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Is the problem with congress is that there isn't enough of them?

ivwshane

ivwshane

Lifer
While trying to figure out how many people each congressional representative actually represents (I still haven't found the answer and I'm not looking for an average), it dawned on me that we might have a reason why congress seems to be so messed up.

The constitution states (back me up on this incorruptible😛) that no more than 1 rep for every 30k people, currently each rep represents roughly 700k.

Obviously we can't use the 30k per member number as that would mean 10k representatives (we would have to build a stadium to house them, lol).

But, it is my opinion that people aren't being represented very well right now and when you have so many people to represent its usually the people that yell the loudest which get attention (think of a class room full of kids all talking, who would the teacher listen to?). More representatives means less people per rep which means more influence from that smaller group.

And for those that are all about states rights what about repealing the 17th amendment and going back to a senator being elected via the state legislators. I don't understand the purpose of the popluation of the state electing them. But doing away with the 17th would mean the senators would represent the state, not necessarily the people themselves (but technically since state legislators are elected so they in turn would be voting via proxy).

I thought about putting this in the dead forum but I figured I'd get some good replies from the "crazies" in this forum😛
 
It probably wouldn't be such a great idea for Progressives. New Hampshire pretty much does it the way you are talking about and it's the most free state in our country. I mentioned this before but immediately was called an idiot by the progressives in the forum saying how the NH State Congress was a circus.

Frankly I think the 17th should be repealed. We already have our citizens representitives elected in the House. The Senate was and should be our state government representives.
 
I think the problem is there are too many. Herding cats is increasingly hard the more you have. And more districts makes it easier to carve gerrymandered ones. The HoR should be halved.
 
Gonad the Barbarian said:
I think the problem is there are too many. Herding cats is increasingly hard the more you have. And more districts makes it easier to carve gerrymandered ones. The HoR should be halved.
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Gerrymandering only works if you can group people together, the larger the group the easier it is to disenfranchise them. Less reps means larger groups of people.

Put it this way; a large city of 700k people would be split about 7-8 times where as the smaller cities would be unaffected. That's 6-7 times more the representation it would have. Currently cities are under represented.
 
I am not sure how well this would work in the end, but recently I have been considering something like the following (also not saying it's entirely unique or wildly different):

1. Each state has X number of representatives for the HoR, Y for the Senate.

2. X and Y are determined by the population of the state. What the best ratio of people:representative would be, I'm not sure.

3. Elections are based on popular vote of the people.

4. No districts. Everyone in the state votes on the same group of representatives. You pick your top X HoR representatives to vote for and your top Y Senate representatives to vote for.

4.a) I am not entirely sure how you would handle a voter that has no knowledge of the representatives and/or someone that just wants to vote straight along the party line. My first thought would be to allow a straight party line vote. After the votes are counted, the unspecified party line votes would then go towards the representatives that were most voted on by those that did specify specific representatives. My second thought would be to require voters to specify...Maybe include a few bullet points or information along with candidates to help them choose. Or it might encourage Americans to actually learn about their representatives before voting.

5. The X HoR and Y Senate representatives that get the most popular votes win the election and so on.

Part of the problem is gerrymandering. I can't say it's going on quite to the extent that it was in the 50s-60s, but it's still a problem. Both parties can abuse it. The way I see it is that the representatives in Congress end up making decisions for the entire country...it is, after all, the federal government. Their elections should have been as broad as possible; in this case, the entire state level. Districts just seem to allow small minorities to receive an unproportional amount of voice and power in the government compared to the rest of the US population.
 
I guess more representatives wouldn't hurt if their pay went down.

Still, a problem is that a simple majority is sufficient to pass legislation. Even if it were unanimous, we don't have Ron Paul in there so it's time to just fucking dissolve the god damned Hamiltonian government we have... and replace it with nothing.
 
nextJin said:
Frankly I think the 17th should be repealed. We already have our citizens representitives elected in the House. The Senate was and should be our state government representives.
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But half of the States can still take away the sovereignty of the other half.
 
ivwshane said:
Gerrymandering only works if you can group people together, the larger the group the easier it is to disenfranchise them. Less reps means larger groups of people.

Put it this way; a large city of 700k people would be split about 7-8 times where as the smaller cities would be unaffected. That's 6-7 times more the representation it would have. Currently cities are under represented.
Click to expand...

I'm not following your argument. In fact I think the bolded is exactly backwards. If you only split a state into two districts as opposed to four there's less of an ability to disenfranchise groups at all. You simply have fewer boundaries to work with to pack and fracture the groups. Or look at the Senate where each state is in effect one district.

Jaskalas said:
Fewer there are, easier it is to buy them all.
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That's a fair point, but the more there are the more fingers getting into the pie.
 
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The problem is gerrymandering districts. Without gerrymandering most of these Republicans wouldn't be in Congress.
 
