The other day I posted an item to my personal blog outlining “eight crazy constitutional scenarios.” One scenario that prompted a few comments was my suggestion that the House of Representatives could be expanded to 25,000 members. That’s technically incorrect. A commenter reminded me that Article I of the Constitution caps the number of potential House members at one for every 30,000 inhabitants. Still, based on current population estimates from the government, that would still allow for a House composed of roughly 10,341 members — a far cry from the current 435 that’s been fixed by law for nearly a century.
Last year I commented on how Britain’s House of Lords was actually more representative of the general population than the US Senate, at least on a member per capita basis. The numbers are even starker when examining the elected lower houses. The US House has one member for every 713,179 inhabitants*, while the UK’s House of Commons (with 650 members) has one for every 95,921. Quite a stark difference.
And this is not an anomaly. I prepared a chart comparing the per capita members of lower legislative chambers (or single houses in two cases) for 12 elected governments. Britain is the norm, not the US:
The final column represents the “US Equivalent,” or what the size of the US House of Representatives would be if it adopted the same per capita apportionment as the country identified at the start of the row. In most cases the US would end up with more than 2,000 House members.
Obviously, more legislators doesn’t equal more freedom, or even less restrictive government. All of the countries on this list are arguably worse off than the US in some ways. But these numbers do undercut the mythology that the US is somehow uniquely democratic-republican in its government. The US House is one of the least “representative” assemblies in the so-called free world.
Certainly there’s no case for reducing the level of representation. And the failure of the European countries on the list above to maintain free societies is, in no small measure, a product of the transfer and consolidation of government powers within the European Union. And while the EU has its own elected parliament, its per capita representation figure (approximately one member for every 681,000 inhabitants) is far closer to the US House than the national legislatures.
A better model for the US House might actually be New Hampshire, long regarded as one of the freer states within the US. The New Hampshire House of Representatives has 400 members, which works out to one member for every 3,311 people. In contrast California, arguably the least free state, has one lower-house member for roughly every 462,000 inhabitants.
Even sticking with the Constitution’s one-for-30,000 maximum would give us a robust House of more than 10,000 members. It would be hard to imagine how this would make things worse. If nothing else, a 10,000-member House would be harder for the president or single party leader to manipulate. There would certainly be greater occupational and intellectual diversity (i.e. fewer lawyers and more libertarian types).
Logistically things would be radically different. The quaint House chamber would be obsolete. You’d need to hold House sessions in a basketball arena or similar facility. Many House functions would be transferred into the world of social networking — committee meetings via Facebook, Wiki-style editing of legislation, Twitter debates. It would make today’s style of backdoor legislating through massive bills that nobody has read or understands virtually impossible. And that of course is the point.
*All population figures are July 2010 estimates published by the CIA World Factbook.
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One small point. The limit to 30,000 is a minimum, the state can’t have more reps than 1 per 30,000. But it most certainly can have far less, which is what it currently is. If it was a maximum, they would have attempted to pass an amendment, as they actually still followed the constitution nominally back then(ie.- 16th and 17th). I do agree that,with 20 times the reps., it would be far harder to pass such bills as “obama care” or “no child left behind”, as well as making it harder for lobbyists, corporations, or wealthy ideologues from having as much influence. Not that I think having a state period will not eventually lead to the current state of affairs, just be much slower in becoming so monstrous.
I can’t see your chart without downloading it separately and opening it outside of my browser: Perhaps you should go with a PNG?
I changed the graphic to a PNG. Let me know if you can see it.
I can! Thank you very much.
Although I don’t like the limited representation and the fact that it is so difficult to have any contact with a representative, I’m not sure how much of a difference it would make. California’s biggest problem is gerrymandering, and I’m sure it is for the rest of the country too. If we can take care of this then I wonder if there would be a substantial decrease in corruption.
I once saw the idea of making representation being based alphabetically by name, rather than geographically. It’d be way harder to pander in this way: It’s easy to win over voters in your area by getting a wasteful public works project built there, impossible to do this with people of certain names! At least not without being incredibly obvious in the corrupt nature of the action.
What an interesting notion.
But, it kind of dilutes the localization of the representation. We’re already too homogenized politically.
The federal policy is necessarily homogeneous! Of course killing the federal level entirely would be better in the long run, but barring that… Having localized representation gives us no benefit here.
The 1st Amendment to the Constitution was supposed to deal with this, but was voted down. Here are a couple of papers that support this contention. I also have an audio file, or two, from many years ago somewhere on Mises.org (I think). There is a website called thirtythousand.org that has a great deal of material on this issue including links to my papers.
“Constituency Size and Government Spending,” (w/ Marc Ulrich) Public Finance Quarterly,
Vol. 27 No. 6 (November 1999) pp. 588-598.
“Constituency Size and the Growth of Government Spending in the United Kingdom,” with
George Ford and Marc Ulrich, Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice, Vol. 24, Nos. 2/3
(2006[2008]) pp. 127-141.
Parliament and Congress are actually primitive forms of information-processing technology from the days when, for the legislature to know what their constituents wanted, the constituents had to elect someone to physically get on his horse and ride to a place of assembly.
But that excuse has now gone. By providing each elector with a secure online vote for each issue, using technology such as is used in banking and tax, we could phase out legislature by representative assembly, and phase in legislature by direct democracy. Not that I’m recommending it, but it might certainly be the least harmful and most acceptable way of doing government which isn’t going to go away, in case you haven’t noticed.
Many of the evils of democracy outlined by Hoppe in “Democracy: The God that Failed” actually inhere in representative democracy. While direct democracy would be no improvement, in terms of oppression of minorities, it would be no worse either. And it would have this great advantage. If it were constituted so that a proposed law required the votes of 50 percent of the electorate to become law, the volume of laws being passed would shrink to almost nothing compared to now.
Who decides what measures go up for vote? Who decides who gets to implement the new laws?
If we assume that a measure needs 50%+1 to pass, then we can just use Reddit to vote. Doesn’t answer the second question, though.
We all seem to be in agreement that this system is faulty and needs to be replaced by a system without all of these weaknesses.
I don’t see how 10,000 would be a problem. D.C. has RFK Memorial Stadium on the east side of D.C. The House can easily share the facility with the two pro soccer teams and one college Bowl game, which only require 30 days a year for games. Shoot, they can probably hold practice there while Congress is in session.
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