> These proposals, no matter which direction they’re coming from, have two things in common. The first is that they largely agree on the problem: members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents.
Is this actually the biggest problem? Congress has something like a 98% re election rate. Yes, gerrymandering, but a lot more than 20% of people are represented by a member of their party.
The average person doesn't know their congresscritter's name, or is fine with them. But they hate the other party's members, plus they hate the general ineffectiveness of the entire organization. Making congress 6 *thousand* members strong seems like it would massively *increase* the barrier to building meaningful coalitions and rallying support for legislation, decrease their ability to get to know each other, etc. You very briefly mention this whole issue, but I think the question of whether it will improve anything at all turns heavily on how you practically implement such an institution.
Exactly. I've often thought that bringing back indirect election of the Senate would be a good thing bc (as the founders thought) they sound be more temperate. But then I think no, the problem is the voters. They are either politically unengaged or rabid.
For years, I've supported the indirect election of Senators on the grounds that it would reinforce states' rights. Your comment got me thinking about whether my concern is just a specific manifestation of voters' lack of temerance. Either way, repeal the 17th!
I'm curious, as a states' rights advocate - why do you think states are a critical grouping that needs rights now that we're no longer in an era where information travel time is so limiting?
A fiscal policy that might make sense in New York isn't necessarily going to work in Kansas. States might even have their own local culture which exists in tandem with both their politics and their geography - for instance, one could argue that the threat of earthquakes necessitates an increased emphasis on building codes and state authority strong enough to enforce said building codes in California, which would seem mercenary and intrusive in Texas, which in turn could explain California's tendency towards political collectivism and Texas's more individualistic Gadsden-flag nature.
States certainly aren't a perfect natural grouping or anything, but they're a fair enough mechanism to delegate certain aspects of legislation and bureaucracy that would be unworkable and/or deeply unpopular if imposed upon the entire United States. Or, put another way, why should someone in Arizona have any say in arranging for snow plows and de-icing in New Jersey?
Yeah there are merits to the idea though as a practical matter much harder given the populist currents. Having indirect election of senators would align more with extreme devolution from the central federal government to the states and other structural shifts.
Obviously, you don't live in Wyoming, or Utah, or Arkansas, or.... I live in Boston, in the suffocating atmosphere of a population sure that there is one right answer and they have it
A very large number of seats have strong partisan leans, to the point where the opposition is viewed as insane extremists and a third party/independent run can't get traction for fear that vote splitting will lead to the insane extremist actually winning. So no change in general elections.
Both parties work extremely hard to discourage primary challenges, through a mix of money lavished on incumbents, assorted dirty tricks, and the congressional seniority system, to the point where 1) internal factions of parties don't run full political slates, but settle for trying to win a few symbolic victories and scare everyone else into line, and 2) a successful primary challenge to an incumbent is usually a political earthquake.
The upshot of this is that it's not at all rare for a politician to win a 5 or 6-way primary for an open seat with something like 30% of the vote and then go for a decade or longer without seeing a serious opponent, and that American democracy gets strangled.
The premise in the second paragraph, "A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations" is not correct. I believe most citizens like their particular representative, but dislike the remainder.
Eh it's more of a prefer their rep to the alternative rather than like their rep which is pretty common these days. Not a lot of profiles in courage and stateswomen these days.
> but a lot more than 20% of people are represented by a member of their party.
doesn't mean much in a two-party system.
OTOH, I struggle to imagine what a non-disconnected congress would look like, at any size. What sorts of local issues are best handled by a national body?
Maybe I'm betraying my urban myopia -- a random district of Seattle probably has the same broad priorities as a random district of NYC or Chicago. The water management issue in the article, meanwhile, seems like a good example of something difficult to address locally.
Sure, but my point was really just that gerrymandering doesn't explain the difference between the disdain for Congress as a whole and the insanely high re-election rates. The limitations of a 2-party system don't either; presidents have much higher than 20% approval, even at the end of their term.
Actually, water management might be your answer. It's a huge issue in the west, and something that practically begs for a coalition of states to manage. However, in the east, water management is pretty much "just dig a hole or find a bucket lol" and the bulk of it (notwithstanding broader environmental issues such as runoff) can be most efficiently managed and addressed as part of an individual state (or even county!)'s budgeting and permitting system.
Water management in the West needs federal involvement because Mexico is also part of the Colorado River drainage (or it was, until we used so much water than the riverbed is now dry 80 miles from the ocean).
Is there actually polling data or other evidence that most people are happy with their own representative in Congress? It may be the case but I don't think we should assume it purely from re-election numbers.
An alternative explanation for re-election rates might be that due to gerrymandering and geographical sorting, very few seats are genuinely competitive anymore, so even if you don't particularly like your representative, you still won't vote against them because you hate the other party even more (assuming they even bother to run a candidate against the incumbent).
The only other way to replace them is with a primary, but parties understandably tend to discourage these as they don't want to waste money on intra-party conflicts, so effective ones are hard to mount (except on the Republican side where Trump-backed primaries are used as threats to whip incumbents).
So it's entirely possible to re-elect at high rates while also having broad dissatisfaction and low engagement because it feels like there's just no alternative. In the same way that you could stick with an Internet service provider for many years despite thinking they're bad, because where you live just doesn't have any robust competition.
Possible, but as I pointed out upthread, the difference is huge and similar factors should apply to the presidency. But Scott said Congress's approval is ~20%, which presidents never get close to, even at the end of their term, except Nixon at 24%.
a trivial nitpick from a longhorn: I would say "an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin" rather than "an undergrad at University of Texas in Austin"
(that being said, TIL the story of the only A+ in UT history! UT is one of the largest schools in the US that doesn't do plus/minus grading)
Another nitpick from another Longhorn: I believe the official name of the university is "The University of Texas at Austin," with a capital "T" on "The."
When NFL games are broadcast, and the players give the name of their Alma Mater, Longhorns usually emphasize "The."
ah yeah, I guess I'm showing my age, it looks like plus/minus grading was allowed starting in Fall 2009, but it was still up to professors' discretion as to whether or not they wanted to use those
One other major effect of this: It dilutes the power of small states in the electoral college. Right now, California has about 67 times the population of Wyoming, but only 18 times the house seats. Each Wyoming-er has about 3.7 times the power in the electoral college as a Californian.
However, after this amendment, California, will still have 67 times the population, but will have 56 times the electoral college votes. Which means that Wyoming's advantage in electoral college votes per citizen is only about 1.2.
It seems like this will make it impossible to get the 15 or so Republican states needed. There is a feeling among conservatives that cities and rural areas have inherently opposed political cultures. It doesn't necessarily make sense for one political culture to have proportionally greater representation just because it happens to be located in an economic zone that supports greater population growth
Now, the point of the Senate is already to do that, but I can't see more than five R states signing on to torpedo their national seat advantage
That sounds like a fancy way of saying “conservatives want more influence than their population gives them”, which is true of everyone. I agree this would block the proposal. Any change would have to incorporate the current level of R advantage (or current levels enhanced to handle likely future demographic shifts).
These states would not necessarily remain "conservative" in perpetuity, but what they seemingly will remain (until politics loses coherence and relevance due to technological developments) is a state with very different kinds of problems and concerns than California or New York. Those places have supported Dems in some eras when that was a populist farmers and workers party, before it became an urbanist professional-managerial class party.
Smaller D-leaning states would be giving up enormous power by endorsing this proposal even if in the short term it helped the party they favor, because the Democrat Party that would emerge from such a transformation is a very different party, it would no longer need to appeal to those parts of the coalition to control the executive branch. The electoral college isn't just about giving one particular faction more influence, it's about diffusing the control of factions across a broader geographical area, it's what makes sure some alliance of the two most popular states doesn't take over everything. Many laughed at the "Civil War" movie from last year putting Cali and TX together, but without the need for broader appeals it would be possible to assemble such an alliance and dominate.
What is the incentive for a small state to be part of the union if they effectively have no way to influence policy because they will always be out voted by larger states? If small states feel like they have no say over national policy then they may no longer feel that it is in their interest to be part of the union. This is effectively the tradeoff that the initial apportionment system is based off of. Larger states traded a smaller power advantage than their populations would indicate for the benefit of a larger union including the smaller states.
They can’t leave the union any more, it’d be illegal and they’re too small to force the issue. But I agree the population-power imbalance originally arose for the reason you’re describing.
Why should they get to slam dunk the economy into the garbage and indirectly kill a couple million people every couple election cycles because they get uppity about being unproductive, uncultured, and illiterate (doesn't start with un, but I think it should count), is a better question.
This is a very silly argument. In a union of 50 states there are zero states, small or large, that can dictate national policy. All of them have to negotiate and compromise and form coalitions around topics of interest.
Far and away the biggest incentives for states to be part of the union are broad-based public goods: things like common defense, access to markets and natural resources and freedom of movement across a wide geographical area. The implicit claim that some temporary balance of power in the day-to-day horse trading of congress is the only possible benefit to membership in the union in frankly unhinged.
Being a small state in a large union, they get to benefit from the aggregated soft and hard power of the larger nation they are a small unit of with some degree of independence of action provided by the federal devolution of some powers to the state.
Better to be 2% of the votes within a much larger polity, than 100% of the votes within a tiny polity whose interests the RotW can completely safely ignore and overrule.
Delaware or Montana on its own would get ignored and/or smooshed in a way that the US as a whole never will.
Even if the union allowed the devolution, within a decade they'd be begging to be let back in on much less favourable terms. The benefits Delawarian's enjoy today are not god-given and forever immutable characteristics of Delaware but a function of their membership of the union.
Isn't the senate for them? To have proportionately more power? Why do they also get more proportionately more power in the House and electoral college too?
Yes fair point and also many voters are not game theory-ing out red state interests so much as expressing their hopes for the future of their community and the country... lots of MAGA and populist R types are extremely anti-incumbent... I was chatting with one through Braver Angels who actually flagged this proposal as a common ground solution.
I used to be sympathetic to that argument before red states gave us trump. And then abused the system by starting a gerrymandering war to grab even more power. This might have been a real concern in the past but I think they've shown themselves unworthy and I hope in 2028 Newsom campaigns on big reforms to our electoral system. Plus they hate DEI programs that give minorities unproportionate amounts of power and influence anyway so they should be super happy with a proposal like that
I served two terms as a delegate to a State Central Committee of one of the major parties.
The full committee has, as I recall, something like 3500 members. However it also has an Executive Board of around 400 members, comparable to the size of our current House of Representatives.
If you went to Giant Congress -- which I favor, I've actually been advocating something like this for years -- obviously the House would need to adopt rules where most business is done in the committees and subcommittees, and there is no full floor debate by the membership, only "vote-o-rama" up/down actions. For national-level debate, only the Executive Committee would participate in debate. Perhaps if you used PR districts, with ~8-10 members per district, you could just give the top winner from each district an E-Com seat. In any case, I'm sure one could settle on a reasonable choice for how to deal with this.
I'm pretty dubious about the functionality of a 6000+ member legislature, especially one that starts with a built-in constitutional interpretation crisis thanks to the typo.
But as you note, the only other pathway to a legislative reform Amendment starts with Congress (or a state-legislature-called Constitutional Convention, where free speech and due process and everything else would be up for grabs--yikes). And this *does* feel like one of the few things that might conceivably spur Congressional action.
If we get to, say, 30 states ratifying the 12th/28th Amendment, the imminent nightmare prospect of being swallowed up in a legislature of thousands might inspire Congress to propose a reasonable alternative -- a rival amendment sans typo, with a more manageable size, maybe taking on board some of the good ideas from other reform proposals.
So yeah, OK: I'd give cautious support for this proposal as a nuclear option to incentivize something more workable. And at the same time, I'd want to start serious thinking about what workable alternative could get bipartisan support.
Right. In theory a legislature has two functions: voting on things and discussing things. Part of this is the idea that any member can take their turn getting up and speaking on the matter at hand. If you have six thousand people, they can't all possibly take turns addressing each other in any meaningful way.
What would the representatives do in practice? Maybe they'd form an "inner sanctum" of a hundred or so of the most important people, who actually get to discuss things, and then the full 6000-person becomes a rubber stamp that strictly votes along party lines.
It's an experiment worth trying though. I would invest a few billion dollars in setting up a 6000-person "shadow legislature" passing shadow bills of no actual importance, for four years, just to see how these people self-organise, and whether they could actually get things done in a non-chaotic manner.
It's neither here nor there, but it's funny that Wikipedia lists the members in "surname stroke order" (how many lines are required to write their surname) rather than alphabetical, but nonetheless gives the actual names using latin characters.
Is there a country that has a politburo-like system that is actually multi-party? The pre-Xi version of the Chinese system is very interesting but obviously it is significantly easier to coordinate something like this when everyone is nominally part of the same party structure (even if there are factions and so on)
I would argue that those two functions are pretty easily separable. Voting rights for all, speaking rights for some. Why does every single member need to be allowed the opportunity to speak? Is this really a value-added activity? Even if it is, this is the 21st Century; have them start a subreddit and they can all argue to their heart's content in there. Making speeches in auditoriums is ancient Greek technology. Might as well have people vote by writing in chalk on pot shards.
In a sense we already have a legislature that has thousands of people. It's just that most of them are unelected congressional staffers (and these are the people that actually write the bills). They didn't used to exist when the legislature was a more reasonable size relative to population, but now they are necessary. In this system there would just be a lot fewer staffers and those positions would be elected directly.
A common idea I hear when it comes to expanding the House is the so called "Wyoming Rule": You set the ratio of Representatives to people such that the least populous state gets 1 representative, and you go from there. Wyoming, the currently least populous state with ~580,000 people would get 1 rep, and then the ratio would be set such that in general 1 rep covers 580k. This would increase the house to about 543, which is higher but still workable.
Not sure if that size still has the same benefits, but it would help a little
Fun proposal, but I want to push back on your point about the electoral college. The bias towards low-population states is not a problem to be 'solved' but a deliberate political compromise made during the founding and which has an underlying logic not much changed from the time of the founding. If we wanted to do large congress we'd probably want to add to bump the number of senators in each state to ~20 so that A) small states get to keep their countermajoritarian electoral college buffer and B) so that individual Senate seats don't become too individually powerful relative to representatives.
Totally agree. The perspective of "electoral college is unfair" elides completely the essential architecure: we are in the Union of States. States are first-class entities, not second-class entities or bygone concepts. We really, realllllly need states as air-gapped experiments in governance with authority (already granted by Constitution) for primary lawmaking within their territories *that pisses some people off*, if we are to have any hope of regaining room for Pluralism. Why would pissing some people off be a feature vs a bug? Because no single national jurisdiction can possibly satisfy the actual range of ways Americans want to live, so the alternative to pluralism isn't harmony, it's one coalition perpetually imposing on everyone else. Self-sorting is essential, along with the pluralistic attitude to zip it most of the time about what other states are doing. (I view the current messes as due to a lack of adequate Pluralism, driven by the winner-take-all effects of a centralizing/totalizing single national governance structure)
I wholeheartedly agree, but I believe the best way to stave off a dictatorship of the majority is simply to reduce the power of the federal government of the lives of citizens. Federalism was built around conserving rights by having smaller republica so each group could govern themselves as they pleased. It is a shame to see people think that we can effectively agree on domestic policy on the scale of a country. The only unitary state on our scale is China, and that's certainly not the future I want for my country.
I'd also like to add that I'm not a radical libertarian or anything; I just support many of the classically liberal ideals of the founding fathers. They made this country so that people wouldn't have to be ruled over tyrannically by some far away and unaccountable government. These are the values that have influenced American domestic and foreign policy and should continue to do so.
The only way to shrink Leviathan is to starve it. Its too big to drown in the bathtub, as Grover Norquist would say.
I would love a system of government where the Feds only carry out their enumerated duties, instead of being supercops and provider of monies to the states while spending themselves into a hole.
No, the outcome of the Civil War upon return to peacetime rule did not re-order States from first-class sovereigns to second-tier entities. That began most virulently with the Shreveport Rate Case in 1914, buidling on the ICA enacted in 1887. I see the chain of precedents set after that, as stated as a virus, as something to be disinfected. If it is not, then winner-take-all fights lead us again to warring against each other, kinetically.
While it's definitely true that the civil war and the reconstruction amendments weakened the independence of the states, it didn't eliminate their sovereignty entirely. They lost certain pieces of power to the federal government, but they still retain some important pieces, like the general police power. If you get tried for murder or assault or rape, it will almost certainly be under state law, with state law definitions and penalties. If you sue someone for damages, you will almost certainly be suing them under state law with state law torts and standards. And these standards can vary pretty significantly among the states.
I don’t see why you need small states to have disproportionate senate and president power in order to ensure that states have lawmaking capacity over themselves. Pluralism seems to me to suggest disempowering the federal government, not extra empowering some people to have more power in that federal government.
Switzerland has an arguably much more effective federalism. Aside from foreign policy, federal infrastructure, and basic rights, cantons are pretty much free to do what they want. It achieved this with an executive branch chosen by the federal parliament, which is much more representative than the electoral college (except for half a dozen seats out of 200, they are all pretty much the same in voters-per-representative). Even more, the executive is a body of 7 ministers representing all major parties that must take collegiate decisions.
The US executive system is unfair because a) it places a large fraction of the population under executive power chosen by a minority, and more importantly because b) this power is essentially unitary, and despite all minarchist delusions to the contrary, currently running a mastodontic and extremely powerful federal State. You can argue that if a) was the other way around, it would still be unfair. You could make a strong argument there, and you could mostly make it because of b).
This claim seems to me soundly refuted by the very existence of the amendment being discussed. People of the present day are fond of claiming what the EC is there for most loudly when its accomplishing their own partisan objective. But the EC accomplished statistically something quite different at founding than it does today and here is direct evidence the founders wanted it to accomplish something else in the future too.
I agree that the electoral college was primarily designed to address a different problem, but the bicameral structure of congress is specifically designed to address the small state/large state sovereignty issue. The compromise of 1787 was one of the most hotly debated issues of the framing. I think the decision to fix each state's electors at the combined number of their congressmen is good evidence that the framers wanted to import the logic of the compromise into the electoral college, even if the electoral college was chiefly implemented to address other concerns. As to the existence of this amendment as a counter-argument, I'd say the fact that it failed to pass is a better indicator of where the country stood on it than the fact that it was drafted.
I think its been well argued why, when states have a population disparity of 70 to 1, the federal govt is much larger and no longer takes enumerated powers seriously, and rather than branches competing with each other we have parties competing each other across branches, that both the senate and the EC in fact represent problems to be solved. (The solution doesnt have to be abolish the senate btw). You can disagree! But just pointing out that the framers did something else for different reasons under different circumstances is not a convincing argument. And here we see the framers intentions were more complex than that even if they didnt get the whole country to agree. Just engage with the argument at an object level instead of going back to framers
I mean sure, that's the purpose of it, but it also very transparently is DEI for rurals. You could make the same argument for any group whose interests do not necessarily align with the popular majority.
Not just rurals. Rhode Island is one of the most urbanized states in the union.
People think of the rural plains states as the EC's big beneficiaries but it also boosts a lot of small states in the northeast, and makes sure Alaska/Hawaii don't get totally overlooked.
America's political system has failed its people in a lot of ways, but I do think regional balancing is an important goal in such a large country, and would not like to see that goal totally ignored in whatever replaces it.
(but if you still have the Senate you probably don't need the EC. OTOH, how much does a massive House fix if the Senate remains a dysfunctional veto point incapable of legislating?)
It was a deliberate compromise, but at the time, the largest state had about 15.5x the population of the smallest (and effectively less, since 39% of the pop of the largest were slaves, versus 15% of the smallest). Today, a single CA county has more people than all but ten states, and CA's pop is 66X that of WY. They might have made a different compromise had they known that would happen.
>which has an underlying logic not much changed from the time of the founding.
On the contrary, much has changed. We are more likely to see the role of Congress (and the govt in general) as representing individuals, rather than states as entities in themselves.
The small state/large state issue *was* extremely relevant at the time. Now, the primary dispute isn't Wyoming and Hawaii vs Texas and California, it's party-based. I think small states are *mostly* still going to care about the party-based implications, and you don't need every state. Also keep in mind that Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware have already ratified it.
The relative power of individual Senate seats is a concern that I'm not sure how to fix, since changing the number of Senators would require a separate constitutional amendment. Maybe you could use the CAA passage to build momentum for a separate amendment (which could also fix the typo)? Or try to make a deal where you pass that next amendment? Problem is we can't really change the text of the CAA without resetting the "states ratified" count to 0 and there's no enforcement mechanism once the CAA passes. Maybe write and start ratifying the Senate amendment at the same time as trying to get the CAA passed, and maybe work with multiple states at once to ratify both at the same time?
Bias is already intentionally baked into the Senate's "two representatives per state" rule. The House was never meant to have a similar bias, so now Congress and the Electrical College are doubly biased in favor of rural states with small populations.
Sure. I'm just saying we shouldn't throw away the (constitutionally intended) single bias in service of addressing the more shakily founded statutory second bias.
We're talking a constitutional amendment, so it's fair game to use it to rewrite that political compromise. You might not want to do it and campaign against the amendment, but we are in fact allowed to change the power balance as a nation.
Oh no doubt it's legal to change this by amendment (anything is!) I just want to point out that the original post framing the compromise as a mistake to be 'solved' is not something I agree with for Chesterton's fence reasons. If one wants to make the case for the modification or amendment of the electoral college that's fine: many have done so. I just think it would be wise to decouple a case for fixing congress at the procedural level from the case for overwriting one of the oldest and most fundamental political compromises in our national history; at the very least it's important to make a case for why the two issues have to move together as opposed to waving away the apportionment of electors as a pure error.
You could make each of the new Representatives count only 1/10 of an electoral vote or something. But both of these things are changes... which makes it hard to do.
Of course it's changed, because slavery is no longer legal, so we don't need a way for states to gain more power by counting their permenantly-ineligible-to-vote slave populations at a ratio of 60% compared to their free populations.
This is rhe most thought provoking article i have read in a while. With modern technology, it probably makes sense for super-congress members to spend their times among constituents. And that might mean teachers and shop owners and a childcare givers would feel comfortable running for office and not significantly changing their jobs.
While I am pleased to see this argument refreshingly NOT made on the premise that representing fewer people will legitimately make legislators actually do the right thing, I'm not really sold.
For starters, Congress already does a pretty trash job arranging to have enough staff to properly put together information for themselves, so they increasingly rely on external (interest) groups to do deep research. Having over 10x as many legislators is going to make the necessary budget to staff them over 10x bigger and put more pressure on individual Congresspeople to do more with less.
Meanwhile interest groups are going to have just as easy a time producing slick presentations, and already get such outsized returns on lobbying that they can probably absorb the increased costs.
I also don't buy the "money in politics" argument. If elections really do get cheaper than they get cheaper to contest as well. You don't need to coordinate a ton because we already have political parties and a fundraising apparatus that can shift money around a lot more easily than you can shift around whatever local donations from concerned citizens you're using to counter it.
I generally share your skepticism, but I'd push back on one of your arguments:
> I also don't buy the "money in politics" argument. If elections really do get cheaper than they get cheaper to contest as well. You don't need to coordinate a ton because we already have political parties and a fundraising apparatus that can shift money around a lot more easily than you can shift around whatever local donations from concerned citizens you're using to counter it.
What you say is certainly true about the distribution of money, but it's important to remember that money is only one method of reaching the electorate. I know the name and face of my state rep because he came to my town and held a townhall in a room of 60 people on a topic I care about. He lives within a 10 minute drive of me, and one of my team members has him as a neighbor, a few houses down. None of this required a particularly large amount of money from him, and would be far more workable in a larger House.
I think your reasoning step "If elections really do get cheaper than they get cheaper to contest as well." ignores the fact that cheaper elections targeting smaller numbers of voters increases the impact of non-money-based outreach as well. Money might simply become somewhat less relevant.
Pennsylvania passed a constitutional amendment in 1874 making their state legislature quite numerous, as a way to control widespread corruption. It seems to have succeeded at that. I'm not sure how well that applies to modern times and modern problems, though.
Wouldn't all the legislators mean that Congresspeople could themselves be assigned to the jobs that would formerly go to staff? It becomes viable to say to Member, "Okay you're going to be on the Southeastern Water Rights committee, so go become an expert about southeastern water rights."