Anarchist420 said:
But half of the States can still take away the sovereignty of the other half.
Click to expand...

And that's why we have the House as part of the legislative branch then of course the executive and judicial branches. They way it is now does not make a hell of a lot of sense, might as well not even have a Senate since both the House and Senate are elected via popular vote. Not a single person in the Senate gives a damn what their states tell them, they don't care.
 
hans030390 said:
I am not sure how well this would work in the end, but recently I have been considering something like the following (also not saying it's entirely unique or wildly different):

1. Each state has X number of representatives for the HoR, Y for the Senate.

2. X and Y are determined by the population of the state. What the best ratio of people:representative would be, I'm not sure.

3. Elections are based on popular vote of the people.

4. No districts. Everyone in the state votes on the same group of representatives. You pick your top X HoR representatives to vote for and your top Y Senate representatives to vote for.

4.a) I am not entirely sure how you would handle a voter that has no knowledge of the representatives and/or someone that just wants to vote straight along the party line. My first thought would be to allow a straight party line vote. After the votes are counted, the unspecified party line votes would then go towards the representatives that were most voted on by those that did specify specific representatives. My second thought would be to require voters to specify...Maybe include a few bullet points or information along with candidates to help them choose. Or it might encourage Americans to actually learn about their representatives before voting.

5. The X HoR and Y Senate representatives that get the most popular votes win the election and so on.

Part of the problem is gerrymandering. I can't say it's going on quite to the extent that it was in the 50s-60s, but it's still a problem. Both parties can abuse it. The way I see it is that the representatives in Congress end up making decisions for the entire country...it is, after all, the federal government. Their elections should have been as broad as possible; in this case, the entire state level. Districts just seem to allow small minorities to receive an unproportional amount of voice and power in the government compared to the rest of the US population.
Click to expand...

In almost all states, if not all, the only people that would actually be represented are those in the cities despite the state being mostly rural. Why would a rep give half a shit about the minority of the population who live in rural areas? Same argument for not using a straight popular vote for President, they already don't give a fuck about half of the states. If it was a straight popular vote they would almost exclusively hit/cater to the uber mega cities and dense population centers.
 
I think that's a pretty interesting theory. You might just be reversing the problem, though - now instead of people clamouring to get heard by their representatives, the representatives will be forced to push and shove to get a few bills of their own heard or passed.

So probably even less would get done, and there would be very many more people in your Congress that one Congressman must cut a deal with and water down a provision for in order to get something passed.
 
ivwshane said:
Gerrymandering only works if you can group people together, the larger the group the easier it is to disenfranchise them. Less reps means larger groups of people.

Put it this way; a large city of 700k people would be split about 7-8 times where as the smaller cities would be unaffected. That's 6-7 times more the representation it would have. Currently cities are under represented.
Click to expand...

And larger groups of people typically means fewer radicals. The Senate is historically much more bi-partisan than the house for this very reason.

In any case, IMO cities should be under-represented at the national level, because those citizens occupy a very specific physical and cultural niche of America. If cities were represented proportionally, they'd rule the nation and we'd be the United Cities of America, in effect. It would create a situation ripe for abuse of the majority. God knows cities already determine Presidential elections.

Granted the country bumpkins shouldn't be in charge either, then you have abuse of the minorty. There needs to be balance but I don't think a directly-proportional-to-population model is the way to achieve that.
 
Gonad the Barbarian said:
I'm not following your argument. In fact I think the bolded is exactly backwards. If you only split a state into two districts as opposed to four there's less of an ability to disenfranchise groups at all. You simply have fewer boundaries to work with to pack and fracture the groups. Or look at the Senate where each state is in effect one district.


That's a fair point, but the more there are the more fingers getting into the pie.
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If the two groups were similar you would be correct but that's not the reality of it. The original intention of the HoR was to ensure the people were well represented. Having more people per rep means peoples views aren't getting represented and only a diluted majority is heard.

To see how gerrymandering would be limited lets pretend your workplace represented a state. Each person has one vote and therefore everyone has an equal voice. Now let's say because you have a lot of coworkers a one to one vote is undo able (the reality is that we could have a true democracy with today's tech but that's another discussion), so we decide that every two people equal a vote/voice. You could pair people up by political leaning and the voice/vote becomes a little less representative. But let's say even two people per vote is unworkable and instead of 1 or 2 people per vote we go with ten people to equal one vote and we group people by political leaning except because we don't have an even number of people at each spectrum we can now group them in a way that most groups consist of six members that lean one way and four lean differently. The vote/voice becomes even more diluted.
Now let's remove the requirement that all groups are the same size and you get chaos. Whoever is making the groups basically now has the power.

The farther away you get from one vote per person the less representative you get and the greater chance for corrupt grouping.

