know — the example is far too clear and rooted in the practical application of principle to suit “political scientists”, who are so sure that — well, what exactly are they said to be sure of? That 435 is the perfect # for the US House? No, can’t be that — after I pointed out it ain’t, one guy said “it could go to 500″, and another said, “maybe 650″. Obviously a matter y’all have given a lot of thought — but, hey, you’re SURE that some number, some day, would be too big, so why apply principle to practice? That wouldn’t be “political science”.
“show me a well functioning legislature with the number of reps we’d need to get rep to pop down to a reasonable ratio in a number of 300 million people…”
More proof you’ve never thought about it: since the US is a relatively large nation, and there aren’t that many democracies, the sample is small — which makes the confusion in the challenge even more obvious, to those of us who HAVE thought about it.
I mentioned Britain — 60 million people, 650 Members of Parliament.
Then you have India — 1.1 billion people, 545 in their lower house.
I wouldn’t count China, but for comparison there are 3,000 members of the National People’s Congress ‘representing’ about 1.4 billion people.
Indonesia, in the ballpark for comparing population (230 million people), still has more than 100 more members of its House: 550.
So much for size/ratio comparisons, that pesky application of principles to practice that “political science” does such a bangup job avoiding.
Face it: the effectiveness of a legislature has little to do with size, nor even with the the ratio that determines its ‘representative’ character — it’s a straightforward question of organization, which generally depends on party structure, the independence of members, and what the people want from it. There are city councils with very few members that can’t get anything good done (look at Wasilla), and there are large legislatures that are marvels of efficiency, like China.
But when you look at the structural defects that make up the stuff progressives bitch about — the cost of elections, the power of money in elections, the inertia that resists and dilutes changes we want: they all trace back to the conditions ESTABLISHED by failing to continue adding representation as the nation grew.
So, fix what’s broken. When you’re bitching about structural problems, think about structural solutions — and no, eliminating the Senate and bringing back at-large districts aren’t structural solutions. (LOL — much how StevenAtwell managed to confuse that I noted how ‘before one man, one vote prevailed, the balance of power in the House was rural districts, who realized that continuing to expand the House simply diluted their power and shifted it toward the urban districts that would be created…’ with the opposite. Hell, if you want to bring women and blacks into the RELEVANT discussion, I’d be happy to argue that instead of having 435 men representing 30 million white male voters in 1910, we should have gone to 1,000 Americans representing 100 million Americans in 1920. Speaks a bit more to your point, such as it was.)
July 14th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
theAmericanist:
Your points on zero-sum apportionment and districting are completely valid.
I said 650 because it’s about right for a “Wyoming unit” model of apportionment, whereby Wyoming retains its single representative and larger states get proportionately larger delegations. That number addresses a century of inaction, and shouldn’t be considered as a ceiling.
As Njorl says, restoring some proportionality to state delegations would fix some of the electoral college’s disparities, but doesn’t do much to address the member/pop ratio. (Nor would it make the reps any more “representative”, given the nature of districting.) Addressing that probably requires reform at intermediary levels, whether in existing state institutions or on a regional level.
there are large legislatures that are marvels of efficiency, like China.
I’m not sure if that’s a helpful comparison here.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
The Electoral College is a distraction — it serves no purpose except preserving a genuinely archaic vision for the country that isn’t offset by any useful purpose: planning Presidential campaigns around winning the electoral votes of particular states or certain congressional districts within states isn’t the strangest characteristic of our Presidential elections (that belongs to the primaries, starting with the Iowa Caucuses). And arguing about the way We, the People are represented in terms of the Electoral College is just bass ackwards.
That said, I like the concept of a Wyoming unit, and propose to steal it. (low bow)
July 14th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Why would abolishing the senate favor, say, Ohians over Texans (other than the fact that Texans at present favor the minority party)?