Each person voting on major legislation is going to need staff to research and explain technical details.
If legislators end up banding together and voting as little blocks and acting as each others' staff, then you've effectively just renamed a bunch of people's jobs, except also your "support staff" will randomly leave and join every couple of years and you don't get to interview them or fire them yourself.
Also some staffers do "constituent services", not things related to legislation, which is kinda weird and has its own problems, but you do need to staff for it.
You're missing some of the substance of what Strange is saying: what staff do today is what the Committee system was created to do. Large personal staffs are really new, dating from the 60s and especially the 70s. Prior to that, the largest number of staff positions was working directly for the Committees, especially before the number of Committees was drastically reduced in the 40s.
In a very large House, the number of Committees could be increased again, staff could work for the Committees primarily, and House members could reduce their personal staff counts.
Personal Congressional staff aren't usually policy experts. If you need expertise, you either hire out (more common these days) or (as it used to be done) you call experts to testify before your committee.
Maybe this would help us get a pet idea of mine through and make a "Congressional Policy Office (CPO)" more likely. I think part of the reason local government (usually) works better is the dedicated staff experts usually do all the details and town council is more giving them general direction and then yes/no on specific proposals. Vs. congress which tend to write the specific proposals themselves. I'd rather the norm be congress never writes a word of law themselves, but directs the relevant department in the CPO to come with a proposal to do X. Then they present the law, or changes to law, and congress votes it up or down.
Giant congress makes this more feasible as now it makes more sense to have one set of staff that works for congress as a whole rather than every congressman having their own staff.
I have an alternate proposal that amounts to the same thing: Repeal the 17th Amendment. Prior to this, senators were directly voted on by the state legislatures, as the Senate is the body that's supposed to represent the interests of the respective state governments, which isn't exactly the same thing representing the people. But this is good, there's 7,386 of these state level representatives, and they are generally very easy to get ahold of if, for instance, you were become unhappy with the job your senator in federal Congress is doing.
Direct election of Senators dates back to the same Progressive era faith in popular democracy that gave us California's awful referendum system that Scott has been complaining about.
Part of the problem with the current system is that power concentrates with the federal government, and states become increasingly irrelevant. The 17th Amendment was part of that trend, as you say, but schools have consistently misinterpreted the intent of the appointment of Senators to the point that most people would see repeal of the 17th Amendment as an elitist move.
One thing I think the OP gets wrong is his assumption that a state legislator would necessarily want to move "up" to the House. Giant Congress would likely change the perceived political career ladder for most politicians. Imagine you're in a state legislature that's bicameral. You start in the lower house and move up to your state's senate. Now you're part of a legislative body that's < 100 members. Ideally you want to run for Senate. Does winning one of >100 seats in your home state alone and becoming part of a >6k member legislative body put you in a better position vis-a-vis Senate prospects than remaining in a state senate seat? Likely not.
I would really, really like this to happen, but (in addition to the obvious opposition from the 'Democracy is always good' demagogues) you face the problem at the start of Scott's article. Most sitting senators face incentives opposed to radical changes in the election of senators, and new amendments have historically always started in Congress. (Technically, there's the "Convention for proposing amendments" that can be started by 2/3rsds of states, but it's quite a grenade to throw since you don't KNOW what amendments you're voting to propose.)
The claim that "Zero state or national legislative seats are currently occupied by third parties" is false. Senator Emily Buss of the Forward Party represents District 11 in the Utah State Senate.
You have Major Representatives and Minor Representatives, and you make the voting power proportionally smaller for the minor ones, and make the total Minor and Major voting powers equal. Then there’s still a significant group that can talk amongst themselves and act as rallying points for the Minor reps, but who can still be disagreed with.
Plus then you can directly compare and contrast voting patterns.
Liberals are not inherently right just because there are more of them.
I dont want liberals forcing their politics on the nation. I want states to have the right to say no to the aspects of their agenda that are most awful. Give me 50 laboratories of innovation and I will choose the one least offensive to me.
Whether you have proportional representation or first past the post is completely orthogonal to the issues you raise. Both forms give power to those that there are more of, regardlesss if they are right or not. And both are compatible with very high degrees of federalism. See for example Switzerland, whose lower house is elected by a form of proportional representation and which is one of the most well ran, decentralised, and conservative countries in Europe.
but in almost every state there is already a serious rural-urban divide, and over the last so and so many decades people sorted themselves (via mobile, "adventure-minded" (collectivist?) people moving to the cities, and more individualist (stability-minded?) people moving out), which made the situation noticeably worse, no?
... just the fact that the whole coal industry is a talking point, and about 40 000 people work in it, for not very good wages. (30 billion total revenue.) while also there's a crazy datacenter building boom. where single companies spend more than 30 billion.
(okay, maybe the AI bubble is not the best example, but maybe it is. coal is the classic anti-bubble. it should have been forgotten long ago, but there was no real political cooperation, there were largely unsuccessful programs, and executive branch machinations via EPA rulemaking.)
One way it might help is decreasing coordination ability of congresspersons, and another could be to significantly increase their sensitivity to average voters relative to donors.
I think in my mind there would be effects from increasing significantly beyond Dunbars number. I think some of what appears to be deadlocking is feigned in order to preserve the group interests of Congress people. It also makes corralling all of them via think tanks and media groups become less feasible. And you didn't address the argument that their constituents should be more influential. Deadlock is also the result of lobbying by special interest groups.
> I think in my mind there would be effects from increasing significantly beyond Dunbars number.
Possibly true. I could imagine this leading to some sort of Commitee of Actual Important Decisionmakers with 9 people on it that are selected by the House at large; such a committee would be far more able to coordinate than the current House, and maybe making a huge House would force people to do something like that. I'm not convinced; they might just loiter in dysfunction instead. But maybe.
> I think some of what appears to be deadlocking is feigned in order to preserve the group interests of Congress people.
That sort of collusion seems very hard to organize in a body of 500 people, outside of narrow cases where other incentives also help.
> Deadlock is also the result of lobbying by special interest groups.
I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of this. Most special interest groups don't only want to prevent Congress from doing something; they have specific agenda's they'd like Congress to pursue. So it's generally against their interests for Congress to deadlock. I think that for it to be true that special interest lobbying is increasing deadlock, they either need to be incompetent or roughly evenly balanced with opposing special interest groups on all issues (which we know isn't true.)
> It also makes corralling all of them via think tanks and media groups become less feasible.
Corralling them via anything should increase their ability to coordinate, no? If a think tank corrals all the republicans, they would be able to coordinate action when republicans control the House (like now) or vice-versa for democrats. Reducing the ability to corral them seems to be very closely linked with reducing their ability to coordinate.
> And you didn't address the argument that their constituents should be more influential.
Influential over what? If you're twice as influential over your congress person, but your congress person is half as influential over Congress, is that good? Maybe? It's not clear this is a notable value.
This is a myth. There is no grand conflict between donors and voters. It's a conflict between donors and other donors, voters and other voters, and, yes, voters vs donors, but its a bunch of different conflicts between different groups of each and not one grand unified conflict.
The Congress is deadlocked because parties threaten to blackball anyone who votes for their opponents' bill. When the reps are able to tell their party, "Fuck you, I will vote my conscience, not along the party line, I only have to convince 25001 people to vote for me to keep my seat," bipartisan bills will become more common.
Maybe. But in the current Republican Party, it’s actually the voters who are terrifying the officials to vote for whatever Trump says, while the party is trying to be a bit more conscientious and losing.
>The second clause was two less-thans, meaning many representatives and low representative-to-constituent ratio. The third clause is a less-than followed by a more-than, meaning many representatives and a low representative-to-constituent ratio.<
Amusingly, the same sort of error, or perhaps a mirror image, has been made here. (In the amendment: "less than ... more than" → supposed to be "less than ... less than"; here, "low ... low" → supposed to be "high ... low", I imagine.)
--------------------------
I don't know if I'm exactly convinced by the arguments here. At least, some of them *are* convincing; probably it'd be a net benefit for everyone; but the arguments aimed at Democrats vs. those aimed at Republicans, in the "why support this if you're a ______?" section, seem of distinctly different quality. (Only the point about California & Illinois etc. is convincing, to me; other than that, we get "but what if the Texas thing backfires?" & "you love Trump!" Well...Trump doesn't have a lot of fans among a certain sector of Republicans, these days—and "imagine how owned those libz will be lol!" seems a little... I don't know, "what's up, fellow kids?"–ish.)
The idea that the population-disproportionate influence of the E.C. *in re* small states is a *problem to be "fixed"* also sort of assumes the reader is of a particular political bent.
These aren't terribly substantive objections, and I think I do support this initiative—just a few thoughts, 'sall.
If I understood it correctly, those two sentences should be (emphasis added)
> The second clause was two less-thans, meaning many representatives and _high_ representative-to-constituent ratio. The third clause is a less-than followed by a more-than, meaning many representatives and a low representative-to-constituent ratio.
Naturally, being on Astral Codex Ten, I wondered whether this was one of those deliberate typos normal, sane people unconsciously paper over and you should feel bad for noticing.
What aspects of the Australian system should be adopted by the US?
Instant runoff voting? Compulsory voting? Elections on Saturdays? Paper and pencil ballots? Sausage sizzles on election day?
These are all good ideas, but they still can't solve the big problem raised here, which is that the US has too damn many people and must choose between having too many people per legislator or too damn many legislators. The Australian solution is to be ten times smaller.
Or the other problem that has the author reaching for a 250 year old solution: the fact that any other, saner reforms would need to be initiated by the very body in need of reform.
I do think there's a potential PR issue there, but I think you could sell this as "6,206 Mr. Smith's Going to Washington": you can make the argument that the issue with "politicians" is that our current "politicians" are all a particular "political class" that's largely out of touch with average people.
"More politicians" isn't popular idea at face value, but "we wouldn't have so many problems if we'd just elect normal people to Congress" is a much more popular opinion (at least among fans of the Goode Homolosine map projection, apparently), and it does seem likely that we would have a lot more 'normal people' under this sort of system. (Whether or not that actually helps or not)
You have identified the right way to sell it, but I still think it is unsaleable! The big difference between the other leftover amendment, the one about politician salaries, and this one, is the other one was mean to politicians.People really want to be harsh toward politicians
Yep. The problem is the voters. The other problem is that we insist on pretending the problem is the politicians and that democracy isn't working when, in fact, the problem is that it is working too well.
There are some additional stories included that make it even crazier, including George Washington's endorsement, and the lost horseback messenger reporting it originally passed enough states:
The problem with Congress is not the size of it, it’s the composition of it.
Politicians are incentivized to come from elite institutions, gerrymander, and act in the interest of donors over citizens, etc. We need to get rid of politicians altogether if we actually want to fix these problems, and replace Congress with a citizens assembly of our peers.
I highly recommend the new book Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore.
This is what New Hampshire has had on a mild de-facto basis for....ever. I did my turn there, along with 15,000+ others who lived all or part of their lives there over the last 25 years.
You haven't engaged with the crucial point that pretty much no novel reform proposal has a chance to be enacted, because it has to route through the existing Congress, which obviously won't abolish itself.
But do you want to throw that grenade? Are you confident that the amendments proposed and accepted will be the ones you want? Are you confident that the wisdom of the delegates and of the current populace are greater than the wisdom in the current system, functional and dysfunctional as it is?
We just had a post here on how California voters can be duped easily enough that you can extort people by threatening to offer the voters poison pill amendments. Are US voters more insightful than Californians? IDK. I wouldn't bet on it.
Why is that supposed to be obvious? A lot of what Congress has done in recent years specifically is vote against things that restore Congress’s power over the executive. People in Congress are much more ideological than concerned with actually exercising legislative power.
That is true. However it could absolutely be enacted at the state level in any state that lets you amend the constitution by ballot measure, most notably California.
Right, and citizens assemblies don’t require congress at all. All around the world they have been created by third party groups when citizens demand a change and don’t feel they are being heard.
They usually result in real power. It's hard to go against a citizens assembly!!! Though I think that's only the first step toward creating ones that fully replace congress (at both the state and federal level!)
i've been pitching my portland city council members to bring the oregon citizens' initiative review process to portland. maybe we'll be able to do it for this trailblazers debacle.
That’s just it, citizens assemblies don’t require congress at all!!! Countries and cities around the world have created citizens assemblies without government involvement. They are put on by unbiased third party groups, and when the results show that 70% of the assembly want a certain outcome, Congress has to follow it.
It's the opposite. The problem is that the politicians are incentivized to favor the voters whim above all else. The donors aren't the ones backing Trump and his erratic nonsense.
Even if politicians were incentivized to follow the voter’s whims above all else, that is still not democracy. Because a shy, reserved person with a good budget and a strong plan rarely wins. Politicians have to act like a celebrity to get in office, and that puts a certain kind of person there. If, instead, Congress was made up of nurses and tech workers and construction workers and engineers, it would actually represent the people. Politicians inherently don’t.
we want to decompose the issue into two separate things:
- intrinsic preferences: what we actually want, essentially "to have more stuff and thus more welfare" (or more health, friends, whatever)
- instrumental preferences: the "how", e.g. rent control, liberalized zoning—these are objectively right or wrong. either they achieve our goals efficiently or they don't.
generally speaking, strong instrumental efficiency comes from just having high generalized problem solving capacity, "IQ".
whether the intrinsic component is diverse or all members are near the statistical average doesn't matter much as to what legislation can ultimately pass.
generally i hear people in the community using "sortition" to mean "randomly select the legislature". as discrete from using random selection to pick the jury.
"Sortition is the selection of public officials or decision-makers through random lottery rather than elections, used to ensure a truly representative, diverse assembly. Often called "allotment," it aims to create bodies that mirror the general population’s demographics (age, gender, location)."
On the one hand, I agree that getting 5-10 people to go against party lines is much easier than getting 50-100. On the other, I think party lines become much much harder to enforce when the amount of representatives jumps that high. Plus, one main effect (hopefully) of a smaller constituency size is that legislators are much more incentivized to vote on behalf of their constituents rather than party lines. I don't know how effective of a solution it actually is, though - the two-party system is the #1 contributor to these issues and I don't think increasing the amount of representatives will change much in that regard.
Anecdotally the extremely low approval rating can be summed up as this: "When <my party> is in charge, they don't get nearly enough done. When <opposing party> is in charge, they get too much done and <my party> doesn't do enough to stop them." I think this sentiment has gotten worse and worse as the parties have increasingly been defining their candidates as "not the other guy".
I'm not sure this is true of Congress in the current era. How many of the things left-wing folks have opposed since Jan 2025 have been things done by the fully Republican Congress? Congress, even under a trifecta, seems almost vestigial at times.
This sounds like an IT person's solution to the problem: Implement a strange and overcomplicated fix to an issue just because it fits the current (legal) codebase instead of refactoring the old codebase. There are well known fixes to the issues: proportional voting, election districts based on administrative areas, you name it.
Was the image model prompt to turn Congress into the Vatican, or is this just the solution that the model came up to on its own when asked to design a 6000-person congress?
One thing Im immediately hesitant about is that… campaign finance rules already push donors to spread money across many candidates because contributions are capped per campaign. If House districts shrank to ~50k people, campaigns would be much cheaper, meaning the same max donation would make up a much larger share of a candidate’s funding. That seems like it could make influence easier to scale and wealthy donors or PAC networks could give the max to hundreds of candidates, and each donation would carry more weight.
That’s fair. I agree smaller districts probably make word of mouth, civic networks ,and especially door-to-door engagement important. I still think that these races would still be very low information for voters at this scale. For most people going to the booth they are doing so without knowing the candidates esp with 6k. Familiarity cues matter a lot and just having heard a name from ads make a difference. In that environment even small amounts of spending by Super PACs or donor networks I bet scale pretty efficiently across lots of races, especially since the max donation would make up a larger share of a cheaper campaign.
I don’t think gambling our entire legislative system on an untested scale of congress is a wise idea unless society is literally collapsing, which it isn’t.
> The simple explanation is that this is a typo.
I want to give some benefit of the doubt here, but this sounds absurd to me. These were written up by very well educated men, lawyers, and debated for many hundreds or thousands of hours prior to voting. The idea that someone wouldn’t catch a typo in a 3 sentence clause seems incredibly unlikely.
Sol Hando argued that the text was clearly their intention as written because they wouldn't make such mistakes at all. But clearly, interpretation is necessary because of the mathematical impossibility it demands. It wasn't my point to favor one interpretation over the other, but that interpretation is necessary in the first place.
Note that the US had ~4 million people at the time of the first census, so a scheme that works for 4-8 million and 10+million, but is impossible to apply between 8 and 10 million is not exactly an edge-case failure.
Exactly this. As radical as the entire system of American governance was, the Framers were ultimately wealthy elitists who knew uneducated people were a danger to liberty. Hence the system of representation.
The article assumes "its a typo" then runs on that to propose a solution where Wyoming is a rounding error, instead of a state to be won.
I just meant like: "At a certain size of population, democracy predictably falls apart (see Belarus, Hungary, Israel), and the founding fathers were smart enough to predict this. Below 8 millions, [insert bullshit explanation], and above 10 millions, [insert another bullshit explanation], it's just the values between them that are super problematic and lead to things like Lukashenko, Orbán, or the endless fight against Palestine. This is not a coincidence; it's a function of population size. The founding fathers never wanted a population of that size in America."
A math mistake seems more likely than a wording mistake here.
It's like, it's only 3 sentences, and how could they possibly make such a fundamental typo that it inverts the intending meaning in such an important sentence? It was like if your wedding vows "I promise to never love and care for you" instead of "always."
I don't know what the other explanation is, but "they accidentally inverted the meaning in one of the most important and scrutinized sentences of their time" doesn't seem possible to me.
The impression I got from your first comment was that you argued that in such a short clause, any such mistake should be impossible. Surely, among those highly educated men spending thousands of hours looking at the thing there had to be at least one who was mathematically inclined enough to make such a simple calculation? Especially since the problematic range of populations wasn't exactly negligible, neither in size nor in the expected time until arrival.
I would prefer to call it Yuge Congress. The biggest, most incredible Congress the world has ever seen. But - yes, sort of confused on the merits. If the average citizen has no idea who their one-of-435 is already, then when there's an OOM+ more...on the other hand, it also becomes a much lesser lift to run for Congress with that many extra seats available. Low-salience elections have rather different strategies than general ones. I don't know, there's surely a lot of receipts behind the claim, but when the evidence is mostly comparing outcomes of second-order effects at best, it's tricky to weigh. "Merely" upgrading from FPTP seems like it'd have many similar salutary effects, without as many complicated unknown-unknowns. (Except Condorcet. That'd be a fun election to hash out in the courts...)
"So we have a potential Constitutional amendment which says the opposite of what it definitely means. If passed, this would set us up for a court case that directly pits the legal school of textualism (you need to follow the law as written) against originalism (you need to follow what the people who wrote the law meant). These two schools are often in oblique and complicated conflict. But as far as we know, they’ve never faced so direct a test as a section of the Constitution with an obvious-for-two-hundred-years typo that inverts its meaning. All the Supreme Court Justices who have previously gotten away with talking about how the law is subtle and complicated would have to finally just decide whether textualism or originalism is right, no-take-backs, once and for all. It would be hilarious."
That's not quite right. Textualism means "follow the law as an ordinary reader would interpret it" and originalism means "follow the meaning of the law when it was enacted". Many (perhaps most?) judges are both textualists and originalists, and they follow the law as an ordinary reader would interpret it when it was enacted.
Textualist judges often reason about the intent of the author in order to determine how an ordinary reader would interpret an ambiguous text. After all, whenever anyone reads an ambiguous text, they think to themselves "hmm, what did the author mean to say here?" But intent is merely one of several tools to help evaluate text, not the other way around.
The idea that judges should follow the intent of the author even when it contradicts the text is called "purposivism", and it isn't very popular these days. There was a brief purposivist originalist movement around 1980, but nowadays, nearly every originalist is a textualist.
All correct. The common term for the ascendant form of originalism is "Original public meaning originalism." Which means exactly what you said.
Although it is worth noting that the vast majority of textualists and originalists recognize that a "scrivenor's error" like is being alleged here would not be part of the original public meaning of the document. You'd have to convince them that it WAS a scrivenor's error, but if you succeeded in that, you'd have the entire Supreme Court without an ideological objection to ignoring the erroneous text.
This is clever, but let me put a horse before this cart of 6000+ Reps.
Lawmakers elected into office haven't been making law themselves for way way too long. Justin Amash documented the lack of sausage making by the sausage-makers (1). We've governed by regulations far more than we are by statutes, this is true across basically every domain and niche. I haven't been a federal rep, but I have been a local elected policymaker.
It is bizarre that the law-making part of our very intentionally separated parts of government are not actually staffed by elected reps that spend their waking hours running law-making ops. For [reasons] this got dished out to the Federal government. Long term effect of doing more and more of this outsourcing by delegation: the Elected Lawmakers Who Represent Us have lost almost all muscle and tone for making, editing, and rescinding laws, because it's the regulations where the details live. What's left when the real work is outsourced? Exactly what we've got now and had for a while, weird elected jobs that don't actually *do* much in reality. It's kind of understandable that Congress is dysfunctional when the brass tacks rulemaking, ie the pointy end of the spear of lawmaking, is....not your job as a 'law-maker'.
There's at least several tens of thousands, perhaps 75k-150k jobs that sit in the Administrative state right now that make the rules we've all gotta live by. That is weird, and for the next 2-ish years that is uniquely solvable. Let Congress rescind the delegation of regulatory authority, and bring the full scope of law-making back to where it should be. And not by requiring every rule to pass as a statute, which isn't how it works now and doesn't need to be how it works under this proposal either. Keep the rulemaking process basically the same: notice-and-comment, technical expertise, iterative updates...you just have the people doing that work answer to Congress instead of the President.
Budget increase! Well, no. There's a pretty clean populist frame that works for both left and right: we're not growing government, we're moving authority back to where the Constitution actually put it, so let's move the money with. Cut from the agencies, add to Congress in equal measure. Hard to campaign against that without sounding like you're defending the administrative state on its 'merits', which is not something that either left or right are likely to be fans of at this particular moment.
Congress can't just do this! Yeah, Congress can do exactly this, in big pieces or bit by bit, or all at once, Constitutionally.
But Congress won't agree to do more work, they LIKE this setup! Hmm, a massive increase in budget, a 10x-20x increase in manpower, and authority over rulemaking. More power, more chairmanships, and a massive collection of rulemaking organizations to lead - eh, which Congress member would take a pass on this, exactly?
But the President will veto losing power! Well, no. This would be the immovable dead in the water issue at any *other* time. But at the moment we have a maverick in office, a change agent, and most importantly a dealmaker. A deal could certainly be made within this current window to trade back rule-making vs enforcement, to the satisfaction of President Trump.
And in parallel with rebuilding a Congress that has full and proper lawmaking duties, we can dial up representation so that 6000+ Congressmen and women can run this thing. And get the bills passed in a window that will shut hard with whoever becomes the next prez.
> a massive increase in budget, a 10x-20x increase in manpower, and authority over rulemaking. More power, more chairmanships, and a massive collection of rulemaking organizations to lead - eh, which Congress member would take a pass on this, exactly?
Uh, every congress member would take a pass on this. It gives them more work without getting anything they want.
Yeah, I'm not convinced that Congress isn't just a sinecure job for mediocrities. The media personalities there clearly like it this way. Letting them grandstand on C-Span was probably a mistake.
· Elect an entire city / town worth of parliamentarians, who take decisions by popular assembly, like in Athenian democracy or in a veche. This city is made the capital of the country; you're only allowed to live in the capital if you've been democratically elected.
· Make an even bigger parliament, with a million members. They then elect their own second-degree parliament, with thousands of members, to help the first-degree parliament coordinate their processes. Of course, the second degree parliament then elects the third-degree government with several dozens of people for more snappy decisions. Heck, maybe there's even a fourth-degree parliament here.
While I agree there are a lot of benefits to Giant Congress (enumerated in the article), there's very little evidence Giant Congress does anything to resolve the *core* issue presented here, which is the public's hate for Congress.