I hope that illustrates the point.
 
irishScott said:
And larger groups of people typically means fewer radicals. The Senate is historically much more bi-partisan than the house for this very reason.

In any case, IMO cities should be under-represented at the national level, because those citizens occupy a very specific physical and cultural niche of America. If cities were represented proportionally, they'd rule the nation and we'd be the United Cities of America, in effect. It would create a situation ripe for abuse of the majority. God knows cities already determine Presidential elections.

Granted the country bumpkins shouldn't be in charge either, then you have abuse of the minorty. There needs to be balance but I don't think a directly-proportional-to-population model is the way to achieve that.
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I agree with your assertion but the problem with the senate, or a senate like model, is that it's not really representative of the people. It's true there might be more radicals but there would also be many, many more "normals".

The HoR is meant to be the part of government which is closest to the people, not being able to push things through or to have to compromise and wheel and deal is not a bad thing in my opinion.
In terms of cities versus rural areas why wouldn't you want a government that represents city dwellers more if that's where most of your citizens are from?
If 90% of the population lived in one large city and the other 10% lived in the rest of the US, why would you not make laws that address the problems a majority of the people face?
 
ivwshane said:
I agree with your assertion but the problem with the senate, or a senate like model, is that it's not really representative of the people. It's true there might be more radicals but there would also be many, many more "normals".

The HoR is meant to be the part of government which is closest to the people, not being able to push things through or to have to compromise and wheel and deal is not a bad thing in my opinion.
In terms of cities versus rural areas why wouldn't you want a government that represents city dwellers more if that's where most of your citizens are from?
If 90% of the population lived in one large city and the other 10% lived in the rest of the US, why would you not make laws that address the problems a majority of the people face?
Click to expand...

We have lower levels of government for that, and they should be empowered accordingly.

I think the national government should look after national issues, issues that truly affect the entire nation, and nothing else. War, taxation, enforcing the Constitution, social issues, federal assistance for states that ask, etc; and I think any issue that only affects a single demographic or region should be decided within that demographic or region.

To use your example, if 90% of nation lived in one big city, then any issue which only affects the city-dwellers should be managed by the city government. Say the city dwellers decide that to improve traffic conditions and environmental conservation, a tax on those who own a car should be imposed. Now in a city (with presumably adequate public transportation) this is less of an issue, but for the 10% that live outside the range of city transportation it's idiotic and destructive. To use current US population numbers, the fact that 270 million people would benefit does not entitle them to damage the lives of 30 million, merely because there are more of them. If we ruled solely by what was best for the majority the civil rights movement would be non-existent.

Granted you can't have everything by consensus. Someone will always lose, but they should lose for a higher purpose than "there are more people who think differently, and whether they're right or wrong doesn't matter". Majority rule is great until the majority shoves its head up its ass.
 
irishScott said:
We have lower levels of government for that, and they should be empowered accordingly.

I think the national government should look after national issues, issues that truly affect the entire nation, and nothing else. War, taxation, enforcing the Constitution, social issues, federal assistance for states that ask, etc; and I think any issue that only affects a single demographic or region should be decided within that demographic or region.

To use your example, if 90% of nation lived in one big city, then any issue which only affects the city-dwellers should be managed by the city government. Say the city dwellers decide that to improve traffic conditions and environmental conservation, a tax on those who own a car should be imposed. Now in a city (with presumably adequate public transportation) this is less of an issue, but for the 10% that live outside the range of city transportation it's idiotic and destructive. To use current US population numbers, the fact that 270 million people would benefit does not entitle them to damage the lives of 30 million, merely because there are more of them. If we ruled solely by what was best for the majority the civil rights movement would be non-existent.

Granted you can't have everything by consensus. Someone will always lose, but they should lose for a higher purpose than "there are more people who think differently, and whether they're right or wrong doesn't matter". Majority rule is great until the majority shoves its head up its ass.
Click to expand...

Good post. in this way we don't end up with ALL of illinois being a gun free zone because of the drug-war in Chicago. . . it's a matter of geography as well. People in NH and RI probably are more similar than someone in Northern Californa vs Southern California. . and want different things. NorCal isn't quite as worried about border patrol as Socal for one example. . .
 
Just the opposite. There are too many. There should be one senator per state. Then we need a new formula based on population to limit the number of representatives. per state. Limit it to about a maximum of say 4 per state. Every state gets one and use some formula that limits it to a mazimum of 4.

We also need to have a vote of confidence every year for all federally elected positions. Plus the head of all departments and the supreme court.

Then we need to make it illegal for political parties, corportations and unions and non-profits to spend money on political campaigns. Only donations allowed should be personal donations by real individuals in their state and district. Using national party funds to interfere in local elections should be illegal and considered like rigging votes.
 
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Yea, thats interesting. Representatives per person, makes sense the more people each one represents the less effectively ideas are filtering up from main street.

Its always the simple things.
 
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