The urban vote only has a majority if you factor in suburbs–central-city voters alone are not a majority of the electorate. Cities and their suburbs very often do not vote as a bloc. It would make no sense, for example, to claim that Georgia is dominated politically by Atlanta. Atlanta proper, though heavily Democratic, has only a small proportion of Georgia’s voters. The whole Atlanta area does have a much greater population than rural Georgia, but it includes the northern suburbs like Gwinnett County that are the largest source of Republican votes in the state. This is the pattern in most of the country–except for a few rural states which are usually ignored anyway (too few EVs and too dominated by one party or the other).
July 14th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
It occurs to me, in a hopelessly wonky manner, that somebody may find it useful how the zero-sum allocation of representation works: after every census from 1800 through 1910, Congress voted on adding US representatives to the House, and often, to add whole states to the Union.
It’s important that the two dynamics were separate and independent: Congress added representatives when it did NOT add states, and states which simply grew in population got more representatives, regardless of the addition of states.
But even though we continued to add states after 1910 (four of ‘em), we stopped adding US representatives.
The modern practice simply re-allocates the 435 among the 50 states, according to the Law of Equal Proportions, with some basic rules: no Congressional district can cross state lines, and each state (like Wyoming) must have at least one US Representative.
Within those rules, the remaining 430-odd Congressional Districts are divided up among the states that have more than one US Representative. Thus, there is a sort of target ratio, along the lines of one Member of Congress for every 630k people. California, being the largest state, will always come closest to that goal.
At the margins, e.g., Delaware, you will find the greatest proportional injustice: that is, there are 740k people in Delaware with one US Representative, while Wyoming has 500k people with one US Representative.
The pernicious nature of this system is evidence when you consider states like New York or Massachusetts, who have steadily (if slowly) grown in population for the past half century, and yet have consistently lost significant political weight.
Much of this is explained away by “political science” types who pick nits while they swallow camels whole: true, New York and Massachusetts have a smaller RELATIVE population compared with the rest of the country, particularly the Southwest.
But the same algebra that accepts ‘fairness’ defined in terms of taking US Representatives away from growing states in the Northeast and giving them to faster growing states in the Southwest, easily demonstrate that it would be considerably more fair in terms of the Law of Equal Proportions, if we had adopted my rule that no state which gains population should lose a representative.
Applying the Wyoming Unit (or perhaps, the Delaware Deal) that would require NOT the ratio of Rep to Pop characterized by the largest state, but the Rep to Pop ratio of the smaller states (the 500k to 1 of Wyoming, or the plus-sum approach of Delaware’s 740k getting 2, for a target of 370 per: the system would always be unfair on the margin, but adding seats would automatically allow that unfairness to be reduced).
This gets even more revealing as the Cause of Much Trouble, when you realize that the #s of VOTERS in the Congressional districts in states that have LOST representation are significantly higher than those which have gained ‘em — the new districts in California and Arizona, for example, regularly register 2/3s, or sometimes even only half the voters of the districts that were lost in NY and Mass.
The idea that we’re somehow making America more democratic by taking representation away from people who can and do vote, to “give” it to people who can’t and don’t, because somebody decided 90 years ago that US representation has to be zero-sum: well, there is a reason why folks scoff at “political science”.
Cuz, let’s face it: this particular true issue is both TOO political and, oddly, too scientific for all these political scientists to consider — they’re rather talk about abolishing the Senate, or the winner-take-all election.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:21 am
We are always talking about getting rid of the Senate. I, for one, would miss the Senate. In fact, the more camerals, the merrier, my pappy used to say.
So let’s add a legislative body and have ourselves some tricameral government. Why not? We could call the new body the Plenipotentiariat; an august assembly of ten or fifteen arrogant bastards picked wholly at random, or by fiat. Or whatever. Who cares?
The elemental idea is served: you can never have enough checks and balances. The more checks and balances you have, the further removed you are from dread tyranny, pinko infiltration, and other despicable things.