There is an important difference between hate for Congress, and hate for *individual representatives*. Individual congresspeople are about as popular as other politicians within their district, enjoying baseline partisan support modified by scandals or general bipartisan vibes. (https://news.gallup.com/poll/162362/americans-down-congress-own-representative.aspx#:~:text=Although%20Americans%20overwhelmingly%20disapprove%20of,they%20approved%20of%20that%20representative) When rating congress as a whole, people just seem to assume that the other ones are worse (or consider institutional issues). Smaller constituencies likely affect individual approvals, but it's not obvious how they'd improve perceptions of Congress as a whole, and lesser influence from people's individuals reps + the general chaos of a larger House could make it worse!
Empirically, we can also check this hypothesis against state legislative approvals, given state legislative seats are much closer in representative size to 50k per rep. And lo, as bodies, they are similarly unpopular to Congress, even though they get way more legislating done! (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41719833?seq=1)
I don't think it's the size or ratio, though, it seems to be most likely either (A) productivity, the 13x higher rate of introducing bills locally vs in Congress + the 25% enactment rate vs 6% for Congress + POTUS, or (B) state legs have been controlled by one party for ages, and that tends to align (obviously) with the relative lean in any given state.
Yeah, definitely out of date! Though I would note your more recent Pew polling has this "local elected officials" phrasing which seems like it might be closer to "your individual legislator" than the legislature as a whole. Obviously hard to verify.
I've always interpreted the difference between popularity of the whole legislative body vs popularity of the legislator to be a feature of the democratic compromise system as a whole.
If you're at dinner, voting on what to order, you might be happy with your personal vote for steak. Someone else wants salad, etc. When the compromise solution of fried rice is eventually approved, there's no reason that specific choice was anyone's first preference.
Everyone may be disappointed in the final outcome, even if they approved of their representation in the process. Indeed, but for the lobbying for their preference, the outcome might have been worse! Thus the phenomenon where the local populous may like their Congressional representative, but hate Congress. "Why can't all of Congress be as good as our representative? It's the rest of the country who are voting in these bad politicians."
This effect isn't unique to the US, but it is more pronounced here because:
1. We do direct elections of representatives (others often vote for the party, which selects the representative)
2. We have a larger geography/population, so the issues and interests are often more diverse
Murder is a self-limiting phenonomon (if you murder too many people, there will be no-one left to murder). Yet, I think we should take action to do something about it.
And do you think the same applies to gerrymandering? Why?
Note that murdering someone causes a problem without reference to any secondary effects, and this problem cannot later be resolved. Neither of those things is true of gerrymandering.
Because it transform a republican form of government where the people determine their representatives into a semi-fuedal system where elites distribute power among themselves.
The classic political science rule on the size of legislatures is that the more numerous house should have a number of members equal to the cube root of the size of the population. For an American population of 342 million that would be about 700.That is a lot bigger, but not totally ridiculous. districts would have about 490,000 people per. We could also add 50 senators.
I think the supposed evidence for this rule being "optimal" is overblown. That said, it seems like as good a rule as any to balance house size with representativeness. What I care more about than 435 vs 700 is having an equal number of constituents per representative, whatever that number happens to be. The imbalance of power of voters in low-population states to me is the most unbearable aspect of our "democratic" republic.
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed."
I don't think the length and depth of this post does justice to the proposal it makes.
As it stands it reeks of back-of-the-envelope calculations and motivated arguments.
Take the money argument (h/t Timothy for offhandedly making the counter argument above/below) - To suggest that enlarging supply of a product with demand staying the same without conteding with the possibility that would drive down prices like it naturally does in every other market is... astounding?
The arguments for Democrats and Republicans are awefully short-term for what would need to be a long-term campaign.
The whole idea is casually suggesting to try something that was never attempted before with what amounts to a handwaving claim that it'd be alright where the closest analog suggested is China which *really* can't be that relevant.
It makes very little effort to show the solution will address the main problem outlined, no attempt to point to research that may or may not have been made into congress size and representation ratio...
It's kind-of a conversation starter waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting.
There's a hidden assumption that if the total number of congress members is proportional to the population then that would be true on a per-state basis - by since that's not the case now, why would ratifying the ammendment change that when it mentions nothing about it?
The claim that this could be passed while other solutions cannot is rather weak - the analogy was states curtailing congress members in a popular (populist?) move that costs them nothing. Here state actors that would expect to weaken themselves by ratifying this ammendment will be actively acting against their voters to no personal gain.
I mentioned the argumetns for Republicans and Democrats are too short-term to matter, but in addition one cannot make a good faith arguments to two competing sides claiming both would do better in elections thanks to a claim, a change is pretty much guranteed to benefit one side more. If you want to get bipartisan support you need to speak about bipartisan goals, if you want to let each side believe that it would help themselves you need to shut up and let them do their own math - telling each that it would benefit them more comes off as disingenuous and manipulative.
I'm really trying to be charitable in my reading here, but the article reads as newspaper-level, the kind of thing that I come to Astral Codex Ten to avoid.
Congress worked just fine for a long, long time despite having large numbers of constituents per congressman. It stopped working recently because of various feedback loops that increased polarization dramatically and caused it to be impossible to compromise or work together.
This wouldn't fix those *at all* (notwithstanding the claims). What it would do is make Congress as dysfunctional as a large political party convention (ever been to one of those? It's not pretty). Yes, I'd know my Congresswoman better. But guess what? She'd have no power at all, and Congress would have the dynamics of a large crowd -- not known for being an effective type of body at deliberation. Indeed, it would be absolutely incompetent at getting anything worthwhile done.
Does your congresswoman have any power at all right now? Have they ever been the deciding vote or bucked the party they vote for? It would matter at all to you if they simply replaced them with an automatic vote in line with the party button?
Agreed. Having so many representatives that each one has much less power and individual negotiating relationships means they'll rely more on their party to tell them how to vote to get anything done. That will increase party polarization, not decrease it.
"those spirits who first adhered to him in the days of his splendour, and became most like him in his corruption: their hearts were of fire, but they were cloaked in darkness, and terror went before them; they had whips of flame."
This passage is actually describing the speaker of the house and his many party whips after this amendment is confirmed. Looking forward to it.
whether you represent 50k or 750k voters, if national virality raises more money than local water management, the incentive to serve goes viral anyway. the district shrinks but the attention economy stays the same. big congress doesn't fix where the eyes are.
>It may have actually been ratified by 3/4 in 1490 and erroneously ignored!
See that's the problem. Record-keeping wasn't all that good in 1490, if not to say non-existant, what with America being undiscovered (by Europe) for another 2 years.
Fascinating! It sounds like the courts rejected this because the lawyer didn't have standing. Who does have standing? Is there a way to just remind the government that this is already passed?
I'm not a legal expert, but I do listen to lots of legal podcast. And my guess either everyone or nobody.
Everyone because you could just claim that any particular law is unconstitutional (because it hasn't been voted for by a constitutionally licit House), so if you've been particularly hurt by a federal law, you have standing.
If that doesn't work, I suspect nobody has standing. Maybe congressional candidates could try. A recent SCOTUS decision (Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections) gave pretty much categorical standing on election rules to congressional candidates, and the size of congressional district seems like an election rule
Imagine. "We've been using the wrong manual for 200 years?" Then, boom, largest representative body in the history of democracy. Make America a Republic Again! RatifyThe1st.org
1. People won't actually 'connect with their local representative' or anything like it, they instead grow even less likely to know who it is as they get no media coverage on the 3 websites and one newspaper. In 98% of cases, they will be a suit with a D or R next to their name who votes the party line. The remaining 2% are celebrity vanity stunts.
2. Congress being less about individuals and more about parties would in a vacuum make things worse, not better, as the parties have strong incentives to sabotage the other side when in power while individuals are incentivized to defect on popular issues. Compare leadership attitudes vs caucus attitudes. You either controll congress and pass anything with no bipartisan negotiation or don't and pass literally nothing ever.
3. This doesn't really do anything to fix the systemic issues with voters being incentivized to vote for the big 2 parties, you still get spoiler effects all the same, just more distributed.
It’s not obvious that it’s a typo. The drafters could well have thought about both the minimum and maximum sensible sizes of Congress, and fully intended what they wrote.
It would be weird to do it in a triple parallel construction, rather than making the third construction more explicitly different since you suggest it is intended to do something different.
The thing that’s weird is having three perfectly parallel clauses with one word change, rather than three perfectly parallel clauses and an additional clause mentioning when this stops.
The three are not parallel anyhow! The first is “equal to 30k” while the 2nd is “not less than 40k”. Also, in your scheme, the third would anyhow not be parallel, since it would omit that clause entirely.
Three clauses of (1) equal to 30k; (2) not less than 40k;, and (3) not more than 50k, could well be exactly what they intended.
Observing from abroad, so maybe there is some nuance I'm not getting, but the thing that always confuses me about the US Congress is why there isn't more support for removing the Senate filibuster. By making it super hard to pass even mildly controversial laws, even with a majority in both houses, it weakens the democratic feedback loop. The public should get to see the results of a party's agenda and then pass judgement at the next election. I'm not surprised that people dislike Congress when it seems constantly caught in gridlock.
Fear that it leads to a winner take all situation for whatever party has a one seat advantage in the year that the filibuster is removed.
Republicans fear that democrats will let millions more non English speaking immigrants into the country, promise them welfare, amnesty 10s of millions more, and give them all the right to vote, creating a one party state for at least a generation.
Democrats fear republicans will drastically increase the IQ threshold to vote via voter ID laws, concentrate power in republican leaning bodies like senate an SCOTUS, plus some gerrymandering, to create a one party state for at least a generation.
Both sides are right, which is why it’s called the “nuclear option.”
>A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive.
So the claim seems to be: People don't like Congress -> Congress is being subsumed by executive.
Could it not be the other way around? This seems like an important point for the whole argument. Maybe Congress could increase its popularity by actually doing their job, which is to pass laws and thus limit the powers of the executive.
Not an American though, so I'm asking for input on this.
Not that I disagree, but if you're so confident, instead give your reasoning instead of accusing the author of writing the opposite of what they believe.
ok I stopped reading at the 27 states need to agree. This is America, disunity and inability to agree on anything defines the nation. The only way it will actually change is in the face of some kind of catastrophe, of which dozens are looming, and it will not then change for the better.
For my part, I live in a country where there are between 10.000 (far north) and 20.000 (in the capital) votes behind each parliamentary seat. Does this mean we trust our parliamentarians more than US voters? And if so, for this reason rather than due to a gamut of confounding factors (proportional representation rather than first past the post, rules against gerrymandering districts, state money to political parties so they should be more independent of private donors, "Minnesota nice" culture throughout the country, etc. etc.). Since there are 195 countries in the world, most of them demcracies (although some only sort-of) it should be possible to get a rough handle on any semi-causal relationship thorugh some type of regression or time-series analysis.
That said, my pre-understanding is that the number is unlikely to have an impact in itself. I bet that most voters in European countries do not know who their representative is at all. Only which party they belong to. Regardless of how many/few voters are behind each parliamentary seat.
I think it's quite obvious the amendment was planned as an algebraic sequence to balance size of Congress and number of constituents per representative. Extending the sequence to today's population, we arrive at 1:200000 and 1665 representatives, which seems more reasonable.
I like the idea of them creating an algebraic sequence in law. Not sure it's accurate, nor that this particular sequence has any basis in science, logic, or reason, but thank you for suggesting it. :)
A 6000 member Congress is not a good idea as it reduces oversight per member even further and will make members just blindly vote along party lines.
In fact, the opposite is needed: radically fewer members of Congress. I'd say about 7 or 9, the typical number of members on a board of directors. This would allow public scrutiny of every one of them, and it would allow them to more easily reach compromise deals across party lines.
Now, you'll object that we lose all local representation with so few Congress members. But you can actually combine the two ideas as follows: first elect a 6000-member Proto-Congress and then let those people elect 9 members for the real Congress. You could even use fancy ranked voting procedures for that last step, because hopefully the Proto-Congress members can intellectually handle that. The Congress members would regularly meet with the Proto-Congress members to discuss constituents' concerns and priorities.
Is the "why should the Republicans support this" section intentionally snarky because there's really no good reason for them to support it? It would basically guarantee that the House will be blue forever, if I understand it correctly. That means this has as much chance of being implemented as ranked voting, or a parliamentary system, or any of the other proposals that will never be implemented.
That would not be a Nash equilibrium. Instead, the Republican party as a whole would shift closer to Democrat policy, and the two parties would stay in balance.
If the primary issue with the current American congress is constant legislative deadlock, I'm not convinced that adding more congresspeople is the solution.
Ireland's lower house (Dáil Éireann, equivalent to the US Congress or the British House of Commons) is huge relative to the size of the population. There are 174 seats against a population of 5 and a half million, or roughly one seat for every 30,000 people. For comparison, if the House of Commons had the same ratio, there would be about 2,300 MPs: instead, there are 650.
In the US, the problem facing Congress is hyper-polarisation and a myopic focus on national rather than local issues. In Ireland, the opposite is true: a large proportion of our seats are occupied by independent politicians (or politicians affiliated with minor parties) who are extremely parochial and have no incentive to vote to pass legislation on any issues of national significance. Because they're independent candidates, the party whip can't be imposed upon them. We have several elected officials whose job essentially seems to consist of driving up to Dublin, going off on a big rant about how the people in Dublin don't care about people in rural Ireland (so that this rant can be filmed and posted to social media, to their electorate's delight) and voting against any proposed bills.
There are two huge flaws with this proposal to make the US Congress much larger, and we have historical evidence to show it would only make American politics worse (yes, everything can get worse: ask Afghan people who lived in the 1970s):
-The Roman senate started off as a pretty effective debating chamber, with around 100 members, and it became more and more unwieldy as it expanded. It settled in around 300 members during the peak Republican era, and then Julius Caesar (yes, the guy who ruled as a dictator rather than listening to the senate) briefly expanded it to near 1,000 members, the better to muzzle it as turn it into a club for people Caesar liked. Augustus and others found this excessive and lowered the numbers, but they were raised again under Diocletian and later Constantine, centralizing autocrats who (like Caesar) had no time listening to senatorial advice. Constantine increased membership to 2,000 and that was pretty much it for the Roman senate, which survived not as an assembly by as an institution membership of which made one into a bonafide Roman elite member. Increasing the size of assemblies is the best method to make them unworkable.
-The idea that partisanship, parties working as blocs would be more effective than politicians representing constituencies is one that is contradicted by the entire parliamentary history of all Spanish-speaking countries. In most such countries, notably including first-world Spain, the stress is on party affiliation rather than constituency representation (fishing for safe seats is a common occurrence when you want an unpopular party hack in parliament). Party discipline is more destructive of the electorate's trust than anything else. Parliament members become lazy party employees who only show up to vote, strictly along party lines each and every time.
Is there a conflict here between the idea that representatives with smaller constituencies would be more attentive to local issues, and the idea that Big Congress would probably entail decisions being taken at the party level rather than the individual?
The outcome of this would be that the President would gain much more de facto power than they currently have and given that's a lot already then expect a dictatorship in practice.
The reason for this is something I learnt in the Dr. McNinja webcomic: the Inverse Law of Ninjas. When a large group (e.g. of ninjas) faces a small group of the same quality (so, like, one ninja) then the smaller group will win. The lone ninja will triumph over the swarm 6,641 ninja because it is easier for people to identify with the lone ninja.
This might sound like a joke but I'm completely serious: people will view Congress as a swarm and the President as a real person. The swarm will also suffer major coordination problems; Congressmen herd like cats, not sheep. The President will be a 4 or 8 year dictator (and often, via their VP, able to hand select their successor).
I'm 99% sure this would make everything people hate about Congress worse.
For a start, very few individual representatives have sustained 20% approval ratings with their constituents. It that does happen, it's not enough for them to survive a primary (the safer the seat is partisan-wise, the higher approval rating you need to stay as nominee as there are more primary voters you need to satisfy). Plenty of people don't like other districts' representatives (eg AOC is presumably not very popular in the white parts of Alabama), but they're not necessarily supposed to.
What people hate is that they vote for Bob Smith, who says he's going to go to Washington and pass the Save the Local Doomed Industry Act, he valiantly goes and fights for it but it ends up stuck in "the committee" and doesn't happen. The same thing then happens with the Abortion, Guns and Race Act. Bob Smith is very good at letting people know why, and a big part of his campaign is how he's "against the elites" and "against congress."
The biggest problem is that Bob Smith lacks the power to do very much, as he individually is 1/435th of one house of Congress. Making him 1/6000th of Congress will make this worse, so the sorts of people who vote for legislators on the basis of what legislation they vote for get very worked up.
It's much worse than that, though, because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. In short, because 6,000 people can't actually decide things like a committee, they'll need to delegate most of the decision making to a smaller committee that actually makes decisions. This already happens, and is why the House leadership is much more powerful than the Senate leadership, and part of what congressmen actually do for their constituents goes through them.* 6,000-person congress would realistically mean that the parties would need an intermediate tier between congressmen and the leadership.
As for what doesn't, the major use case of congressmen is to cajole people by writing them angry letters, especially but not exclusively in the federal bureaucracy.*** If you write to the head of the FDA, you might get a polite pro forma response, but even the 1st term congressman from Oregon's 4th district will get a proper answer and things looked into. For agencies with a big national footprint (e.g. Farm Services), this lets random Americans access Tier 3 Customer Support for the Federal Government.**
A 6,000 person congress would be very different on this front in two directions. First, the quality of congressmen and staffers would be lower. This would be bad, as a big part of their job is knowing which bureaucrats' arms to twist about what. Second, there's a risk that congressmen would fall below the threshold where they can reliably get government agencies to do things. This would be extremely bad, because if patronage can't route through democracy it will route through something else; presumably whichever MAGA influencer/Omnicause organiser you can attract the attention of on Twitter. These people will be far less keen on solving *everyone's* problems than politicians are.
A corollary of all this is possibly that people prefer the Senate to the House (source: vibes), but they definitely prefer the singular President to Congress, because he can achieve a lot more.
*This is a big part of why 3rd party reps tend to caucus with a party or fizzle out.
**This is the person you get through to after four hours on the phone to your bank who can actually solve your problem.
***If you're reading a blog about congressional reform, you're not a typical consumer of legislatures. Most people consume more government services than you do and use actual sports to scratch their competitive-team-activity itch.
I would register and then vote if this were on my state ballot. Scott, if you really want this to pass, send this to every podcast you can think of. Get comedians to talk about it.
Regarding your statement that the ‘troublesome typo’ would induce a showdown between textualism and originalism, I believe this is wrong and hangs on an incorrect understanding of both theories. Originalism does not mean “you need to follow what the people who wrote the law meant”. This is a common misconception. Originalism means you have to follow the letter of the law and interpret the meaning of the words according to what they meant at the time the constitution was written. So how is that different from textualism? Because textualism isn’t about the constitution at all. Textualism says that you need to follow the letter of the law when interpreting federal statutes. Essentially they are the same principle, with originalism applying that principle to the constitution and textualism applying it to federal statutes.
If textualism isn’t relevant for the discussion of a constitutional amendment, and if originalism means following the letter of the law (according to the meaning of the framers, who I doubt had different means than today for ‘less than’ and ‘more than’) then are we screwed? Not necessarily. Originalism and textualism both acknowledge and correct for obvious typos, known as ‘scrivener’s errors’. For example, in 1945, Arkansas passed a law that said “All laws and parts of laws, and particularly Act 311 of the Acts of 1941, are hereby repealed”. The Arkansas Supreme Court understood that they did not intend to repeal all laws in the state of Arkansas: “No doubt the legislature meant to repeal all laws in conflict with that act, and, by error of the author or the typist, left out the usual words ‘in conflict herewith,’ which we will imply by necessary construction.”
The fact that this has been "noticed and acknowledged for over two hundred years" would make any originalist worth the name conclude that this is NOT a scrivener's error and the Amendment means what it says.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to reply because this sounds nonsensical to me. The fact that it was discovered over 200 years ago doesn’t mean it’s not a scrivener's error. The Arkansas Supreme Court didn’t have to wait 200 years to discover the scrivener's error in my example above. If anything, it’s evidence to the contrary. If it was only discovered like a decade ago, that would be evidence that this was some modern reinterpretation.
Clarification: that was in the hypothetical that the Amendment is ratified in its current form, long after this supposed "typo" been noted.
The analogy would be if the Arkansas Legislature had noticed and discussed that the Bill's text repealed all laws and passed it after that without changing it.
Ah, I see. I think the counter argument would be that this was the version passed by congress 200 years ago, so the scrivener’s error already occurred, and we the states, as we ratify this, understand that it contains a scrivener’s error and are ratifying it with that in mind as we cannot change the text. I’m not a lawyer, so idk what judges would decide.
Certainly, you might have the case decided by Living Constitutionalists who decide that it means whatever, AND that it bans all guns and guarantees the right to abortion at any time.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. We often SAY that we're considering original public meaning at the time of ratification, but is that actually the standard? Indeed, is that even workable for an amendment that was ratified both in 1790 and in 1998? The public meaning of words can change quite a lot in 200 years!
I read a paper about this from one of the big-name original-public-meaning originalists a few years ago. I thought it was Michael Stokes Paulsen and I thought its title was "Which Originalism?" or "Which Meaning?" or something to that effect, but I cannot for the life of me find it, and it might well have been by someone else. Lawrence Solum? Randy Barnett? I don't know.
But the paper basically argued (persuasively, in my opinion) that meaning is fixated at the time of proposal, rather than the time of ratification. The 14th Amendment means what it meant in 1866, not 1868 -- but those meanings are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, and that is true in most cases, so it only comes up in weird cases like the 27th Amendment.
Sorry I couldn't find it, though! It was a good paper!
I think this comment would be more helpful if you explained why you think that. If you aren’t able or don’t have time to do that, it would be more constructive to keep your opinion to yourself.
" I expect that out of necessity, the House would take on a more parliamentary form with the party as the baseline for decision making. Then the big negotiations become those between parties, not between individuals." I'm not sure that's going to increase trust in Congress.
I don't want 6000 reps. That's insane, and will lead to political illegibility and chaos.
I have an alternate package of laws that would accomplish these goals and would all have a really good chance of passing. They would have to pass as a package deal as part of a massive negotiated settlement with both parties at the national and state level, but it is doable.
1. Congress gets a huge pay raise. Reps and Senators each now make $2.5 million a year, with automatic pay raises to account for inflation every ten years. This dramatically widens the range of people who can afford to run for and be in Congress, and dramatically raises the caliber of person who might be interested in being in Congress.
2. Constitutional amendment ending gerrymandering through math. All districts need to be as square as mathematically possible, starting from right to left, and it is illegal to consider demographics while drawing districts. A 15 man national board of elections oversees this process, serving ten year terms, appointed by the president (max three appointments per term) and approved by Congress, with the Supreme Court able to remove a member from the board by a minimum 7 person vote if they determine they don't have the right qualifications or have revealed serious partisan bias.
3. Constitutional amendment pegging a Representative seat per 500,000 people. Adds a few hundred Congress people, not 5500.
4. Repeal the 17th amendment. Senators no longer need to raise campaign funds, and no longer need to try to be social media and TV stars.
Congress passes the pay raise law because obviously. They agree to the gerrymandering law and increasing the size of Congress because that's the price of the pay raise. State legislatures ratify the amendment because it gives them power over Senate seats, and because increasing the size of Congress increases their chances of getting into national politics. The Senate ratifies all of it because it increases their power relative to the rest of Congress, they no longer have to run around raising campaign funds and dealing with the public during campaign season, and they get a fat pay raise.
The only entities who lose are the state legislatures of tiny states, who won't get a larger Congressional delegation and will lose power relative to large states, power over Senate elections might not be enough. But there aren't enough tiny states to stop this.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the median member of Congress is already a millionaire. Even if we assume that the richest persons make the best MoC, the utility of guaranteeing millionaire status seems marginal at best.
Also, if you just want to make money, you could do much worse than to get into Congress even at today's salary:
>In a comprehensive study from the 115th Congress, the combined wealth of all members at that time amounted to at least $2.43 billion, marking a 20 percent increase compared to the preceding Congress. This growth occurred during a period when both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor’s 500 Index experienced gains of slightly under 10 percent
>Over a typical 9‐year career for a Representative, an average Representative will have about 25% more wealth than the average U.S. resident who started the 9‐year period in the same wealth cohort as the Representative
I think the claim is that currently you have to start out rich to afford a career in Congress, and this wouldn’t be true if the salary were higher.
Personally I think that congressional members have an important enough job to easily justify a 7-figure paycheck, but it’s less clear to be that actually paying that much would meaningfully change who gets elected.
I am afraid that such a huge legislation body would be really unable to work in a coordinated manner. China only gets away with having 2900 people in the parliament is because it is not a democracy.
(1) if we're going to try to get 27 states to ratify an amendment that doesn't, in its as-written form, do anything, then we should go the extra mile and get 38 states to ratify an amendment that will do the right thing.
(2) my proposed solution is nonpartisan primaries with approval voting.
Our current primary system generates a lot of polarization. In a normal voting system, we expect to see the candidates converging toward the average of everyone's views. When there's a primary, what we instead see is that one candidate represents the average of the views of all the Democrats, and the other represents the average of the views of all the Republicans. (It's actually worse than this because we only get the views of the ones who are engaged enough to vote in the primary.)
It turns out we can just pass a law that they can't do this any more.
We have a few states already where there's one single statewide primary instead.
I think they're still doing it wrong; the wikipedia page notes that, if a party fields lots of candidates, then the votes from people aligned with the party get split across all the candidates and that party loses. The solution is approval voting.
And, to be clear, I think we should definitely apply this to the presidential election as well.
It's even worse than what you said, because with plurality it's not even the average, it's whichever candidate doesn't have any other candidates similar enough to them or with nearly enough money/influence/charisma to get enough share of the votes.
California already has a jingle primary, but we need the approval voting piece of the puzzle to fully unlock its potential.
To clarify, I meant that in our current system with partisan primaries with plurality voting, it's not even the average of views of all the voters within each party that win out. Because of the deficiencies of plurality voting, similar voices in the middle can split the vote and you can have extremes that win (case in point: Trump in 2016).
And of course I meant we have a *jungle* primary for most state and federal offices, but not President, in California. :)
Look at the rules of order. They can be changed more easily.
We have partisanship because of Congressional rules. Whoever wins majority takes control of the gavel, and completely runs the body. This makes the contest for majority far too important. It forces severe partisanship and creates wildly unequal representation
It should be possible to rewrite rules to eliminate gatekeepers in favor of rules based promotion instead. Every legislator would have the same power. While leadership would be loathe to give up gatekeeping power, the advantage here is that most legislators would gain power, and might be willing to vote to get it.
The argument that it would be significantly more difficult to buy influence seems questionable. Though there would be more races, each would spend significantly less money and therefore be cheaper to swing. AI generated misinformation is cheap and without a strong campaign on defense, it could provide a very cost effective means to swing elections.
IDK if the most likely outcome would be the supreme court accepting it was a typo. I think they would take whatever interpretation they want (whatever Trump says for the conservatives, whatever BlueSky says for the libs) and logic and hypocrisy be damned.
New Hampshire has 400 state representatives - by far the largest of any US state despite having a small population of just 1.4 million. That's one representative per 3500 people. I am pleased to inform you that New Hampshire has incredibly sane politics that prove that this solves all the problems! [note: sarcasm]
FYI this proposal is also what Patrick Deenen, who is influential with the current Trump administration, wants to implement. So maybe I'm biased against it for the reason of not liking Trump but I'm highly dubious of it and nothing I've read has sounded the least bit persuasive.
I question the "typo" argument. I think the authors of the amendment thought "we can't increase the size of congree indefinitely. At some point it will get too big to manage" It may be mathematically incoherent at a population between 8-10 million, but the intention was to give Congress the flexibility to determine its appropriate size if the population got much larger. Passing the amendment would thus give us the freedom to increase the size of Congress (maybe we have that already?) but not require it.
Now what do we do? the site has info, sources, and a way to sign up for news, but do we all just mail our state legistlatures and watch the world continue as it is?
My proposed solution is that in every ODD numbered year, the entire US gets an up or down vote on Congress and if DOWN gets more than 2/3rds (or perhaps 60%) then all current members of congress are barred from running from re-election in the next cycle. (So all of the House members and 1/3rd of the Senate) AND any laws that they pass cannot take effect until 180 days after the next Congress is sworn in, to give the next congress time to review/reject.
What’s to stop the replacement Congress from being essentially the same as before? Joe Crowley gets kicked out of Congress and we get AOC instead — AOC gets kicked out and we get someone like Mandani?
The point is that the the fear of getting kicked out may actually encourage the current members of Congress to value US public opinion as much as they value (say) lobbiest money, lest they lose their sinecure.
The idea is interesting and might be good but the actual analysis in this post is bad in a few ways. Firstly, you took jabs at Republicans. This will be noticed if it ever gains traction and the political economy you propose is fairly simplistic. A lot of the things you want to change are things some people want to actively preserve.
Secondly, your legal analysis is spotty. There is no form of Constitutional theory that says "we look at what they intended to do and modify the wording to mean that." The description of textualism and originalism is faulty too. You don't even bring up purposivism or contextualism or the other ideas that are closer. And the idea they've never been in conflict is very wrong.
You also don't grapple with the fact that Congress's unpopularity is a collective action problem. Individual congresspeople can poll pretty well. It's Congress collectively that polls poorly. Basically people like their representatives and dislike the other side's. That's the point.
Also, assuming costs increase proportionally the big house would cost about $10 billion a year which someone would bring up. By the way, you get a pension after five years of serving. Assuming it approaches the maximum (ie, people cycle out) you might end up with six figures of people drawing pensions. I don't think this is a good argument but someone would bring it up. What might be a better argument is if salaries go down you end up with it becoming a rich person's hobby club.
Lastly, you don't deal with the fact Congress WAS increasing steadily until the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. You could simply repeal that without needing a constitutional amendment. But also this is kind of a problem for your theory of change. The representatives per people was steadily increasing but it changed about 10x from 1787 to 1929 (so about 7% per year) and from 1929 to 2025 about 3x (so about 3% per year). The growth has actually slowed.
>a representative has little incentive to care about the experience of individual people in their district.
If that is true, why do representatives hire so many people to provide constituent services? And, why do polls show much higher approval for respondents' own representative than for Congress as a whole?
>the House would take on a more parliamentary form with the party as the baseline for decision making. Then the big negotiations become those between parties, not between individuals.
So, each Congressperson will ignore the interests of his/her local constituents? Isn't that exacerbating the problem that you are trying to solve?
This change would be very interesting for politics nerds. I'm much less certain that it would actually improve governance, which should be the goal of reforms like this.
>And when my state representative and my state Senator tell me about the good work that they’ve done and ask for me to vote for them again, they point to legislation that they’ve passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.
The problem with this is that a legislator in a 6,641 person House is not going to be introducing any bills at all. Bills will originate with committees and the legislator gets to vote yay or nay. This could just as easily backfire and make legislators even less interested in legislating and more interested in stealing the media spotlight so they can advance to governor/senator/Presidency.
Lawyer note: Originalism in the context of constitutional *amendments* does not mean "what the people who wrote it meant", it relies instead on analysis of "original public meaning". What the language would have been understood to mean by the people voting to ratify it. This is of course an obvious problem in the case of amendments ratified across the span of 250 years, as there IS no shared understanding of what it meant.
As to the shape of the arguments that would occur, these theories and canons of interpretation are typically relied upon only when there is ambiguity in the text, which there isn't here. You would have to argue that, primarily because of the 8 to 10 M impossibility, the law as written is nonsensical, and therefore needs to be fixed. But the Court would likely determine that had the people wanted to do it correctly, they need only to have re-introduced it without the typo, most of the ratifying states would have done so in the 21st c. when the absurdity was both noted and arguably irrelevant because we are well over the 10M threshold (never mind the political realities, your practical hurdles don't count.)
Of course this is all academic, as small states will never vote to make the Electoral College irrelevant, the world where presidential candidates can just run up numbers in their densest strongholds is death to rural America. And that's even if I grant you that your new Mega-Congress somehow weakened the executive. Let's face it, the only available evidence of such a body is that weak leaders such as the hapless Chancellor Velorum will let it get clogged up by bureaucratic excess and 2000 weirdos yelling about trade policy from their hovering delegation platforms (solves the space issue though!) Meanwhile Naboo burns under fire from a droid army, and a strong executive like Palpatine will inevitably use the crisis of inaction to step in and ultimately dissolve the body.
Make sure the pay raise is massive. $2 million a year for the house, $3 million for the senate, something out of hand. We are trying to attract capable people here.
This proposal might be fun to debate, but it is wildly unrealistic both legally and politically. It is inconceivable that it could actually happen. If there was ever sufficient support to get it through there would be enough support for far more revolutionary changes.
An underlying assumption is that the American people are somehow better than their legislature, and the right structural changes would improve the legislative product and result in better governance. I don't see any evidence in support of this thesis. I submit that we have the government we collectively "deserve." Congress passes plenty of laws and is plenty responsive to the popular will. Making it more responsive in our closely divided country would be destabilizing. It is not a good thing to have policy swing wildly back and forth as the result of 51-49 elections.
I think there's a reason no legislature is that large (and China of course is a dictatorship where the legislature matters less even than the US).
Gerrymandering is irrelevant to the Senate, which is also prohibited even via Constitutional Amendment from not equally representing the states, and that's just as much part of Congress that people complain about as the House. They don't have to worry quite as much about re-election, because their terms are three times as long, but that's a separate issue.
The real solution is to break up the US into multiple countries. We are too large to be effectively governed by one national system.
Consider a population perfectly dispersed by party affiliation. The party with one more vote per district would sweep the election without gerrymandering. Determining how much gerrymandering exists requires a much much more granular analysis.
But Proportional representation is NOT the answer. And even if you want it, you have to break out of the two party system first, so you need approval voting as a prerequisite.
I tried explaining this to Nader's former running mate, Matt Gonzalez, in two separate one-hour whiteboard sessions, but he's not a math guy (extremely right-brained) so he really didn't seem to follow. He did allow us to host this essay on his personal web site tho.
You can only do this via ballot initiative. That’s how we got St Louis to get approval voting by a 68% majority. This can be done for mere tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, if only you could get some rich people to fund it.
In case anyone else clicked through to the article in the opener, saw that Ebola and Gonnorhea had 28% and 25% of respondents liking them more than congress, and wondered how the hell that's larger than the lizardman constant, it's because the questions are not independent but are a head to head e.g.:
Q26 What do you have a higher opinion of:
Congress or gonorrhea?
Congress ……………………………………………….. 53%
Gonorrhea………………………………………………. 28%
Not sure …………………………………………………. 18%
This also means the statement "People dislike congress more than cockroaches" is more figurative than literal, in the sense that it's a measurement of people's willingness to say "I have a higher opinion of congress than cockroaches", which is different from "We measured how much people like cockroaches and congress independently and found out people like cockroaches more". It's really a proxy for general disgust with congress, which to be fair supports the idea that many people are disgusted with congress.
Regarding the 11th (27th) amendment, it seems like the only way to change things is to get incredibly mad for a decade and work for that whole time to prove yourself right
FairVote are lying idiots. I co-founded their chief competitor, the Center for Election Science, and we advocate the simpler and better approval voting.
I'm not sure that anyone, in the history of deliberative bodies, has thought that increasing a body's member's by a factor of ten would make it more efficient or functional.
Maybe they're wrong. Maybe the scleroticism of large bodies is actually unique to 'medium'-sized bodies, and we simply haven't tried enough dakka yet. But I think my initial assumption would be that coordination problems would reduce the effective power of the House of Representatives.
And I'm really not sure that would be good. My primary concern with our current government structure is that the legislature has seen fit to reduce its duties and effective powers in favor of a 'supervisory' role over a legislatively-empowered executive. That power vacuum has led to an increase in the effective power of courts as well, as they serve as the primary counter-majoritarian check on the increasingly potent president.
How does dektupling the size of the House help this? Maybe it would force a two-tier representative selection system, which would accomplish a lot of the goals originally intended for the Senate under its original design? I'm not sure. It's plausible, but I'm not convinced.
Why think it’s harder to gerrymander smaller seats? It’s going to be harder to eliminate all representation for a group that is a strong majority over a large region (so any place with cities and with countryside is going to have some democrats and some republicans). But at the interface, you can do a lot more with a lot of little districts than with a few big districts.
And if you think beyond party, to racial, cultural, and geographic gerrymandering, there’s plenty that can and will go on with 50,000 person districts. In Los Angeles, you would be able to decide whether there’s a district that represents the Hollywood hills, or whether those rich people would be diluted in a bunch of neighboring districts. You’d be able to decide if there’s a district centered in historic downtown, or if those apartment dwellers are divided among neighboring districts. You could decide if koreatown gets four or five districts, or if there’s only one core koreatown district with the rest of the neighborhood diluted into its neighbors. Are there several districts that primarily represent coastal neighborhoods, or is each neighborhood broken up into strips cutting across it?
And if you allow the kind of long thin districts that, say, Texas has to ensure multiple representatives of border communities (who each get a tail into San Antonio), then you could absolutely draw lots of tails from a city into the countryside, either making sure that each is 60% city and 40% country with one or two big totally rural districts, or making sure that each is 60% rural and 40% urban with a few totally urban districts.
You're right on one level, but your examples require a lot more specialized knowledge about all of the local characteristics of those places, and to some extent rely on neighborhoods staying the same over time. It's not by any stretch of the imagination impossible, but it's still harder than gerrymandering at the coarser resolution of districts we have today.
It doesn’t actually require any more specialized knowledge than is required for modern gerrymanders that make large scale maps that look nice!
And importantly, all it really takes is one lawmaker from West Shelbyville to tell the map drawing people that East Shelbyville should definitely not get its own representative.
> Imagine how owned all those Washington libs will be when they walk by the giant golden statue of Donald Trump that hosts Congress.
You could at least pretend to write well, even if sentences like this show that your brain falls out when you think about republicans. If you want to convince the opposite side, don’t make fun of them
If the current number of house representatives is 435 and the hypothetical future number if the amendment is naïvely passed is between 6,641 and 6,980, what is the actual optimal number?
The United States is not a democracy, nor is it a democratic republic, but an oligarchy with some vestigial trappings of democracy but run by a system of de facto unlimited legal political bribery (for those who can afford pricey lawyers and who have enough sense not to be caught buying or selling votes in a blatant quid pro quo).
This system may be justifiably unpopular with the peons, but it suits people of influence and authority just fine. Therefore it will not be changed.
That said, a larger Congress might be harder to bribe. That alone would have The People Who Matter up in arms. They paid good money for this Congress, and they do not want to have to pay off a whole new crew. (This is why many people living in third world countries may detest the local strongman, but don't necessarily want to see him replaced, as that would mean that they'd have to make new connections and pay off a new set of swollen assholes.)
Also, I don't have a great link handy but there was a Congressional committee that examined how much Congress sucks for a while and some of their committee hearings are great (it's a lot of people being like "We suck so much! We are the worst!").
Sorry if this is a naive question, but why bother with an ancient proposed amendment with a typo? Why not just start from scratch and write a better one?
I don't understand why you start talking about a potential Supreme Court battle over textualism vs originalism in the section on the typo. If you're going to bother with getting 27 states to ratify something, which is already a huge effort, you might as well start over with a well-written amendment and get the 11 other states to re-ratify the corrected version.
I will also echo some other commenters that I think concentration of power in the federal government is a major issue. Congress's popularity, and the taking of power by the executive, doesn't matter as much if neither has a lot less power. Partisan control of Congress also matters less in this case.
I remember learning in high school that back in the 1800s, federal representatives would leave their posts to take a more prestigious one... in their *state* legislature. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to put Pandora's Box back into place. SCOTUS could theoretically remember that words mean things and that the 9th and 10th amendments exist, and overturn a bunch of cases (such as the infamous Depression "growing wheat on your farm for your consumption is interstate commerce"), but I don't see that happening any time soon. Individual states could try to assert themselves, but there's little they could actually do to *reduce* federal power, and both parties seem primarily interested in increasing federal power whenever they get the chance.
This is genuinely one of the most destructive “well meaning” wonk reform proposals I have seen floating around political discussion spheres. What are the historical examples of 1000+ parliamentary bodies? The Estates-General which was deadlocked and melted down in the French Revolution. The Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies with 2250, or the All-Union Congress of Soviets with 2025 members. The National People’s Congress of China with ~3000 members.
The continuity between all of them, every historical example I can find, is that they’re either utterly dysfunctional, or they are rubber stamp machines for centralized executive power. It is not hard to see that a mob of thousands of representatives might lose cohesiveness and become pliant to executive power. Each individual member is practically faceless as the influence of individual seats drops towards zero and the “bully pulpit” steering effect becomes overwhelming.
Several suggested benefits do not make sense. The role of money in an election is primarily to buy advertisements and fund on the ground campaigners. This activity is largely localized to the district the election occurs in. Elite money will go as far as small donors whether the election is in a big district or a smaller one. The suggested logistical issue of coordination of influence campaigns across more districts is routinely performed by private sector advertisers. The suggested benefit with regard to gerrymandering is unsubstantiated, mathematically more zones increases rather than decreases gerrymandering capacity.
These proposals seen across various think tanks are born less from realistically approaching congress’s problems and more from pure idealism about increasing the “representation” knob to try and fix institutional problems.
National People’s Congress of China still exists today.
Utopianism around the internet aiding rather than debilitating civil society coordination should be put to bed given the experience of the last 10-20 years. The median online debate, the actually popular with the mass public kind not the nerdy kind, is observably an exercise in gutter sophistry.
I think this is pretty cute, in a "Modest Proposal" kind of way. It reminds me a little bit of "Sovereign Citizen" tactics. There are lots of different varieties of Sovereign Citizens, but mostly they replace their car's license plates with something that says "Private: not for commerce", and then attempt to argue in court that "driving" refers to commercial operation, and therefore they don't need to pay any traffic tickets. Also, according to some old treaty, the US government is a corporation and not a Constitutional entity, and the entire so-called body of law is just admiralty statutes that apply only to maritime actions etc.
All of that stuff sounds really plausible and authoritative and honorable, but it never works, because at the end of the day the government says you need a license to drive, and they have all the cops to enforce that preference. And you might think this is unfair, and every man must be free to travel as he chooses; but the mother of that child you will run over while going 90 in a 25 zone might disagree.
All that is to say that Shelling points and entrenched institutions cannot be overturned with "one simple trick", no matter how elegant that trick might sound.
I like the angle. What would the estimated total cost be for the new building, the offices, and the newly required support staffs (and housing, transportation, etc, etc). Meaningful or not?
Let's make Giant Congress but also make it so that each member of Congress must live and hold an office in the district that they represent. The work should be remote.
The polls about people’s approval of Congress are misleading. Everyone hates Congress, but most people approve of their own representative in Congress. “Does my representative deserve re-election” is a useful metric here — it’s almost always above 50%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
So contra the author’s claim, we don’t live in “A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives” — something more complicated is going on.
One reason the proposed solution is a bad idea is that it would reduce the power of the individual people in Congress — the ones people actually like — and replace it with party control. Party control has increased tremendously in the past 20 years and seems a more obvious reason why “the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive” — the main problem the article proposes to fix.
The claims about congressional approval polls being misleading are misleading. Most people can’t name their district or rep, know nothing about their character or political views.
All this shows that in partisan districts, the larger party wants to keep their seat and keep the other guys out. Obviously.
There’s an option for “no opinion” in the poll I linked; presumably many folks who don’t know their rep are choosing that option. It’s possible that my interpretation is wrong, but it’s far from obvious. The situation is just more complicated than “everyone hates Congress.”
If you can get 27 states, why not just ditch this version, fix the typo, and get an extra 11?
The 27th Amendment was easier to pass once resurrected than this would be, because people have a visceral objection to Congress voting themselves pay raises. I don't think the size of Congress elicits a visceral reaction.
I'm not convinced by your argument about money. One seat is less valuable, but it would also cost less money to "buy". I expect you'd see donors simply shift to funding collections of ideologically aligned candidates. Funding a "package" of candidates would be different, but I don't know if it would fundamentally change the degree to which money influences politics.
I worry about the unintended consequences of trying to do business with such a large organization. A substantially bigger Congress? I can see an argument for it. 6,691? I'm more skeptical and would like some people who study the dynamics of very large organizations and how they make decisions to chime in.
This proposal assumes that a bicameral body invested with legislative powers, separated from and checking the authority of the executive, can be made to work in a large, rich, 21st century super power. I desperately *want* to believe that's true, but I think it's worth considering that it might not be.
Here's the Devil's Advocate argument: Compared to 1787 the world is more globalized, the US is more nationalized, and problems arise and must be dealt with more quickly and nimbly. If Congress isn't up to those tasks, it doesn't matter how big it is, how little districts are gerrymandered, how little money influences politics, or how bipartisan the country is. The President will act, Congress will acquiesce, and Representatives will win elections by performing for the cameras rather than accomplishing anything meaningful. Maybe Congress will be less hated, but it won't be any better at performing its Constitutional role.
As a present congress-person, one should block this idea as it will most likely lead to a decrease not only in power but also in salary. Or is anybody believing congress-people will be paid the same after such an explosion in their numbers? (At around 100 comments, I may not be the first to wonder. Scrolled down some, not all.)
"Democrats: You’re about to take a beating in the next census. California is moving to gerrymander its Congressional delegation, but it’s also going to lose four seats. Texas is moving to gerrymander its delegation even more aggressively, and it’s going to gain four seats. Florida is going to gain three. Illinois and New York are losing seats. Across the board it’s bad news; while you might come out on top in this year’s elections, you’re going to lose the gerrymandering battle come 2030."
That picture has been shifting for a couple of years now and, if present trends continue, will by 2030 be rather different than the above.
-- the Census Bureau reports that regarding its July 1 2025 annual estimates, "The Midwest was the only region where all states gained population from July 2024 to July 2025. In addition, after experiencing population decline in 2021 and small growth in 2022, the Midwest’s population grew solidly in 2023 (259,938), 2024 (386,231), and 2025 (244,385)...."
-- the Trumpist jihad against nonwhite immigration is dramatically slowing population growth in the two largest politically-red states, Florida and Texas. "Immigration accounted for 44 percent of the Lone Star State’s population growth between 2024 and 2025, a larger share than came from either domestic in-migration or natural increase (births)....in the same period, immigration accounted for more than 90 percent of Florida’s growth....If, in fact, immigration levels turn out to be zero or negative for the balance of the decade, the current reapportionment projections could be impacted in unexpected ways. For example, with zero immigration between 2025 and 2030, the Brennan Center projects that Florida would gain only two seats rather than three because it would go from being one of the nation’s fastest growing states to a relatively slow growing one. Meanwhile, Wisconsin would keep a seat that it is currently projected to lose."
-- the Census Bureau again: "domestic migration within the US has been changing. From July 2024 through June 2025, the Midwest saw positive net domestic migration for the first time this decade." Looking at major blue or red states, CA through 7/1/25 had its 4th straight annual decline in net domestic-migration loss; NY for 2025 had less than half the net loss of either 2021 or 2022; TX had its lowest net annual gain since 2020 and FL its lowest since sometime before 2020; WI had its 4th straight year of net domestic gain; MN and MI each had their first domestic net gain since sometime before 2020; VA had its 2nd year of net domestic gain after three years of losses; IL had its lowest net domestic loss since 2020; WA had its 2nd year of net domestic gain after three years of losses. The large blue city in which I live, Chicago, is today on track to in 2030 record its largest census population since 1980.
That's a fun quirk I didn't know about but I want to argue that the fundamental problem we have with congress is too much (direct) representation not too little.
Yglesias wrote an interesting piece awhile ago about how everyone thinks policy is easy and they hate congress because they keep electing people and then those people don't do the 'obvious' things that would fix everything. Of course the problem is that at this point in history there are usually good reasons we didn't do those obvious things (like they have bad consequences or a bunch of other people think it's obvious we shouldn't do that).
I don't think he takes the implications of this seriously enough. Indeed, I'd argue that Trump is the natural result of frustration with a system where people keep campaigning on things easy enough for voters to understand in the limited time they are willing to give to an election and then have to deal with the real complications of the world.
In an ideal world we would have something like transferable votes. Rather than having to pick a particular politician I could pick a particular organization to place my vote for me. But there are quite a lot of issues there with corruption and practical implementation. Another great idea would be to have our state legislatures vote for our national legislatures but even that seems pretty hard.
So at least what we should do is repeal McCain-Feingold and allow the national parties to make unlimited donations to individual canidates to reduce the effects favoring the most extreme legislatures in terms of fundraising and creating pressure to do things that are nationally popular.
My weird suggestion is to have congress reform the electoral college in the following ways. They can set the date (and I believe manner) of elections so specify that electors will be choosen 8 years before they vote for their canidate and don't allow the name of any canidate to appear on the ballot (ie you have to vote for an elector and the listed party, if they want to promise to vote for a particular figure in 8 years that information can't be on the ballot).
Aside from reduced polarization, one of the main things I'd want to get out of a political reform is better consumer protection, like Europe has. This seems like it would be very much at odds with unlimited donations.
That electoral system sounds nice in theory. If anybody gets some large groups of voting nerds together, maybe they can try it out on some toy elections and see how it does in practice. I'd be interested to hear how it goes.
I actually think consumer protection regulations tend to benefit established market incumbents so this might go the other way. Consumer protections increase barriers to entry into the market but since they apply to all market participants generally they are to the advantage of the incumbents. It might feel like consumer protections are things the companies will hate but overall that's not so clear. I mean at the end of the day you can always just pass any increased costs along to your customers since everyone has them so why would this result in less consumer protection?
Anyway what I said was unlimited donations from the party to a candidate which is a bit different. We already have unlimited donations to super-pacs -- they just can't coordinate. Those have much more of an incentive to be extremist but it isn't clear it does much to cut down on the ability of politicians to see how their votes impact the corporate donations to the super-pacs on their side.
Also, you have to realize that most influence happens not by outright purchasing a vote but simply because they manage to get the politician's time and that lets them pitch the arguments and considerations that benefit them. Someone is always going to have that kind of time advantage, even if you had no donations at all it wouldn't result in politicians hanging out with random joe public. Is it really better when that influence and time is basically being managed by Epstein style shadowy figures who somehow can get anyone who is anyone into their roleadex? I tend to think open lobbying might be the least bad way for this influence to be distributed.
That's why I specified "like Europe has". Somehow, in the US, every law that is drafted, no matter the subject and no matter the direction, seems to end up benefiting large, established corporations. Consumer protection absolutely can be done without making things harder for small or informal businesses! For instance, you can fine a supplier that sells tumeric with too much lead. While larger corporations would still have an advantage at testing the lead levels of their products at scale, it avoids adding start-up costs you might see with a different system like certification.
So this is a nice dream. So our congress has many problems, too much big money, too much influence from big business (pharma, defense, food) and as you say accountability to constituents. But I see the biggest problem with congress is that they have given much of their power to the executive branch. And so I see the solution as; We the voters must insist on congress people that will take back their power and make the hard decisions. But no one I hear is even talking about this.
In this fascinating post, Scott doesn't really go into detail about why this amendment has overwhelming advantage compared to other ways to fix Congress, in the form of actually Getting Anything Done.
If you want to say "Giant Congress we'll make things worse, here's my own plan for fixing things," you're entitled to. But let's say that although you think this amendment would improve our system, but not enormously. And you're afraid of the opportunity cost of pushing this amendment when we could be doing something more useful.
You can put that worry right out of your mind, because this amendment has a huge advantage. Which is that the actual text of the amendment goes back to the 1780s, and was endorsed by numerous members of the founding generation. In a country that still largely reverse the Founders, that's a huge advantage.
.
Even though the amendment originally failed, the fact that it is a relic from the original Convention is hugely important. For much of America, not limited to conservative Republicans, America's unofficial civil cult is alive and well. And no modern amendment will ever have the cachet in that cult called like an amendment that was endorsed by George Washington (I think).
So if you think Giant Congress is a step in the right direction, your choice amounts to This or Nothing. As far as legislative solutions go, you're not going to find anything better that has a snowball's
Years ago, as a student in a course that involved reading the daily minutes of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, I learned that the Electoral College had been a desperate bit of improv not even suggested until almost the last day of the gathering. Virtually nobody present deeply liked it or had thought through its implications; they were just hopelessly stuck on the point of how the new "president" would be elected and the EC was the half-a-loaf that a majority present could live with.
Then, as part of trying to persuade enough states to ratify the drafted new constitution, Hamilton/Madison in the Federalist Papers hand-waved the idea of the EC ensuring that small states got heard in national elections. Then when states, in order to give that notion teeth, began requiring their electors to vote as a bloc the way the state's presidential vote had gone, Madison was horrified and outraged. He proposed a Constitutional amendment banning the practice but it didn't go anywhere.
In legal reality no amendment is required to get rid of the EC's state by state all-or-nothing aspect (because that part is not in the Constitution). Congress could pass a federal law declaring that the EC votes shall be assigned based on the winning candidate by House district (for 435 of the votes) or state as a whole (for the other 100 EC votes i.e. the 2 per state based on Senate representation).
That change would preserve the EC's extra representation for low-population states, while largely eliminating the scenario of a presidential candidate losing the popular vote but winning the White House. And of greatest value to me that change would end the thing where presidential tickets campaign in and pander to only the handful of "swing" states, basically ignoring the rest of us whether our state is large or small.
Your comment made me dig a bit more and, current SCOTUS precedent is indeed that Congress alone could not prevent the states from the all-or-nothing thing. So, pending a future-SCOTUS conclusion to the contrary, an amendment would be required. Foo. I am discouraged by this.
As for gerrymandering, I certainly would make ending that practice the highest constitutional priority ahead of actually anything else, including reforming the EC. That said, my idea about the present situation [gerrymandering still happening] would be that EC votes being cast by congressional district would at least make the gerrymandering of federal districts _harder_. The politicians trying to choose their voters for House of Representatives partisan gain, which always includes trying to protect some specific incumbents, would now have to compromise that selfish objective with a different party-selfish objective of trying to guess which lines would best help future POTUS nominees of their party.
Getting rid of gerrymandering is the best first choice! Making is a bit less practical to do without backfire risk would be...well not even half a loaf but, something at least.
All we need to get rid of the EC is to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; if we can’t pass that, why do you think we could get Congress to do it?
The point about originalism vs textualism is amateurish. There's already a lot of thought put into how textualism can be reconciled with the existence of typos (called "scrivener's errors" in the legal business), and originalism is of two types (original meaning and original purpose), not just the one type mentioned in the post.
trying to peer into the minds of the legislators who wrote the bill has been very much out of favor for decades. Just the public meaning of the text they actually passed. What congressmen said about it on the side has very little weight, for good reason: it's not what the full congress actually voted on.
Having a relatively small lower house seems to be a common feature of large countries. India's lower house has 543, Brazil's has 513, Indonesia's has 580, Apart from China, no other legislature has more than 900 people in one chamber.
Not arguing against the proposal, but I wonder why no democracy has tried having a large legislature.
One rule of thumb I've heard is that empirically, lower houses of legislatures tend to be sized to approximately the cube root of the population. That would be about 685 members for the US.
An important difference between the US and those nations is the power and impact of the 50 state legislatures.
Even after some decades of the federal government gaining relative power, the states still do have and carry out significant lawmaking authority at the practical level. To note one example currently in the news, there's a reason most of the wave of "YIMBY" advocacy/lobbying efforts is taking place in state capitols rather than Congress.
Also a current theme in SCOTUS jurisprudence is pushing back at the federal agglomeration of authority [some examples being the "Sackett", "Dobbs", "Loper", "Sebelius", "Allen", "Skrmetti", "City and County of San Francisco" rulings]. Given lifetime terms for justices that trend won't change anytime soon.
So to some degree lawmaking power is more decentralized in the US than in most other places.
I don't think federalism is a determining factor here. Canada, Mexico, and Switzerland are all (as of 2019) within 1-2% of the legislature size suggested by the cube root rule. To the best of my knowledge, Canada has about the same level of federalism as the US, Mexico maybe somewhat less, and Switzerland quite a bit more. The EU Parliament also comes pretty close the cube root rule levels, with 720 MEPs as of 2025 for a population of 450 million (CRR legislature size would be 766).
That said, the cube root rule is an empirical observation based on a very rough trend with a lot of departures in both directions. There are theoretical justifications that have been proposed for it, but I don't think it should be adhered to too strongly as a prescriptive rule.
Here's another idea. Winner-take-all voting systems, like in the US, naturally produce two parties that roughly evenly divide the national vote. New forms of media, like cable TV, talk radio, and social media, that give people more choice to absorb news the way they want, lead people to self-segregate into echo chambers and vote for more polarized politicians, driving these two parties further apart and making it harder for them to compromise and thus pass laws. Citizens are frustrated by this deadlock. One way to reduce it may be to introduce national propositions so that we can directly vote on laws, like many cities, counties, and states already do.
Why would voting directly on issues be any more successful than voting indirectly, by electing our Congressional representatives? As citizens, we have diverse views, but to elect representatives in a two-party system, all these views on a huge range of issues must be sorted, often arbitrarily, into just two boxes. It’s not just squeezing a square peg into a round hole; it’s putting a hypercube with hundreds of dimensions into a dot. There are issues that majorities of citizens agree on and want action on, but which aren’t acted on because of the representative system. Voting directly on these issues would get things done that majorities want, relieving much of our frustration. Another benefit of offloading some of the contentious issues from Congress would be to reduce pressure on representatives and perhaps let them relax their adversarial stance and cooperate more to get bills passed.
It wouldn’t be a radical thing. Many local and state governments in the US already do it, as does Switzerland, which is pretty conservative, stable, and successful.
A change in TV ad market structure seems trivial compared expanding the Congress. Surely they would respond to incentives(assuming most of the targets of TV ads are voters)
So a gargantuan effort to add a Constitutional amendment (the 27th was absolutely nothing, by the 1980s most members of Congress were getting their income through means other than their day jobs anyway, so it was just a cutesy meme-y thing to do to help out this plucky mediagenic undergrad), a perhaps-slightly-less-gargantuan effort to deal with the "least/most" typo, a likely-equally-gargantuan effort to set up new infrastructure for this gigantic House of Representatives, a decade or more of waiting around for smaller parties to start springing up and gaining power in order to do something about the already-existing quasi-parliamentary system we've got whose shortcomings you acknowledge in your sidenote about your own district's representative...
...and then whatever they do is still subject to the mercy of the same ol' shitty ol' creaky-ass-ol' Senate.
Tons of effort, zero meaningful change once the dust settles.
Yea. This concept should not be referred to as increasing the size of _Congress_, which while pedantically correct gives a very-misleading impression of lawmaking impact if this was done.
> if the US population ever declined to between eight and ten million - admittedly another thing that’s not really in the cards - the Constitution would become logically impossible to follow, and America would officially be a paradox.
This would open the door to legalizing everything via proof by contradiction.
Theorem: Murder is legal.
Proof: Assume murder is illegal.
- Premise 1. Congress must have at least 200 members.
- Premise 2. Congress cannot have more than 1 member per 50,000 people.
- Contradiction (from 1 and 2).
Therefore murder is legal. QED.
However, the government can also use the proof by contradiction trick to enforce anything they want.
Putting 6600 important people in one location is a security risk.
The thing to do here is to have 11 more congress buildings (in addition to the original, of course), and 11 more house speakers. Each congress house will have around 560 members and each speaker job is to speak on behalf of their house.
Piece of anecdata in favor of this... the city of Glendale ~200k people near the so cal suburb where I live has 5 city council people which each rep around 40k people and coffee meetings rather than money and interest groups are the key factors there. Coordination costs are very real and there is something beautiful about small d democracy.
I'm very bothered by this guest author's name. They practically just took my name and put an "-er" on the end. How would you (Scott) like it if you found someone who was Scott Alexanderer than you.
A current critique of Congress is that authority is currently so diffuse that everyone can successfully avoid taking responsibility. Instead, power defaults to the executive or the small circle of leaders who set policy and assume compliance from the rest of the body.
I don't see how scaling the membership dramatically higher does anything other than make the problem substantially worse. You'd scale the difficulty of coordinating and dilute any feasible assignment of blame for failure.
No one looks to China's thousands-strong national Assembly as being the powerhouse of a robust democracy.
Its a cute idea, for sure. And it has zero chance of ever being reality.
Unless SAI in charge of SEZs becomes a thing, and the economy doubles in size every year, the problem of federal government is going to work itself out when they become so insolvent no one will issue them credit. I look forward to the day they become so ridiculous and powerless that the states just stop listening to them and go their own way.
I don't know the solution, or even the direction in which a solution might lie, but I appreciate the careful articulation of one possible solution in the context of the procedure which has to be followed if we're going to keep the actual structure of our constitutional republic, and I certainly think that's important, even given how awful the general public's relationship to our representatives is at present and how terribly those reprensentatives have responded to the crisis. But the thought of that many represenatitives actually turns my stomach. In any event, I think we need to work hard at the smaller tasks in the mean time of eliminating dark money and reversing bad precedents and rooting out corruption and realighning incentives to encourage honor and cooperation rather than corruption and waste.
I'm making precisely the opposite argument. Currently, only people who are already rich can afford to run for and be in Congress. Living in DC on your own dime, with the lifestyle expected of someone in your position, is very expensive. And If you somehow get to Congress without being rich, your only way to afford your current lifestyle and reach your financial ambitions going forward is to become a quasi lobbyist, being bought and paid for while in office, or doing shady stock market stuff. That's obviously bad for governance.
If you massively increase the standard normal above-board no shenanigans required salary, then all of a sudden a small business owner, an entrepreneur, a high-paid, high-flying big law lawyer, a doctor, a highly paid professional of some kind or other can now quit their job, quit their career, put it on pause, and go for Congress. If they win, know that they will be making more than enough money to keep themselves in their current lifestyle or maybe do even better. Especially for young ambitious people who are not yet making a bunch of money, Congress now is a viable career path.
If you get into Congress, you are set for life. You are going to be wealthy, which means that higher caliber, more competitive, more competent people are going to be competing to become congresspeople, which is good for governance. Higher quality people, smarter people, more competitive people, that's good.
Hey Scott-- I'm sad Speiser didn't mention the actually crazy CAA fact. It passed!! Several states actually did ratify it but then tried to "unratify it" after noticing the typo. Because the ratifications were not *mailed* they didn't get registered, but in practice there was a period in 1792 where the correct number of states HAD ratified it!
The "Why should Republicans support this" paragraph is really weak. As far as I can tell, no Trump supporter (other than Trump himself, and maybe some of his lackeys) is motivated by Trump's glorification to the point of calling up congressmen to glorify him further. The paragraph focuses on short term wins for Republicans and ignores the giant problem hidden in an earlier section:
> As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s. Under the CAA, both states would be about equal.
This alone makes the Amendment a non-starter on the right. The Executive has been gobbling up more and more power from Congress over the last century, increasing the stakes of the Presidential election, and it is well-known that Republicans have an advantage in the Electoral College. It might be tempting to imagine that conservatives are so devoted to Trump that they would cut off their nose to spite their face, but this is wishful thinking.
---
The good news is: Republicans' permanent EC advantage is actually a widely-held misconception! Electoral College bias effects are surprisingly short-lived—they flip roughly every decade (https://dbaron.org/presidential-election-tipping-point-states). Democrats actually had the EC advantage in 2008 and 2012—thanks, Obama! And thanks to Trump's gains among young men and people of color, the 2024 Republican EC advantage was just 0.23%—the smallest *in either direction* since 1988, and lower than all but 3 elections since 1900. If the EC bias remains small in 2028, this might be the best opportunity in decades to eliminate it, with neither party giving up much power in the short or long term. Though small states would still object, and this is not a small problem.
Great comment. There are good reasons for Republicans to support this, but the author's theory of mind for Republicans strikes me as a bit weak. That's okay, we all have trouble with theory of mind for the other tribe these days, but your point about the electoral college's swinginess is something one would want to emphasize in trying to sell this to the GOP.
(P.S. I solemnly promise that I read this comment and had decided to reply "great comment" before I saw that you said nice things about me at the very end.)
I commented with one way in which this post's factual assumptions are outdated [the US population-trends/House reapportionment arrow is now in the process of changing directions], and the EC partisan advantage is another.
I don’t think getting an 8 state head start is worth litigating the typo or managing the logistics of a 6,600 member Congress. If this is really a good idea I would start over and make the proportion per 100 million of total population at a ratio that doubles or triples the size of Congress at current population. Trump would still get his new development project and all the other benefits would still apply, although on a diluted basis. Plus the new amendment could add term limits, campaign finance restriction or whatever other swamp draining that no incumbent would vote for.
This seems mistaken to me. Look at the UK: constituencies are about that size, politicians make all sorts of dumb decisions in order to appease there local voters. I think you want better politicians. No idea if localism gets you that.
Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek and I'm just falling for the bait. But this would make polarization worse. If anything, we should be making Congress much smaller.
Quick exercise: Can you name your representative in Congress? Can you name three ways that person is ideologically distinct from the average member of their party?
At best, when voters go to the polls, they're voting for a party brand (D or R). Most of the time, that really just boils down to what they think of the incumbent president (midterms) or the party's presidential candidate (presidential years). If legislative elections are just a referendum on the president, then it's no surprise that the legislature does basically nothing and spends its time either abdicating power to an incumbent of the same party or fighting with a president of the opposite one.
Voters don't know anything about Congressional candidates because most media is national. CNN, the New York Times, Fox, etc. don't cover your representative unless that person is doing something nationally notable. And the local newspaper that once would have done that got bought out by private equity, run into the ground, and is barely sputtering along covering local high school sports. Even if you're a political junkie consuming non-stop political news, you're still not likely to know much about your local representative unless they happen to be either a party leader or one of a handful of media stars.
And if no one has any idea what you're doing, then why do anything?
At least now, there's some fighting chance for members to distinguish themselves. A decent number of people in the much smaller Senate have managed to stake out distinctive brands. If you follow politics closely, you can at least tell me some ways that someone like John Fetterman or Rand Paul or Lisa Murkowski is distinctive. And that means those people may have an incentive to do actually *do* things. But, there's not enough media oxygen to give independent attention to 435 members of the House much less 6,000, and so there's no incentive for them to do anything.
Hypothetically, you could go far enough in the expansion direction that people actually have personal knowledge of their local candidate rather than media-derived knowledge. But you need *tiny* districts for that -- much smaller than even the typical district for a state legislature (do you know anything about your state legislator?). At that point, you might as well go full-on direct democracy.
If, on the other hand, you had a really small legislature -- like 15 people or something, then it's reasonable for all of them to get enough attention to have a personal brand and be evaluated on their merits.
I strongly recommend reading De Civitate’s series on non-partisan constitutional amendments, of which this is one. He proposes a series of amendments designed to improve the republic using our updated 250-year perspective that are consistent with the framers’ intent.
Some are more *experimental* than others, but others are solid and have me convinced. Geld the veto!
The gerrymandering argument doesn't necessarily follow. Gerrymandering is least possible at either end of the representative-to-constituent ratios--one giant distract or each constituent is a district. Then, the maximally effective ratio for gerrymandering lies between those two extremes. Until we know if we currently lie to the right or left of that maximum, we can't say that decreasing district size will necessarily lead to less effective gerrymandering.
A less-popular idea: CongressCritters should be paid a lot more. Right now a lot of what they do is indirect enrichment. You get the people who show up for the resume building, or the insider trading. Almost nobody who is actually good at stuff wants high office jobs just to do them because they generally suck.
Also, the public is against allowing CongressCritters having a useful research or legislative staff so a lot of that gets outsourced.
This could also be made much easier if the size and scope of the Federal government were drastically reduced. But just about nobody actually wants that. They just want the Eye of Sauron directed at their enemies and the pork to go to their pet projects.
This comment arrives quite late, but something many comments are overlooking is that Congress *already has* well over 6,000 members.
We just call them "staff", treat them like garbage, and don't get to vote for them. But most of the actual work of the U.S. House of Representatives today is carried out by the 9,034 staffers (that's the real number, not hyperbole) who do most of the actual legislating, most of the meetings, most of the compromising, all of the corresponding, all of the constituent services, and who control more of their members' voting behavior than you'd like to think.
Meanwhile, my mayor does all that stuff for himself, because he represents 20,000 people, not 700,000.
Big Congress would mostly just take the power we handed over to aides when districts got unmanageably large and hand it back to elected officials (and to the People), while having all the beneficial effects OP writes about. I think the CAA is a problematic vehicle, but Big Congress is a huge win.
The people saying this proposal is absurd and couldn't possibly function are just wrong. I can see *why* they're wrong. They look at Congress today and see 435 seats, so they think 10x'ing that is going to be impossibly disruptive. But I look at Congress today and see 9,469 seats (with 435 of them exercising special powers over the rest) and I wonder whether Big Congress is actually big *enough*.
WRT to FN4: Historically, New Jersey was the most expensive state to campaign in. One had to buy advertising in the NYC or Philadelphia media markets, which charged for audiences that were mostly not in New Jersey.
But today, under the current cable/digital streaming system, it's possible to target commercials to individual households.
>In many states, the new CAA-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.
Is likely optimistic, at least for stated reasons. We're split about 50/50 nationally, but states are closer to a combo of 60/40 and 40/60. That means that the dominate party's state control is pretty secure, even without gerrymandering. But since the national outcome is always in doubt, state's have strong incentive to try to further shift the national outcome by gerrymandering from a 60/40 electorate to a 90/10 representation *nationally,* whereas it wouldn't be nearly as efficacious to the state legislature, which they always control anyways without gerrymandering.
As a former staffer in Congress I fully agree with your analysis on why it is so hard to work there today (“Bleak House”, February 21st). Another factor behind this is the number of constituents in congressional districts, which has risen hugely over the past century. After 1910, when the total number of seats in the House of Representatives increased to its current size of 435, each member had on average 212,000 constituents. Today that figure is 760,000, but with wide variation among states owing to a quirky apportionment process.
America has one of the highest ratios of constituents to representatives of any country in the world. As you rightfully noted, this means that each member’s finite time is increasingly spent on the most well-resourced interests.
Overturning the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 would not only make their lives easier, it would also ensure that voters have a greater say in what is supposed to be the more representative of the two chambers. Even a modest reduction in this ratio, say to 500,000 Americans per congressional seat, would add about 250 more elected officials to help carry the load.
Ryan Zamarripa Adjunct lecturer School of Social Work Columbia University
There's a recent Supreme Court of PA decision tackling a state constitutional amendment that was incorrectly worded and did the opposite of what was intended. The Court ruled that the plain text won.
The case is Commonwealth v Yard. There's some interesting secondary opinions in that case.
What is required to get rid of single-member districts? That's not a Constitutional requirement. And it is very bad for representation. Wouldn't state-wide representative elections, with something like ranked choice, give better representation?
The difference between the dominant party's percentage of the popular vote from the percentage of districts that they won is a terrible way of measuring gerrymandering, because you should usually expect this difference to be quite large even when there's no gerrymandering at all.
The dominant party winning a higher percentage of districts when there are fewer larger districts than when there are many smaller districts is what you should expect to happen by default when there is no gerrymandering, not a demonstration that larger districts are more gerrymandered. Consider two extremes: If there is only one district, then the dominant party wins 100% of the districts. If there is one district per voter, then the dominant party wins exactly the same share of districts as their share of the popular vote. In both cases, gerrymandering is impossible. In general, the more districts there are, the more opportunity for fluctuations in the distribution of voters of each party to create local majorities for the minority party in some districts. If there are fewer larger districts, then the minority party winning a district requires a descrepancy from the average distribution of voters to be sustained across a larger geographic area. So in the absence of gerrymandering, you should expect the majority party to win a larger fraction of districts when there are fewer districts, just like the data does in fact show. So this does not establish that the larger districts are more gerrymandered.
> Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven’t improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn’t recovered since.
A noteworthy observation: Of our 100 Senators, only 8 are underwater in approval among their own constituents. All eight of them are interventionist abroad, but pro-immigration - the group most people would identify as "neoconservatives", or "GOP establishment".
Names:
- Mitch McConnell (-35)
- Susan Collins (-13)
- Dan Sullivan (-8)
- Ron Johnson (-6)
- Lisa Murkowski (-9)
- Joni Ernst (-5)
- Lindsay Graham (-2)
Every single one of the most prominent members of this faction of Congress is underwater, and nobody else is. But they always seem to get their way.
I think this is the root of American (and Western) discontent. Immigration and foreign war are two high-salience issues on which the government almost exclusively does the opposite of what the public wants.
This is a self-evidently dumb idea, which nowhere directly addresses WHY people dislike congress, and is 180 degrees from the solution, which is simplification, and concentration of power and responsibility.
Voters want to know: who is in charge? How well are they doing? If poorly, who can I replace them with?
Expecting an atomized, highly transient, and locally disengaged population to get involved on such a minute local level is a pipe dream. We don’t live in a New England township anymore, most don’t know their neighbors and don’t want to. A tiny minority of nimby retirees with emotional disorders will take even greater power.
6k reps is the fast track to increasing the specific things we hate about congress:
-total lack of feeling that one’s vote matters (who cares if my buddy Jack gets elected? There’s 5999 votes against him),
-even more special interests control of legislature (local car dealers will swing neighborhood elections for personal pork),
-and again, no one for THE BUCK TO STOP AT.
“Who’s in charge?” No one. “So who do we ask to fix it?” I have no idea.
This is an absolutely terrible ivory tower idea with no connection to the actual lives of modern Americans. We’re stuck with mass media nationalized political warfare, like it or not.
A propositional representation Party-List system actually addresses what voters are upset about, and accepts the reality of modern politics.
It allows every vote to count, every view to be represented. Instead of making the unrealistic request that voters learn the ins-and-outs of every candidate’s personal character and positions, voters simply choose which party fits their worldview. Parties coordinate themselves with internal discipline, so negotiating happens with 5-6 actors, not 435 or 6000, and shit actually gets done.
This would be a vast improvement, but it still wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem which is that there is no such thing as “us” anymore. From a sociological view America no longer exists, has no common identity, neighbors have no reason to get to know each other, and widely different political views are to be expected amongst such an outrageously heterogeneous population. So we’ll muddle along.
Not that Im not duly impressed by the Austin student, I have to wonder if in fact we'd be better off without the amendment. It is often claimed that congress members should be paid more for various incentive reasons and relatedly have bigger staff budgets. Nothing is stopping them from giving their future selves raises, but maybe theyre a bit shy? Afraid theyd lose a primary? Maybe a congress committing electoral suicide by giving themselves a million dollar raise and being able to walk away with the money for their "sacrifice" would be better for everyone.
You have misunderstood originalism. Originalism isn't about what the people who wrote it meant. Originalism asks what the original public meaning of the words was - it deals with how language changes over time. So in this case, both originalism and textualism would allow the smaller congress.
I want Giant Congress, but I also want a Citizen's Assembly, or Jury Duty Congress. This is a form of direct democracy that goes beyond electoral politics and directly enlists citizens by lottery into lawmaking. Instead of a bunch of wealthy former lawyers, you'll get a true representation of the country-- age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. You'll get the full ideological mix, from Nazis to Communists and the vast majority in between. Yes, you’ll have illiterates and people who believe in QAnon, but 1) the pool will be large and diverse enough they wont be writing law alone and 2) there will be another chamber of congress of annoying lawyers and professional lawmakers that also has to pass legislation. And an executive that can veto. And a judiciary that can strike down unconstitutional laws. And the benefits in taking electoral politics (amd big money) out while putting authentic representation in is a pretty huge upside.
you’ll have illiterates and people who believe in QAnon, but 1) the pool will be large and diverse enough they wont be writing law alone and 2) there will be another chamber of congress of https://www.red-humana.com.co/ annoying lawyers and professional lawmakers that also has to pass legislation. And an executive that can veto.
Out of curiosity, what is the utilitarian case for avoiding gerrymandering and having more equitable democracy? Do we actually think this will lead to better decision making if voters have more power relative to lobbyists? Couldn’t you argue the reverse?
I'm rather late to this post, but fundamentally it seems to be barking up the wrong tree. First of all, while people famously hate Congress as a whole, they generally approve of *their* representative. That is, presumably, why they voted them in! But since the issue of low approval rates does not come from the individual representatives, all the proposals to "improve representation" are basically misguided.
Second, the hope that Giant Congress would be "more parliamentary" is also misguided. Congress is already parliamentary. It has parties defined on ideological lines with leadership that makes decisions individual members mostly follow. The main issue is that the US is a presidential system and (as other countries have repeatedly demonstrated) this structure makes it very easy for the president to absorb powers from the legislature. The things that work in a parliamentary system just don't work in a presidential one, and adding 6,000 members of Congress won't change that.
If you go to the trouble of sending a letter to your legislator, the response that they will send you is boiler plate verbiage that they are passing along from on high. In my opinion, the triumph of legal positivism over natural law has rendered representational government moot. When the jurisprudence system posits law, in lieu of discovering law, discourse no longer functions to facilitate representation. The function of discourse is to legitimize. Voters are not heard. Voters are groomed by narrators for the 1% margin that empowers the pen and the phone to "posit" law.
Amendments must be ratified by 3/4 of the states, which currently works out to 38 out of 50.
It definitely beats what's going on now.
People said that about the Russian Revolution in 1917.
It. Can. Always. Get. Worse.
Yes and this isn't a burn the system down and start over again suggestion.
It can always be worse.
CAAPAC #SOON.
Guessing you're not referring to https://www.the-caa.org/caapac ???
> These proposals, no matter which direction they’re coming from, have two things in common. The first is that they largely agree on the problem: members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents.
Is this actually the biggest problem? Congress has something like a 98% re election rate. Yes, gerrymandering, but a lot more than 20% of people are represented by a member of their party.
The average person doesn't know their congresscritter's name, or is fine with them. But they hate the other party's members, plus they hate the general ineffectiveness of the entire organization. Making congress 6 *thousand* members strong seems like it would massively *increase* the barrier to building meaningful coalitions and rallying support for legislation, decrease their ability to get to know each other, etc. You very briefly mention this whole issue, but I think the question of whether it will improve anything at all turns heavily on how you practically implement such an institution.
Solution: Group members of Congress together and have each group select a representative to go to the super-Congress that actually works on bills.
Isn’t that what the senate was???
Exactly. I've often thought that bringing back indirect election of the Senate would be a good thing bc (as the founders thought) they sound be more temperate. But then I think no, the problem is the voters. They are either politically unengaged or rabid.
Indirect election of senators reduces the problem of voters.
For years, I've supported the indirect election of Senators on the grounds that it would reinforce states' rights. Your comment got me thinking about whether my concern is just a specific manifestation of voters' lack of temerance. Either way, repeal the 17th!
I'm curious, as a states' rights advocate - why do you think states are a critical grouping that needs rights now that we're no longer in an era where information travel time is so limiting?
A fiscal policy that might make sense in New York isn't necessarily going to work in Kansas. States might even have their own local culture which exists in tandem with both their politics and their geography - for instance, one could argue that the threat of earthquakes necessitates an increased emphasis on building codes and state authority strong enough to enforce said building codes in California, which would seem mercenary and intrusive in Texas, which in turn could explain California's tendency towards political collectivism and Texas's more individualistic Gadsden-flag nature.
States certainly aren't a perfect natural grouping or anything, but they're a fair enough mechanism to delegate certain aspects of legislation and bureaucracy that would be unworkable and/or deeply unpopular if imposed upon the entire United States. Or, put another way, why should someone in Arizona have any say in arranging for snow plows and de-icing in New Jersey?
Yeah there are merits to the idea though as a practical matter much harder given the populist currents. Having indirect election of senators would align more with extreme devolution from the central federal government to the states and other structural shifts.
Obviously, you don't live in Wyoming, or Utah, or Arkansas, or.... I live in Boston, in the suffocating atmosphere of a population sure that there is one right answer and they have it
No. Senators are not elected as a subset of the members of the House of Representatives nor are they elected by the House.
I’d only support this if every citizen was entered into super-congress to vote for their representatives starting at 18.
Do you mean sub-Congress? Super-Congress would be the representatives elected by their representatives.
I'd agree if you raised the age to 45.
A very large number of seats have strong partisan leans, to the point where the opposition is viewed as insane extremists and a third party/independent run can't get traction for fear that vote splitting will lead to the insane extremist actually winning. So no change in general elections.
Both parties work extremely hard to discourage primary challenges, through a mix of money lavished on incumbents, assorted dirty tricks, and the congressional seniority system, to the point where 1) internal factions of parties don't run full political slates, but settle for trying to win a few symbolic victories and scare everyone else into line, and 2) a successful primary challenge to an incumbent is usually a political earthquake.
The upshot of this is that it's not at all rare for a politician to win a 5 or 6-way primary for an open seat with something like 30% of the vote and then go for a decade or longer without seeing a serious opponent, and that American democracy gets strangled.
I think you are correct.
The premise in the second paragraph, "A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations" is not correct. I believe most citizens like their particular representative, but dislike the remainder.
Eh it's more of a prefer their rep to the alternative rather than like their rep which is pretty common these days. Not a lot of profiles in courage and stateswomen these days.
on the one hand,
> but a lot more than 20% of people are represented by a member of their party.
doesn't mean much in a two-party system.
OTOH, I struggle to imagine what a non-disconnected congress would look like, at any size. What sorts of local issues are best handled by a national body?
Maybe I'm betraying my urban myopia -- a random district of Seattle probably has the same broad priorities as a random district of NYC or Chicago. The water management issue in the article, meanwhile, seems like a good example of something difficult to address locally.
> doesn't mean much in a two-party system.
Sure, but my point was really just that gerrymandering doesn't explain the difference between the disdain for Congress as a whole and the insanely high re-election rates. The limitations of a 2-party system don't either; presidents have much higher than 20% approval, even at the end of their term.
that's fair. it would be difficult to predict that reelection rate if you only knew the approval numbers, or vice-versa.
Actually, water management might be your answer. It's a huge issue in the west, and something that practically begs for a coalition of states to manage. However, in the east, water management is pretty much "just dig a hole or find a bucket lol" and the bulk of it (notwithstanding broader environmental issues such as runoff) can be most efficiently managed and addressed as part of an individual state (or even county!)'s budgeting and permitting system.
Water management in the West needs federal involvement because Mexico is also part of the Colorado River drainage (or it was, until we used so much water than the riverbed is now dry 80 miles from the ocean).
It's possible to recognize that the institution is incredibly dysfunctional, broken etc and also prefer your local incumbent to the alternative.
Is there actually polling data or other evidence that most people are happy with their own representative in Congress? It may be the case but I don't think we should assume it purely from re-election numbers.
An alternative explanation for re-election rates might be that due to gerrymandering and geographical sorting, very few seats are genuinely competitive anymore, so even if you don't particularly like your representative, you still won't vote against them because you hate the other party even more (assuming they even bother to run a candidate against the incumbent).
The only other way to replace them is with a primary, but parties understandably tend to discourage these as they don't want to waste money on intra-party conflicts, so effective ones are hard to mount (except on the Republican side where Trump-backed primaries are used as threats to whip incumbents).
So it's entirely possible to re-elect at high rates while also having broad dissatisfaction and low engagement because it feels like there's just no alternative. In the same way that you could stick with an Internet service provider for many years despite thinking they're bad, because where you live just doesn't have any robust competition.
Possible, but as I pointed out upthread, the difference is huge and similar factors should apply to the presidency. But Scott said Congress's approval is ~20%, which presidents never get close to, even at the end of their term, except Nixon at 24%.
a trivial nitpick from a longhorn: I would say "an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin" rather than "an undergrad at University of Texas in Austin"
(that being said, TIL the story of the only A+ in UT history! UT is one of the largest schools in the US that doesn't do plus/minus grading)
Another nitpick from another Longhorn: I believe the official name of the university is "The University of Texas at Austin," with a capital "T" on "The."
When NFL games are broadcast, and the players give the name of their Alma Mater, Longhorns usually emphasize "The."
I thought that was an idiosyncrasy unique to Ohio State.
Sir, I think you mean THE Ohio State.
Abbreviated "tOSU", of course.
LOL that is such a Texas thing. Kinda like how us in LA say "the 110" or "the 405" since freeways are such a big factor in our lifeways.
At least when I was there, they did do plus minus grading! Just no A+s. So it was A, A-, B+, etc.
ah yeah, I guess I'm showing my age, it looks like plus/minus grading was allowed starting in Fall 2009, but it was still up to professors' discretion as to whether or not they wanted to use those
One other major effect of this: It dilutes the power of small states in the electoral college. Right now, California has about 67 times the population of Wyoming, but only 18 times the house seats. Each Wyoming-er has about 3.7 times the power in the electoral college as a Californian.
However, after this amendment, California, will still have 67 times the population, but will have 56 times the electoral college votes. Which means that Wyoming's advantage in electoral college votes per citizen is only about 1.2.
That's mentioned in the post.
The post says "a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s" but at 3.7 it's closer to 4x.
It seems like this will make it impossible to get the 15 or so Republican states needed. There is a feeling among conservatives that cities and rural areas have inherently opposed political cultures. It doesn't necessarily make sense for one political culture to have proportionally greater representation just because it happens to be located in an economic zone that supports greater population growth
Now, the point of the Senate is already to do that, but I can't see more than five R states signing on to torpedo their national seat advantage
That sounds like a fancy way of saying “conservatives want more influence than their population gives them”, which is true of everyone. I agree this would block the proposal. Any change would have to incorporate the current level of R advantage (or current levels enhanced to handle likely future demographic shifts).
These states would not necessarily remain "conservative" in perpetuity, but what they seemingly will remain (until politics loses coherence and relevance due to technological developments) is a state with very different kinds of problems and concerns than California or New York. Those places have supported Dems in some eras when that was a populist farmers and workers party, before it became an urbanist professional-managerial class party.
Smaller D-leaning states would be giving up enormous power by endorsing this proposal even if in the short term it helped the party they favor, because the Democrat Party that would emerge from such a transformation is a very different party, it would no longer need to appeal to those parts of the coalition to control the executive branch. The electoral college isn't just about giving one particular faction more influence, it's about diffusing the control of factions across a broader geographical area, it's what makes sure some alliance of the two most popular states doesn't take over everything. Many laughed at the "Civil War" movie from last year putting Cali and TX together, but without the need for broader appeals it would be possible to assemble such an alliance and dominate.
Sure, many small states are both rural and conservative. I think conservative issues are more relevant at a national level than rural issues.
What is the incentive for a small state to be part of the union if they effectively have no way to influence policy because they will always be out voted by larger states? If small states feel like they have no say over national policy then they may no longer feel that it is in their interest to be part of the union. This is effectively the tradeoff that the initial apportionment system is based off of. Larger states traded a smaller power advantage than their populations would indicate for the benefit of a larger union including the smaller states.
They can’t leave the union any more, it’d be illegal and they’re too small to force the issue. But I agree the population-power imbalance originally arose for the reason you’re describing.
Why should they get to slam dunk the economy into the garbage and indirectly kill a couple million people every couple election cycles because they get uppity about being unproductive, uncultured, and illiterate (doesn't start with un, but I think it should count), is a better question.
I agree, and since minnesotans don't feel very well represented right now we should give them 10 senate seats in november
This is a very silly argument. In a union of 50 states there are zero states, small or large, that can dictate national policy. All of them have to negotiate and compromise and form coalitions around topics of interest.
Far and away the biggest incentives for states to be part of the union are broad-based public goods: things like common defense, access to markets and natural resources and freedom of movement across a wide geographical area. The implicit claim that some temporary balance of power in the day-to-day horse trading of congress is the only possible benefit to membership in the union in frankly unhinged.
Having just experienced Brexit...
Being a small state in a large union, they get to benefit from the aggregated soft and hard power of the larger nation they are a small unit of with some degree of independence of action provided by the federal devolution of some powers to the state.
Better to be 2% of the votes within a much larger polity, than 100% of the votes within a tiny polity whose interests the RotW can completely safely ignore and overrule.
Delaware or Montana on its own would get ignored and/or smooshed in a way that the US as a whole never will.
Even if the union allowed the devolution, within a decade they'd be begging to be let back in on much less favourable terms. The benefits Delawarian's enjoy today are not god-given and forever immutable characteristics of Delaware but a function of their membership of the union.
Isn't the senate for them? To have proportionately more power? Why do they also get more proportionately more power in the House and electoral college too?
Yes fair point and also many voters are not game theory-ing out red state interests so much as expressing their hopes for the future of their community and the country... lots of MAGA and populist R types are extremely anti-incumbent... I was chatting with one through Braver Angels who actually flagged this proposal as a common ground solution.
I used to be sympathetic to that argument before red states gave us trump. And then abused the system by starting a gerrymandering war to grab even more power. This might have been a real concern in the past but I think they've shown themselves unworthy and I hope in 2028 Newsom campaigns on big reforms to our electoral system. Plus they hate DEI programs that give minorities unproportionate amounts of power and influence anyway so they should be super happy with a proposal like that
I served two terms as a delegate to a State Central Committee of one of the major parties.
The full committee has, as I recall, something like 3500 members. However it also has an Executive Board of around 400 members, comparable to the size of our current House of Representatives.
If you went to Giant Congress -- which I favor, I've actually been advocating something like this for years -- obviously the House would need to adopt rules where most business is done in the committees and subcommittees, and there is no full floor debate by the membership, only "vote-o-rama" up/down actions. For national-level debate, only the Executive Committee would participate in debate. Perhaps if you used PR districts, with ~8-10 members per district, you could just give the top winner from each district an E-Com seat. In any case, I'm sure one could settle on a reasonable choice for how to deal with this.
I'm pretty dubious about the functionality of a 6000+ member legislature, especially one that starts with a built-in constitutional interpretation crisis thanks to the typo.
But as you note, the only other pathway to a legislative reform Amendment starts with Congress (or a state-legislature-called Constitutional Convention, where free speech and due process and everything else would be up for grabs--yikes). And this *does* feel like one of the few things that might conceivably spur Congressional action.
If we get to, say, 30 states ratifying the 12th/28th Amendment, the imminent nightmare prospect of being swallowed up in a legislature of thousands might inspire Congress to propose a reasonable alternative -- a rival amendment sans typo, with a more manageable size, maybe taking on board some of the good ideas from other reform proposals.
So yeah, OK: I'd give cautious support for this proposal as a nuclear option to incentivize something more workable. And at the same time, I'd want to start serious thinking about what workable alternative could get bipartisan support.
Right. In theory a legislature has two functions: voting on things and discussing things. Part of this is the idea that any member can take their turn getting up and speaking on the matter at hand. If you have six thousand people, they can't all possibly take turns addressing each other in any meaningful way.
What would the representatives do in practice? Maybe they'd form an "inner sanctum" of a hundred or so of the most important people, who actually get to discuss things, and then the full 6000-person becomes a rubber stamp that strictly votes along party lines.
It's an experiment worth trying though. I would invest a few billion dollars in setting up a 6000-person "shadow legislature" passing shadow bills of no actual importance, for four years, just to see how these people self-organise, and whether they could actually get things done in a non-chaotic manner.
You don't have to experiment, China already does this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party
It's neither here nor there, but it's funny that Wikipedia lists the members in "surname stroke order" (how many lines are required to write their surname) rather than alphabetical, but nonetheless gives the actual names using latin characters.
Is there a country that has a politburo-like system that is actually multi-party? The pre-Xi version of the Chinese system is very interesting but obviously it is significantly easier to coordinate something like this when everyone is nominally part of the same party structure (even if there are factions and so on)
With so many reps there would be bandwidth for a lot more oversight. I don't know how much is too much, but currently it seems there is too little.
I would argue that those two functions are pretty easily separable. Voting rights for all, speaking rights for some. Why does every single member need to be allowed the opportunity to speak? Is this really a value-added activity? Even if it is, this is the 21st Century; have them start a subreddit and they can all argue to their heart's content in there. Making speeches in auditoriums is ancient Greek technology. Might as well have people vote by writing in chalk on pot shards.
Why just *an* inner sanctum? Make 20 sanctums of 300 people each and hold 20 debates in parallel, then everyone gets together in the end to vote.
In a sense we already have a legislature that has thousands of people. It's just that most of them are unelected congressional staffers (and these are the people that actually write the bills). They didn't used to exist when the legislature was a more reasonable size relative to population, but now they are necessary. In this system there would just be a lot fewer staffers and those positions would be elected directly.
A common idea I hear when it comes to expanding the House is the so called "Wyoming Rule": You set the ratio of Representatives to people such that the least populous state gets 1 representative, and you go from there. Wyoming, the currently least populous state with ~580,000 people would get 1 rep, and then the ratio would be set such that in general 1 rep covers 580k. This would increase the house to about 543, which is higher but still workable.
Not sure if that size still has the same benefits, but it would help a little
Fun proposal, but I want to push back on your point about the electoral college. The bias towards low-population states is not a problem to be 'solved' but a deliberate political compromise made during the founding and which has an underlying logic not much changed from the time of the founding. If we wanted to do large congress we'd probably want to add to bump the number of senators in each state to ~20 so that A) small states get to keep their countermajoritarian electoral college buffer and B) so that individual Senate seats don't become too individually powerful relative to representatives.
Totally agree. The perspective of "electoral college is unfair" elides completely the essential architecure: we are in the Union of States. States are first-class entities, not second-class entities or bygone concepts. We really, realllllly need states as air-gapped experiments in governance with authority (already granted by Constitution) for primary lawmaking within their territories *that pisses some people off*, if we are to have any hope of regaining room for Pluralism. Why would pissing some people off be a feature vs a bug? Because no single national jurisdiction can possibly satisfy the actual range of ways Americans want to live, so the alternative to pluralism isn't harmony, it's one coalition perpetually imposing on everyone else. Self-sorting is essential, along with the pluralistic attitude to zip it most of the time about what other states are doing. (I view the current messes as due to a lack of adequate Pluralism, driven by the winner-take-all effects of a centralizing/totalizing single national governance structure)
I wholeheartedly agree, but I believe the best way to stave off a dictatorship of the majority is simply to reduce the power of the federal government of the lives of citizens. Federalism was built around conserving rights by having smaller republica so each group could govern themselves as they pleased. It is a shame to see people think that we can effectively agree on domestic policy on the scale of a country. The only unitary state on our scale is China, and that's certainly not the future I want for my country.
I'd also like to add that I'm not a radical libertarian or anything; I just support many of the classically liberal ideals of the founding fathers. They made this country so that people wouldn't have to be ruled over tyrannically by some far away and unaccountable government. These are the values that have influenced American domestic and foreign policy and should continue to do so.
The only way to shrink Leviathan is to starve it. Its too big to drown in the bathtub, as Grover Norquist would say.
I would love a system of government where the Feds only carry out their enumerated duties, instead of being supercops and provider of monies to the states while spending themselves into a hole.
Individual sovereign States that are currently in a union was the original concept, but the deciding nail was driven in its coffin in the 1860s.
No, the outcome of the Civil War upon return to peacetime rule did not re-order States from first-class sovereigns to second-tier entities. That began most virulently with the Shreveport Rate Case in 1914, buidling on the ICA enacted in 1887. I see the chain of precedents set after that, as stated as a virus, as something to be disinfected. If it is not, then winner-take-all fights lead us again to warring against each other, kinetically.
While it's definitely true that the civil war and the reconstruction amendments weakened the independence of the states, it didn't eliminate their sovereignty entirely. They lost certain pieces of power to the federal government, but they still retain some important pieces, like the general police power. If you get tried for murder or assault or rape, it will almost certainly be under state law, with state law definitions and penalties. If you sue someone for damages, you will almost certainly be suing them under state law with state law torts and standards. And these standards can vary pretty significantly among the states.
I don’t see why you need small states to have disproportionate senate and president power in order to ensure that states have lawmaking capacity over themselves. Pluralism seems to me to suggest disempowering the federal government, not extra empowering some people to have more power in that federal government.
Switzerland has an arguably much more effective federalism. Aside from foreign policy, federal infrastructure, and basic rights, cantons are pretty much free to do what they want. It achieved this with an executive branch chosen by the federal parliament, which is much more representative than the electoral college (except for half a dozen seats out of 200, they are all pretty much the same in voters-per-representative). Even more, the executive is a body of 7 ministers representing all major parties that must take collegiate decisions.
The US executive system is unfair because a) it places a large fraction of the population under executive power chosen by a minority, and more importantly because b) this power is essentially unitary, and despite all minarchist delusions to the contrary, currently running a mastodontic and extremely powerful federal State. You can argue that if a) was the other way around, it would still be unfair. You could make a strong argument there, and you could mostly make it because of b).
This claim seems to me soundly refuted by the very existence of the amendment being discussed. People of the present day are fond of claiming what the EC is there for most loudly when its accomplishing their own partisan objective. But the EC accomplished statistically something quite different at founding than it does today and here is direct evidence the founders wanted it to accomplish something else in the future too.
I agree that the electoral college was primarily designed to address a different problem, but the bicameral structure of congress is specifically designed to address the small state/large state sovereignty issue. The compromise of 1787 was one of the most hotly debated issues of the framing. I think the decision to fix each state's electors at the combined number of their congressmen is good evidence that the framers wanted to import the logic of the compromise into the electoral college, even if the electoral college was chiefly implemented to address other concerns. As to the existence of this amendment as a counter-argument, I'd say the fact that it failed to pass is a better indicator of where the country stood on it than the fact that it was drafted.
I think its been well argued why, when states have a population disparity of 70 to 1, the federal govt is much larger and no longer takes enumerated powers seriously, and rather than branches competing with each other we have parties competing each other across branches, that both the senate and the EC in fact represent problems to be solved. (The solution doesnt have to be abolish the senate btw). You can disagree! But just pointing out that the framers did something else for different reasons under different circumstances is not a convincing argument. And here we see the framers intentions were more complex than that even if they didnt get the whole country to agree. Just engage with the argument at an object level instead of going back to framers
The Amendment being discussed was never adopted.
I mean sure, that's the purpose of it, but it also very transparently is DEI for rurals. You could make the same argument for any group whose interests do not necessarily align with the popular majority.
Not just rurals. Rhode Island is one of the most urbanized states in the union.
People think of the rural plains states as the EC's big beneficiaries but it also boosts a lot of small states in the northeast, and makes sure Alaska/Hawaii don't get totally overlooked.
America's political system has failed its people in a lot of ways, but I do think regional balancing is an important goal in such a large country, and would not like to see that goal totally ignored in whatever replaces it.
(but if you still have the Senate you probably don't need the EC. OTOH, how much does a massive House fix if the Senate remains a dysfunctional veto point incapable of legislating?)
It was a deliberate compromise, but at the time, the largest state had about 15.5x the population of the smallest (and effectively less, since 39% of the pop of the largest were slaves, versus 15% of the smallest). Today, a single CA county has more people than all but ten states, and CA's pop is 66X that of WY. They might have made a different compromise had they known that would happen.
>which has an underlying logic not much changed from the time of the founding.
On the contrary, much has changed. We are more likely to see the role of Congress (and the govt in general) as representing individuals, rather than states as entities in themselves.
Note that the text does not specify whether the population calculations are federal or per state.
The small state/large state issue *was* extremely relevant at the time. Now, the primary dispute isn't Wyoming and Hawaii vs Texas and California, it's party-based. I think small states are *mostly* still going to care about the party-based implications, and you don't need every state. Also keep in mind that Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware have already ratified it.
The relative power of individual Senate seats is a concern that I'm not sure how to fix, since changing the number of Senators would require a separate constitutional amendment. Maybe you could use the CAA passage to build momentum for a separate amendment (which could also fix the typo)? Or try to make a deal where you pass that next amendment? Problem is we can't really change the text of the CAA without resetting the "states ratified" count to 0 and there's no enforcement mechanism once the CAA passes. Maybe write and start ratifying the Senate amendment at the same time as trying to get the CAA passed, and maybe work with multiple states at once to ratify both at the same time?
Bias is already intentionally baked into the Senate's "two representatives per state" rule. The House was never meant to have a similar bias, so now Congress and the Electrical College are doubly biased in favor of rural states with small populations.
Sure. I'm just saying we shouldn't throw away the (constitutionally intended) single bias in service of addressing the more shakily founded statutory second bias.
We're talking a constitutional amendment, so it's fair game to use it to rewrite that political compromise. You might not want to do it and campaign against the amendment, but we are in fact allowed to change the power balance as a nation.
Oh no doubt it's legal to change this by amendment (anything is!) I just want to point out that the original post framing the compromise as a mistake to be 'solved' is not something I agree with for Chesterton's fence reasons. If one wants to make the case for the modification or amendment of the electoral college that's fine: many have done so. I just think it would be wise to decouple a case for fixing congress at the procedural level from the case for overwriting one of the oldest and most fundamental political compromises in our national history; at the very least it's important to make a case for why the two issues have to move together as opposed to waving away the apportionment of electors as a pure error.
You could make each of the new Representatives count only 1/10 of an electoral vote or something. But both of these things are changes... which makes it hard to do.
Eh yes and the ratio of smallest to largest state has widened dramatically from the 18th century.
From the 1790 U.S. Census:
Virginia : Delaware ≈ 12.6 : 1
Today
California : Wyoming ≈ 67 : 1
Of course it's changed, because slavery is no longer legal, so we don't need a way for states to gain more power by counting their permenantly-ineligible-to-vote slave populations at a ratio of 60% compared to their free populations.
This is rhe most thought provoking article i have read in a while. With modern technology, it probably makes sense for super-congress members to spend their times among constituents. And that might mean teachers and shop owners and a childcare givers would feel comfortable running for office and not significantly changing their jobs.
While I am pleased to see this argument refreshingly NOT made on the premise that representing fewer people will legitimately make legislators actually do the right thing, I'm not really sold.
For starters, Congress already does a pretty trash job arranging to have enough staff to properly put together information for themselves, so they increasingly rely on external (interest) groups to do deep research. Having over 10x as many legislators is going to make the necessary budget to staff them over 10x bigger and put more pressure on individual Congresspeople to do more with less.
Meanwhile interest groups are going to have just as easy a time producing slick presentations, and already get such outsized returns on lobbying that they can probably absorb the increased costs.
I also don't buy the "money in politics" argument. If elections really do get cheaper than they get cheaper to contest as well. You don't need to coordinate a ton because we already have political parties and a fundraising apparatus that can shift money around a lot more easily than you can shift around whatever local donations from concerned citizens you're using to counter it.
I generally share your skepticism, but I'd push back on one of your arguments:
> I also don't buy the "money in politics" argument. If elections really do get cheaper than they get cheaper to contest as well. You don't need to coordinate a ton because we already have political parties and a fundraising apparatus that can shift money around a lot more easily than you can shift around whatever local donations from concerned citizens you're using to counter it.
What you say is certainly true about the distribution of money, but it's important to remember that money is only one method of reaching the electorate. I know the name and face of my state rep because he came to my town and held a townhall in a room of 60 people on a topic I care about. He lives within a 10 minute drive of me, and one of my team members has him as a neighbor, a few houses down. None of this required a particularly large amount of money from him, and would be far more workable in a larger House.
I think your reasoning step "If elections really do get cheaper than they get cheaper to contest as well." ignores the fact that cheaper elections targeting smaller numbers of voters increases the impact of non-money-based outreach as well. Money might simply become somewhat less relevant.
Yeah, that's a fair point.
I would be interested if there was some way of doing an experiment here.
Pennsylvania passed a constitutional amendment in 1874 making their state legislature quite numerous, as a way to control widespread corruption. It seems to have succeeded at that. I'm not sure how well that applies to modern times and modern problems, though.
Wouldn't all the legislators mean that Congresspeople could themselves be assigned to the jobs that would formerly go to staff? It becomes viable to say to Member, "Okay you're going to be on the Southeastern Water Rights committee, so go become an expert about southeastern water rights."
Each person voting on major legislation is going to need staff to research and explain technical details.
If legislators end up banding together and voting as little blocks and acting as each others' staff, then you've effectively just renamed a bunch of people's jobs, except also your "support staff" will randomly leave and join every couple of years and you don't get to interview them or fire them yourself.
Also some staffers do "constituent services", not things related to legislation, which is kinda weird and has its own problems, but you do need to staff for it.
You're missing some of the substance of what Strange is saying: what staff do today is what the Committee system was created to do. Large personal staffs are really new, dating from the 60s and especially the 70s. Prior to that, the largest number of staff positions was working directly for the Committees, especially before the number of Committees was drastically reduced in the 40s.
In a very large House, the number of Committees could be increased again, staff could work for the Committees primarily, and House members could reduce their personal staff counts.
Personal Congressional staff aren't usually policy experts. If you need expertise, you either hire out (more common these days) or (as it used to be done) you call experts to testify before your committee.
Yeah, that's a fair point.
Maybe this would help us get a pet idea of mine through and make a "Congressional Policy Office (CPO)" more likely. I think part of the reason local government (usually) works better is the dedicated staff experts usually do all the details and town council is more giving them general direction and then yes/no on specific proposals. Vs. congress which tend to write the specific proposals themselves. I'd rather the norm be congress never writes a word of law themselves, but directs the relevant department in the CPO to come with a proposal to do X. Then they present the law, or changes to law, and congress votes it up or down.
Giant congress makes this more feasible as now it makes more sense to have one set of staff that works for congress as a whole rather than every congressman having their own staff.
I have an alternate proposal that amounts to the same thing: Repeal the 17th Amendment. Prior to this, senators were directly voted on by the state legislatures, as the Senate is the body that's supposed to represent the interests of the respective state governments, which isn't exactly the same thing representing the people. But this is good, there's 7,386 of these state level representatives, and they are generally very easy to get ahold of if, for instance, you were become unhappy with the job your senator in federal Congress is doing.
Direct election of Senators dates back to the same Progressive era faith in popular democracy that gave us California's awful referendum system that Scott has been complaining about.
Part of the problem with the current system is that power concentrates with the federal government, and states become increasingly irrelevant. The 17th Amendment was part of that trend, as you say, but schools have consistently misinterpreted the intent of the appointment of Senators to the point that most people would see repeal of the 17th Amendment as an elitist move.
One thing I think the OP gets wrong is his assumption that a state legislator would necessarily want to move "up" to the House. Giant Congress would likely change the perceived political career ladder for most politicians. Imagine you're in a state legislature that's bicameral. You start in the lower house and move up to your state's senate. Now you're part of a legislative body that's < 100 members. Ideally you want to run for Senate. Does winning one of >100 seats in your home state alone and becoming part of a >6k member legislative body put you in a better position vis-a-vis Senate prospects than remaining in a state senate seat? Likely not.
I would really, really like this to happen, but (in addition to the obvious opposition from the 'Democracy is always good' demagogues) you face the problem at the start of Scott's article. Most sitting senators face incentives opposed to radical changes in the election of senators, and new amendments have historically always started in Congress. (Technically, there's the "Convention for proposing amendments" that can be started by 2/3rsds of states, but it's quite a grenade to throw since you don't KNOW what amendments you're voting to propose.)
Germany has their Bundesrat delegations being selected by state legislatures, I think. Seems to work.
The claim that "Zero state or national legislative seats are currently occupied by third parties" is false. Senator Emily Buss of the Forward Party represents District 11 in the Utah State Senate.
What if you had Giant Congress *plus* the House?
You have Major Representatives and Minor Representatives, and you make the voting power proportionally smaller for the minor ones, and make the total Minor and Major voting powers equal. Then there’s still a significant group that can talk amongst themselves and act as rallying points for the Minor reps, but who can still be disagreed with.
Plus then you can directly compare and contrast voting patterns.
So like a lower house and an upper house? Perhaps a house and a... chamber?
Outhouse.
Seems to ignore why people now mostly don’t like Congress: it’s deadlocked and does little to enact voters will
Unfortunately the reason Congress is deadlocked is because voters are also deadlocked
How does this giant Congress scheme solve that?
Literally just have proportional representation
Liberals are not inherently right just because there are more of them.
I dont want liberals forcing their politics on the nation. I want states to have the right to say no to the aspects of their agenda that are most awful. Give me 50 laboratories of innovation and I will choose the one least offensive to me.
Whether you have proportional representation or first past the post is completely orthogonal to the issues you raise. Both forms give power to those that there are more of, regardlesss if they are right or not. And both are compatible with very high degrees of federalism. See for example Switzerland, whose lower house is elected by a form of proportional representation and which is one of the most well ran, decentralised, and conservative countries in Europe.
but in almost every state there is already a serious rural-urban divide, and over the last so and so many decades people sorted themselves (via mobile, "adventure-minded" (collectivist?) people moving to the cities, and more individualist (stability-minded?) people moving out), which made the situation noticeably worse, no?
... just the fact that the whole coal industry is a talking point, and about 40 000 people work in it, for not very good wages. (30 billion total revenue.) while also there's a crazy datacenter building boom. where single companies spend more than 30 billion.
(okay, maybe the AI bubble is not the best example, but maybe it is. coal is the classic anti-bubble. it should have been forgotten long ago, but there was no real political cooperation, there were largely unsuccessful programs, and executive branch machinations via EPA rulemaking.)
real problems become political wedges.
Edit- wrong reply
One way it might help is decreasing coordination ability of congresspersons, and another could be to significantly increase their sensitivity to average voters relative to donors.
It's hard for me to see how decreasing coordination would prevent deadlocking. Usually deadlocking is caused because coordination is too hard.
I think in my mind there would be effects from increasing significantly beyond Dunbars number. I think some of what appears to be deadlocking is feigned in order to preserve the group interests of Congress people. It also makes corralling all of them via think tanks and media groups become less feasible. And you didn't address the argument that their constituents should be more influential. Deadlock is also the result of lobbying by special interest groups.
> I think in my mind there would be effects from increasing significantly beyond Dunbars number.
Possibly true. I could imagine this leading to some sort of Commitee of Actual Important Decisionmakers with 9 people on it that are selected by the House at large; such a committee would be far more able to coordinate than the current House, and maybe making a huge House would force people to do something like that. I'm not convinced; they might just loiter in dysfunction instead. But maybe.
> I think some of what appears to be deadlocking is feigned in order to preserve the group interests of Congress people.
That sort of collusion seems very hard to organize in a body of 500 people, outside of narrow cases where other incentives also help.
> Deadlock is also the result of lobbying by special interest groups.
I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of this. Most special interest groups don't only want to prevent Congress from doing something; they have specific agenda's they'd like Congress to pursue. So it's generally against their interests for Congress to deadlock. I think that for it to be true that special interest lobbying is increasing deadlock, they either need to be incompetent or roughly evenly balanced with opposing special interest groups on all issues (which we know isn't true.)
> It also makes corralling all of them via think tanks and media groups become less feasible.
Corralling them via anything should increase their ability to coordinate, no? If a think tank corrals all the republicans, they would be able to coordinate action when republicans control the House (like now) or vice-versa for democrats. Reducing the ability to corral them seems to be very closely linked with reducing their ability to coordinate.
> And you didn't address the argument that their constituents should be more influential.
Influential over what? If you're twice as influential over your congress person, but your congress person is half as influential over Congress, is that good? Maybe? It's not clear this is a notable value.
This is a myth. There is no grand conflict between donors and voters. It's a conflict between donors and other donors, voters and other voters, and, yes, voters vs donors, but its a bunch of different conflicts between different groups of each and not one grand unified conflict.
The Congress is deadlocked because parties threaten to blackball anyone who votes for their opponents' bill. When the reps are able to tell their party, "Fuck you, I will vote my conscience, not along the party line, I only have to convince 25001 people to vote for me to keep my seat," bipartisan bills will become more common.
Maybe. But in the current Republican Party, it’s actually the voters who are terrifying the officials to vote for whatever Trump says, while the party is trying to be a bit more conscientious and losing.
Those damned voters.
they are the product after all ... https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
Current parties will inevitably fracture in a Congress this large.
I’m pretty convinced that the reason people hate congress is entirely cultural conditioning.
>The second clause was two less-thans, meaning many representatives and low representative-to-constituent ratio. The third clause is a less-than followed by a more-than, meaning many representatives and a low representative-to-constituent ratio.<
Amusingly, the same sort of error, or perhaps a mirror image, has been made here. (In the amendment: "less than ... more than" → supposed to be "less than ... less than"; here, "low ... low" → supposed to be "high ... low", I imagine.)
--------------------------
I don't know if I'm exactly convinced by the arguments here. At least, some of them *are* convincing; probably it'd be a net benefit for everyone; but the arguments aimed at Democrats vs. those aimed at Republicans, in the "why support this if you're a ______?" section, seem of distinctly different quality. (Only the point about California & Illinois etc. is convincing, to me; other than that, we get "but what if the Texas thing backfires?" & "you love Trump!" Well...Trump doesn't have a lot of fans among a certain sector of Republicans, these days—and "imagine how owned those libz will be lol!" seems a little... I don't know, "what's up, fellow kids?"–ish.)
The idea that the population-disproportionate influence of the E.C. *in re* small states is a *problem to be "fixed"* also sort of assumes the reader is of a particular political bent.
These aren't terribly substantive objections, and I think I do support this initiative—just a few thoughts, 'sall.
If I understood it correctly, those two sentences should be (emphasis added)
> The second clause was two less-thans, meaning many representatives and _high_ representative-to-constituent ratio. The third clause is a less-than followed by a more-than, meaning many representatives and a low representative-to-constituent ratio.
Naturally, being on Astral Codex Ten, I wondered whether this was one of those deliberate typos normal, sane people unconsciously paper over and you should feel bad for noticing.
Can I recommend that Americans consider a system that works well in Australia. A series of documentaries explains it well. https://iview.abc.net.au/show/annabel-crabb-s-civic-duty
It might require a VPN set to Australia to be able to see them.
What aspects of the Australian system should be adopted by the US?
Instant runoff voting? Compulsory voting? Elections on Saturdays? Paper and pencil ballots? Sausage sizzles on election day?
These are all good ideas, but they still can't solve the big problem raised here, which is that the US has too damn many people and must choose between having too many people per legislator or too damn many legislators. The Australian solution is to be ten times smaller.
Or the other problem that has the author reaching for a 250 year old solution: the fact that any other, saner reforms would need to be initiated by the very body in need of reform.
A good first step would be to have an independent electoral commission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Electoral_Commission
Being ten times smaller is reasonable. The US is too large and should be split up.
"oh the solution to politicians is more politicians? get outta here. How much is this going to cost?"
This idea is not coming down from its ivory tower without getting its butt kicked, I'm afraid.
Hey... hey, that's right; I don't think I *do* want more politicians!
hmm
yeah, now that you mention it, maybe I *don't* support this idea after all–
I do think there's a potential PR issue there, but I think you could sell this as "6,206 Mr. Smith's Going to Washington": you can make the argument that the issue with "politicians" is that our current "politicians" are all a particular "political class" that's largely out of touch with average people.
"More politicians" isn't popular idea at face value, but "we wouldn't have so many problems if we'd just elect normal people to Congress" is a much more popular opinion (at least among fans of the Goode Homolosine map projection, apparently), and it does seem likely that we would have a lot more 'normal people' under this sort of system. (Whether or not that actually helps or not)
You have identified the right way to sell it, but I still think it is unsaleable! The big difference between the other leftover amendment, the one about politician salaries, and this one, is the other one was mean to politicians.People really want to be harsh toward politicians
Yep. The problem is the voters. The other problem is that we insist on pretending the problem is the politicians and that democracy isn't working when, in fact, the problem is that it is working too well.
Every country has the government it deserves.
I wrote about this a few years too.
There are some additional stories included that make it even crazier, including George Washington's endorsement, and the lost horseback messenger reporting it originally passed enough states:
https://blog.liquid.us/2017/11/20/restoring-our-congressional-representation-the-original-1st-amendment/
The problem with Congress is not the size of it, it’s the composition of it.
Politicians are incentivized to come from elite institutions, gerrymander, and act in the interest of donors over citizens, etc. We need to get rid of politicians altogether if we actually want to fix these problems, and replace Congress with a citizens assembly of our peers.
I highly recommend the new book Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore.
So, legislative jury duty?
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
This is what New Hampshire has had on a mild de-facto basis for....ever. I did my turn there, along with 15,000+ others who lived all or part of their lives there over the last 25 years.
That is actually a reasonable approach.
almost...
https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
Exactly.
we want sortition to pick VOTERS not OFFICIALS.
https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
so close, yet so far away. https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
You haven't engaged with the crucial point that pretty much no novel reform proposal has a chance to be enacted, because it has to route through the existing Congress, which obviously won't abolish itself.
There is always an Article V Constitutional Convention.
Yeah, maybe in another 250 years...
But do you want to throw that grenade? Are you confident that the amendments proposed and accepted will be the ones you want? Are you confident that the wisdom of the delegates and of the current populace are greater than the wisdom in the current system, functional and dysfunctional as it is?
We just had a post here on how California voters can be duped easily enough that you can extort people by threatening to offer the voters poison pill amendments. Are US voters more insightful than Californians? IDK. I wouldn't bet on it.
Oh no, it'll definitely be a fucking disaster! But throw the grenade anyway.
I can only repeat Turok's point:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/last-rights/comment/226249650
It can always get worse, as most revolutionaries have learned to their chagrin.
Why is that supposed to be obvious? A lot of what Congress has done in recent years specifically is vote against things that restore Congress’s power over the executive. People in Congress are much more ideological than concerned with actually exercising legislative power.
Sure, they are very status quo-biased as well, which is also a strike against novel reforms.
That is true. However it could absolutely be enacted at the state level in any state that lets you amend the constitution by ballot measure, most notably California.
Right, and citizens assemblies don’t require congress at all. All around the world they have been created by third party groups when citizens demand a change and don’t feel they are being heard.
Yeah but those are just advisory and have no real power. You could create ones that do have power by ballot measure though.
They usually result in real power. It's hard to go against a citizens assembly!!! Though I think that's only the first step toward creating ones that fully replace congress (at both the state and federal level!)
i've been pitching my portland city council members to bring the oregon citizens' initiative review process to portland. maybe we'll be able to do it for this trailblazers debacle.
https://savetheblazers.com/
That’s just it, citizens assemblies don’t require congress at all!!! Countries and cities around the world have created citizens assemblies without government involvement. They are put on by unbiased third party groups, and when the results show that 70% of the assembly want a certain outcome, Congress has to follow it.
It's the opposite. The problem is that the politicians are incentivized to favor the voters whim above all else. The donors aren't the ones backing Trump and his erratic nonsense.
Even if politicians were incentivized to follow the voter’s whims above all else, that is still not democracy. Because a shy, reserved person with a good budget and a strong plan rarely wins. Politicians have to act like a celebrity to get in office, and that puts a certain kind of person there. If, instead, Congress was made up of nurses and tech workers and construction workers and engineers, it would actually represent the people. Politicians inherently don’t.
i tend to think diversity is hugely overrated in the legislature.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representation-fallacy-553846a383b3
we want to decompose the issue into two separate things:
- intrinsic preferences: what we actually want, essentially "to have more stuff and thus more welfare" (or more health, friends, whatever)
- instrumental preferences: the "how", e.g. rent control, liberalized zoning—these are objectively right or wrong. either they achieve our goals efficiently or they don't.
generally speaking, strong instrumental efficiency comes from just having high generalized problem solving capacity, "IQ".
whether the intrinsic component is diverse or all members are near the statistical average doesn't matter much as to what legislation can ultimately pass.
THIS!
landemore is adjacent to the mark, but the real optimization is election by jury specifically, not "sortition".
https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
it's also incredibly important that the jury decide via score voting or related systems like approval voting or STAR voting.
https://www.rangevoting.org/LivesSaved
but thanks for debunking this very wrong piece.
I'm not sure what you mean? Sortition is just how you create the "jury."
generally i hear people in the community using "sortition" to mean "randomly select the legislature". as discrete from using random selection to pick the jury.
"Sortition is the selection of public officials or decision-makers through random lottery rather than elections, used to ensure a truly representative, diverse assembly. Often called "allotment," it aims to create bodies that mirror the general population’s demographics (age, gender, location)."
On the one hand, I agree that getting 5-10 people to go against party lines is much easier than getting 50-100. On the other, I think party lines become much much harder to enforce when the amount of representatives jumps that high. Plus, one main effect (hopefully) of a smaller constituency size is that legislators are much more incentivized to vote on behalf of their constituents rather than party lines. I don't know how effective of a solution it actually is, though - the two-party system is the #1 contributor to these issues and I don't think increasing the amount of representatives will change much in that regard.
Anecdotally the extremely low approval rating can be summed up as this: "When <my party> is in charge, they don't get nearly enough done. When <opposing party> is in charge, they get too much done and <my party> doesn't do enough to stop them." I think this sentiment has gotten worse and worse as the parties have increasingly been defining their candidates as "not the other guy".
I'm not sure this is true of Congress in the current era. How many of the things left-wing folks have opposed since Jan 2025 have been things done by the fully Republican Congress? Congress, even under a trifecta, seems almost vestigial at times.
This sounds like an IT person's solution to the problem: Implement a strange and overcomplicated fix to an issue just because it fits the current (legal) codebase instead of refactoring the old codebase. There are well known fixes to the issues: proportional voting, election districts based on administrative areas, you name it.
I'll tell you what sounds like an it solution to me: proportional voting.
He gives reasons why not to "refactor the old codebase": existing politicians must approve the change.
How is this overcomplicated?
Was the image model prompt to turn Congress into the Vatican, or is this just the solution that the model came up to on its own when asked to design a 6000-person congress?
One thing Im immediately hesitant about is that… campaign finance rules already push donors to spread money across many candidates because contributions are capped per campaign. If House districts shrank to ~50k people, campaigns would be much cheaper, meaning the same max donation would make up a much larger share of a candidate’s funding. That seems like it could make influence easier to scale and wealthy donors or PAC networks could give the max to hundreds of candidates, and each donation would carry more weight.
Eh at a smaller scale the ability to get the word out through word of mouth, civic networks and the like increases and the power of money decreases
That’s fair. I agree smaller districts probably make word of mouth, civic networks ,and especially door-to-door engagement important. I still think that these races would still be very low information for voters at this scale. For most people going to the booth they are doing so without knowing the candidates esp with 6k. Familiarity cues matter a lot and just having heard a name from ads make a difference. In that environment even small amounts of spending by Super PACs or donor networks I bet scale pretty efficiently across lots of races, especially since the max donation would make up a larger share of a cheaper campaign.
I don’t think gambling our entire legislative system on an untested scale of congress is a wise idea unless society is literally collapsing, which it isn’t.
> The simple explanation is that this is a typo.
I want to give some benefit of the doubt here, but this sounds absurd to me. These were written up by very well educated men, lawyers, and debated for many hundreds or thousands of hours prior to voting. The idea that someone wouldn’t catch a typo in a 3 sentence clause seems incredibly unlikely.
>The idea that someone wouldn’t catch a typo in a 3 sentence clause seems incredibly unlikely.
How does that explain the mathematical impossibility of that clause under certain conditions?
Easy. The drafters wanted to put a limit in to *avoid* a giant congress, but forgot to check the math of the edge cases.
So would you say that they made a mistake?
Yes. They aren't gods. They are capable of mistakes.
Blasphemous in the American civic religion!!!!!!!!!!!!! The founders were wise and benevolent and all knowing.
Yes. I find a mathematical mistake much more likely than a word mistake for the kind of people that draft laws.
Sol Hando argued that the text was clearly their intention as written because they wouldn't make such mistakes at all. But clearly, interpretation is necessary because of the mathematical impossibility it demands. It wasn't my point to favor one interpretation over the other, but that interpretation is necessary in the first place.
Note that the US had ~4 million people at the time of the first census, so a scheme that works for 4-8 million and 10+million, but is impossible to apply between 8 and 10 million is not exactly an edge-case failure.
Exactly this. As radical as the entire system of American governance was, the Framers were ultimately wealthy elitists who knew uneducated people were a danger to liberty. Hence the system of representation.
The article assumes "its a typo" then runs on that to propose a solution where Wyoming is a rounding error, instead of a state to be won.
Perhaps they had some special insight about populations between eight and ten millions?
Austria, Belarus, Hungary, Israel, Serbia, Switzerland, Togo, United Arab Emirates
What do these countries have in common?
I am not sure what you're getting at. Also, UAE have >10 million population, so I'm doubly unsure.
Well, that's what I get for trusting LLM's answer.
But it wasn't a seriously meant comment anyway.
(Even for an unserious comment, I should have limited the list to Belarus, Hungary, and Israel, to start some crackpot numerologist theory.)
>(Even for an unserious comment, I should have limited the list to Belarus, Hungary, and Israel, to start some crackpot numerologist theory.)
Why, did you ask your LLM how many letters each of those countries have in their English names?
I just meant like: "At a certain size of population, democracy predictably falls apart (see Belarus, Hungary, Israel), and the founding fathers were smart enough to predict this. Below 8 millions, [insert bullshit explanation], and above 10 millions, [insert another bullshit explanation], it's just the values between them that are super problematic and lead to things like Lukashenko, Orbán, or the endless fight against Palestine. This is not a coincidence; it's a function of population size. The founding fathers never wanted a population of that size in America."
And I'm pretty sure Switzerland is still a bit shy of the 8 million mark.
A math mistake seems more likely than a wording mistake here.
It's like, it's only 3 sentences, and how could they possibly make such a fundamental typo that it inverts the intending meaning in such an important sentence? It was like if your wedding vows "I promise to never love and care for you" instead of "always."
I don't know what the other explanation is, but "they accidentally inverted the meaning in one of the most important and scrutinized sentences of their time" doesn't seem possible to me.
The impression I got from your first comment was that you argued that in such a short clause, any such mistake should be impossible. Surely, among those highly educated men spending thousands of hours looking at the thing there had to be at least one who was mathematically inclined enough to make such a simple calculation? Especially since the problematic range of populations wasn't exactly negligible, neither in size nor in the expected time until arrival.
A mistake in mathematics seems much more likely than the sort of typo that completely inverts the meaning to me.
I was frustrated by this too. I felt like we keep trying to vote for the right people but it never worked out.
I made a simulator with 535 agents working with all available public data to emulate real congressional decisions.
https://substack.com/@andrew490375/note/c-224274971?r=2i44ul&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
I would prefer to call it Yuge Congress. The biggest, most incredible Congress the world has ever seen. But - yes, sort of confused on the merits. If the average citizen has no idea who their one-of-435 is already, then when there's an OOM+ more...on the other hand, it also becomes a much lesser lift to run for Congress with that many extra seats available. Low-salience elections have rather different strategies than general ones. I don't know, there's surely a lot of receipts behind the claim, but when the evidence is mostly comparing outcomes of second-order effects at best, it's tricky to weigh. "Merely" upgrading from FPTP seems like it'd have many similar salutary effects, without as many complicated unknown-unknowns. (Except Condorcet. That'd be a fun election to hash out in the courts...)
"So we have a potential Constitutional amendment which says the opposite of what it definitely means. If passed, this would set us up for a court case that directly pits the legal school of textualism (you need to follow the law as written) against originalism (you need to follow what the people who wrote the law meant). These two schools are often in oblique and complicated conflict. But as far as we know, they’ve never faced so direct a test as a section of the Constitution with an obvious-for-two-hundred-years typo that inverts its meaning. All the Supreme Court Justices who have previously gotten away with talking about how the law is subtle and complicated would have to finally just decide whether textualism or originalism is right, no-take-backs, once and for all. It would be hilarious."
That's not quite right. Textualism means "follow the law as an ordinary reader would interpret it" and originalism means "follow the meaning of the law when it was enacted". Many (perhaps most?) judges are both textualists and originalists, and they follow the law as an ordinary reader would interpret it when it was enacted.
Textualist judges often reason about the intent of the author in order to determine how an ordinary reader would interpret an ambiguous text. After all, whenever anyone reads an ambiguous text, they think to themselves "hmm, what did the author mean to say here?" But intent is merely one of several tools to help evaluate text, not the other way around.
The idea that judges should follow the intent of the author even when it contradicts the text is called "purposivism", and it isn't very popular these days. There was a brief purposivist originalist movement around 1980, but nowadays, nearly every originalist is a textualist.
All correct. The common term for the ascendant form of originalism is "Original public meaning originalism." Which means exactly what you said.
Although it is worth noting that the vast majority of textualists and originalists recognize that a "scrivenor's error" like is being alleged here would not be part of the original public meaning of the document. You'd have to convince them that it WAS a scrivenor's error, but if you succeeded in that, you'd have the entire Supreme Court without an ideological objection to ignoring the erroneous text.
This is clever, but let me put a horse before this cart of 6000+ Reps.
Lawmakers elected into office haven't been making law themselves for way way too long. Justin Amash documented the lack of sausage making by the sausage-makers (1). We've governed by regulations far more than we are by statutes, this is true across basically every domain and niche. I haven't been a federal rep, but I have been a local elected policymaker.
It is bizarre that the law-making part of our very intentionally separated parts of government are not actually staffed by elected reps that spend their waking hours running law-making ops. For [reasons] this got dished out to the Federal government. Long term effect of doing more and more of this outsourcing by delegation: the Elected Lawmakers Who Represent Us have lost almost all muscle and tone for making, editing, and rescinding laws, because it's the regulations where the details live. What's left when the real work is outsourced? Exactly what we've got now and had for a while, weird elected jobs that don't actually *do* much in reality. It's kind of understandable that Congress is dysfunctional when the brass tacks rulemaking, ie the pointy end of the spear of lawmaking, is....not your job as a 'law-maker'.
There's at least several tens of thousands, perhaps 75k-150k jobs that sit in the Administrative state right now that make the rules we've all gotta live by. That is weird, and for the next 2-ish years that is uniquely solvable. Let Congress rescind the delegation of regulatory authority, and bring the full scope of law-making back to where it should be. And not by requiring every rule to pass as a statute, which isn't how it works now and doesn't need to be how it works under this proposal either. Keep the rulemaking process basically the same: notice-and-comment, technical expertise, iterative updates...you just have the people doing that work answer to Congress instead of the President.
Budget increase! Well, no. There's a pretty clean populist frame that works for both left and right: we're not growing government, we're moving authority back to where the Constitution actually put it, so let's move the money with. Cut from the agencies, add to Congress in equal measure. Hard to campaign against that without sounding like you're defending the administrative state on its 'merits', which is not something that either left or right are likely to be fans of at this particular moment.
Congress can't just do this! Yeah, Congress can do exactly this, in big pieces or bit by bit, or all at once, Constitutionally.
But Congress won't agree to do more work, they LIKE this setup! Hmm, a massive increase in budget, a 10x-20x increase in manpower, and authority over rulemaking. More power, more chairmanships, and a massive collection of rulemaking organizations to lead - eh, which Congress member would take a pass on this, exactly?
But the President will veto losing power! Well, no. This would be the immovable dead in the water issue at any *other* time. But at the moment we have a maverick in office, a change agent, and most importantly a dealmaker. A deal could certainly be made within this current window to trade back rule-making vs enforcement, to the satisfaction of President Trump.
And in parallel with rebuilding a Congress that has full and proper lawmaking duties, we can dial up representation so that 6000+ Congressmen and women can run this thing. And get the bills passed in a window that will shut hard with whoever becomes the next prez.
(1) This is the short form, he has a longer more consequential article he wrote on this...somwhere I can't find at the moment: https://quadrangle.michigan.law.umich.edu/index.php/issues/fall-2022/justin-amash-05-independent-voice-partisan-time
> a massive increase in budget, a 10x-20x increase in manpower, and authority over rulemaking. More power, more chairmanships, and a massive collection of rulemaking organizations to lead - eh, which Congress member would take a pass on this, exactly?
Uh, every congress member would take a pass on this. It gives them more work without getting anything they want.
Yeah, I'm not convinced that Congress isn't just a sinecure job for mediocrities. The media personalities there clearly like it this way. Letting them grandstand on C-Span was probably a mistake.
It's a good idea. We need some strictly legislative agencies. Separate out the enforcement. The FCC can enforce the regulations written by the LCC.
The only problem here is the appointments clause, right?
Alternative proposals:
· Elect an entire city / town worth of parliamentarians, who take decisions by popular assembly, like in Athenian democracy or in a veche. This city is made the capital of the country; you're only allowed to live in the capital if you've been democratically elected.
· Make an even bigger parliament, with a million members. They then elect their own second-degree parliament, with thousands of members, to help the first-degree parliament coordinate their processes. Of course, the second degree parliament then elects the third-degree government with several dozens of people for more snappy decisions. Heck, maybe there's even a fourth-degree parliament here.
That's basically the Chinese system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party
While I agree there are a lot of benefits to Giant Congress (enumerated in the article), there's very little evidence Giant Congress does anything to resolve the *core* issue presented here, which is the public's hate for Congress.
There is an important difference between hate for Congress, and hate for *individual representatives*. Individual congresspeople are about as popular as other politicians within their district, enjoying baseline partisan support modified by scandals or general bipartisan vibes. (https://news.gallup.com/poll/162362/americans-down-congress-own-representative.aspx#:~:text=Although%20Americans%20overwhelmingly%20disapprove%20of,they%20approved%20of%20that%20representative) When rating congress as a whole, people just seem to assume that the other ones are worse (or consider institutional issues). Smaller constituencies likely affect individual approvals, but it's not obvious how they'd improve perceptions of Congress as a whole, and lesser influence from people's individuals reps + the general chaos of a larger House could make it worse!
Empirically, we can also check this hypothesis against state legislative approvals, given state legislative seats are much closer in representative size to 50k per rep. And lo, as bodies, they are similarly unpopular to Congress, even though they get way more legislating done! (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41719833?seq=1)
Good points. The JSOR data is a bit stale now, though. State legs are 2:1 on favorability ratings vs Congress: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-americans-view-congress-the-president-state-and-local-political-leaders/
I don't think it's the size or ratio, though, it seems to be most likely either (A) productivity, the 13x higher rate of introducing bills locally vs in Congress + the 25% enactment rate vs 6% for Congress + POTUS, or (B) state legs have been controlled by one party for ages, and that tends to align (obviously) with the relative lean in any given state.
Yeah, definitely out of date! Though I would note your more recent Pew polling has this "local elected officials" phrasing which seems like it might be closer to "your individual legislator" than the legislature as a whole. Obviously hard to verify.
I've always interpreted the difference between popularity of the whole legislative body vs popularity of the legislator to be a feature of the democratic compromise system as a whole.
If you're at dinner, voting on what to order, you might be happy with your personal vote for steak. Someone else wants salad, etc. When the compromise solution of fried rice is eventually approved, there's no reason that specific choice was anyone's first preference.
Everyone may be disappointed in the final outcome, even if they approved of their representation in the process. Indeed, but for the lobbying for their preference, the outcome might have been worse! Thus the phenomenon where the local populous may like their Congressional representative, but hate Congress. "Why can't all of Congress be as good as our representative? It's the rest of the country who are voting in these bad politicians."
This effect isn't unique to the US, but it is more pronounced here because:
1. We do direct elections of representatives (others often vote for the party, which selects the representative)
2. We have a larger geography/population, so the issues and interests are often more diverse
> The aggressive gerrymandering in Texas could easily backfire in a blue year
Sure. It's easy for aggressive gerrymandering to backfire.
This means that gerrymandering is a self-limiting phenomenon. Why do we need to do something about it?
Murder is a self-limiting phenonomon (if you murder too many people, there will be no-one left to murder). Yet, I think we should take action to do something about it.
And do you think the same applies to gerrymandering? Why?
Note that murdering someone causes a problem without reference to any secondary effects, and this problem cannot later be resolved. Neither of those things is true of gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is bad
It is good to prevent bad things
Therefore, it is good to prevent gerrymandering
Why is gerrymandering bad?
Because it transform a republican form of government where the people determine their representatives into a semi-fuedal system where elites distribute power among themselves.
Is that true? What's the mechanism?
The classic political science rule on the size of legislatures is that the more numerous house should have a number of members equal to the cube root of the size of the population. For an American population of 342 million that would be about 700.That is a lot bigger, but not totally ridiculous. districts would have about 490,000 people per. We could also add 50 senators.
I think the supposed evidence for this rule being "optimal" is overblown. That said, it seems like as good a rule as any to balance house size with representativeness. What I care more about than 435 vs 700 is having an equal number of constituents per representative, whatever that number happens to be. The imbalance of power of voters in low-population states to me is the most unbearable aspect of our "democratic" republic.
Unbearable?
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed."
Or sortition
I don't think the length and depth of this post does justice to the proposal it makes.
As it stands it reeks of back-of-the-envelope calculations and motivated arguments.
Take the money argument (h/t Timothy for offhandedly making the counter argument above/below) - To suggest that enlarging supply of a product with demand staying the same without conteding with the possibility that would drive down prices like it naturally does in every other market is... astounding?
The arguments for Democrats and Republicans are awefully short-term for what would need to be a long-term campaign.
The whole idea is casually suggesting to try something that was never attempted before with what amounts to a handwaving claim that it'd be alright where the closest analog suggested is China which *really* can't be that relevant.
It makes very little effort to show the solution will address the main problem outlined, no attempt to point to research that may or may not have been made into congress size and representation ratio...
It's kind-of a conversation starter waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting.
There's a hidden assumption that if the total number of congress members is proportional to the population then that would be true on a per-state basis - by since that's not the case now, why would ratifying the ammendment change that when it mentions nothing about it?
The claim that this could be passed while other solutions cannot is rather weak - the analogy was states curtailing congress members in a popular (populist?) move that costs them nothing. Here state actors that would expect to weaken themselves by ratifying this ammendment will be actively acting against their voters to no personal gain.
I mentioned the argumetns for Republicans and Democrats are too short-term to matter, but in addition one cannot make a good faith arguments to two competing sides claiming both would do better in elections thanks to a claim, a change is pretty much guranteed to benefit one side more. If you want to get bipartisan support you need to speak about bipartisan goals, if you want to let each side believe that it would help themselves you need to shut up and let them do their own math - telling each that it would benefit them more comes off as disingenuous and manipulative.
I'm really trying to be charitable in my reading here, but the article reads as newspaper-level, the kind of thing that I come to Astral Codex Ten to avoid.
I think this is a very, very bad idea.
Congress worked just fine for a long, long time despite having large numbers of constituents per congressman. It stopped working recently because of various feedback loops that increased polarization dramatically and caused it to be impossible to compromise or work together.
This wouldn't fix those *at all* (notwithstanding the claims). What it would do is make Congress as dysfunctional as a large political party convention (ever been to one of those? It's not pretty). Yes, I'd know my Congresswoman better. But guess what? She'd have no power at all, and Congress would have the dynamics of a large crowd -- not known for being an effective type of body at deliberation. Indeed, it would be absolutely incompetent at getting anything worthwhile done.
Federalist 55 has not been refuted.
Does your congresswoman have any power at all right now? Have they ever been the deciding vote or bucked the party they vote for? It would matter at all to you if they simply replaced them with an automatic vote in line with the party button?
Agreed. Having so many representatives that each one has much less power and individual negotiating relationships means they'll rely more on their party to tell them how to vote to get anything done. That will increase party polarization, not decrease it.
"those spirits who first adhered to him in the days of his splendour, and became most like him in his corruption: their hearts were of fire, but they were cloaked in darkness, and terror went before them; they had whips of flame."
This passage is actually describing the speaker of the house and his many party whips after this amendment is confirmed. Looking forward to it.
whether you represent 50k or 750k voters, if national virality raises more money than local water management, the incentive to serve goes viral anyway. the district shrinks but the attention economy stays the same. big congress doesn't fix where the eyes are.
This seems like an important point to me. If anything, it makes it worse.
It may have actually been ratified by 3/4 in 1490 and erroneously ignored!
https://www.theblaze.com/contributions/did-this-new-jersey-lawyer-discover-a-lost-constitutional-amendment
>It may have actually been ratified by 3/4 in 1490 and erroneously ignored!
See that's the problem. Record-keeping wasn't all that good in 1490, if not to say non-existant, what with America being undiscovered (by Europe) for another 2 years.
Fascinating! It sounds like the courts rejected this because the lawyer didn't have standing. Who does have standing? Is there a way to just remind the government that this is already passed?
>who does have standing?
I'm not a legal expert, but I do listen to lots of legal podcast. And my guess either everyone or nobody.
Everyone because you could just claim that any particular law is unconstitutional (because it hasn't been voted for by a constitutionally licit House), so if you've been particularly hurt by a federal law, you have standing.
If that doesn't work, I suspect nobody has standing. Maybe congressional candidates could try. A recent SCOTUS decision (Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections) gave pretty much categorical standing on election rules to congressional candidates, and the size of congressional district seems like an election rule
Imagine. "We've been using the wrong manual for 200 years?" Then, boom, largest representative body in the history of democracy. Make America a Republic Again! RatifyThe1st.org
The link indicates a possible 1791 ratification.
My expectations are that:
1. People won't actually 'connect with their local representative' or anything like it, they instead grow even less likely to know who it is as they get no media coverage on the 3 websites and one newspaper. In 98% of cases, they will be a suit with a D or R next to their name who votes the party line. The remaining 2% are celebrity vanity stunts.
2. Congress being less about individuals and more about parties would in a vacuum make things worse, not better, as the parties have strong incentives to sabotage the other side when in power while individuals are incentivized to defect on popular issues. Compare leadership attitudes vs caucus attitudes. You either controll congress and pass anything with no bipartisan negotiation or don't and pass literally nothing ever.
3. This doesn't really do anything to fix the systemic issues with voters being incentivized to vote for the big 2 parties, you still get spoiler effects all the same, just more distributed.
It’s not obvious that it’s a typo. The drafters could well have thought about both the minimum and maximum sensible sizes of Congress, and fully intended what they wrote.
It would be weird to do it in a triple parallel construction, rather than making the third construction more explicitly different since you suggest it is intended to do something different.
Why is it weird? Isn’t it sensible to have a “not less than” if Congress is relatively small and a “not more than” if Congress is relatively big?
The thing that’s weird is having three perfectly parallel clauses with one word change, rather than three perfectly parallel clauses and an additional clause mentioning when this stops.
The three are not parallel anyhow! The first is “equal to 30k” while the 2nd is “not less than 40k”. Also, in your scheme, the third would anyhow not be parallel, since it would omit that clause entirely.
Three clauses of (1) equal to 30k; (2) not less than 40k;, and (3) not more than 50k, could well be exactly what they intended.
So they were just bad at math? 😏
Observing from abroad, so maybe there is some nuance I'm not getting, but the thing that always confuses me about the US Congress is why there isn't more support for removing the Senate filibuster. By making it super hard to pass even mildly controversial laws, even with a majority in both houses, it weakens the democratic feedback loop. The public should get to see the results of a party's agenda and then pass judgement at the next election. I'm not surprised that people dislike Congress when it seems constantly caught in gridlock.
Fear that it leads to a winner take all situation for whatever party has a one seat advantage in the year that the filibuster is removed.
Republicans fear that democrats will let millions more non English speaking immigrants into the country, promise them welfare, amnesty 10s of millions more, and give them all the right to vote, creating a one party state for at least a generation.
Democrats fear republicans will drastically increase the IQ threshold to vote via voter ID laws, concentrate power in republican leaning bodies like senate an SCOTUS, plus some gerrymandering, to create a one party state for at least a generation.
Both sides are right, which is why it’s called the “nuclear option.”
>A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive.
So the claim seems to be: People don't like Congress -> Congress is being subsumed by executive.
Could it not be the other way around? This seems like an important point for the whole argument. Maybe Congress could increase its popularity by actually doing their job, which is to pass laws and thus limit the powers of the executive.
Not an American though, so I'm asking for input on this.
Be careful what you wish for. You know damn well that what you're proposing could never work in practice.
Not that I disagree, but if you're so confident, instead give your reasoning instead of accusing the author of writing the opposite of what they believe.
ok I stopped reading at the 27 states need to agree. This is America, disunity and inability to agree on anything defines the nation. The only way it will actually change is in the face of some kind of catastrophe, of which dozens are looming, and it will not then change for the better.
This should call for a quantitative study.
For my part, I live in a country where there are between 10.000 (far north) and 20.000 (in the capital) votes behind each parliamentary seat. Does this mean we trust our parliamentarians more than US voters? And if so, for this reason rather than due to a gamut of confounding factors (proportional representation rather than first past the post, rules against gerrymandering districts, state money to political parties so they should be more independent of private donors, "Minnesota nice" culture throughout the country, etc. etc.). Since there are 195 countries in the world, most of them demcracies (although some only sort-of) it should be possible to get a rough handle on any semi-causal relationship thorugh some type of regression or time-series analysis.
That said, my pre-understanding is that the number is unlikely to have an impact in itself. I bet that most voters in European countries do not know who their representative is at all. Only which party they belong to. Regardless of how many/few voters are behind each parliamentary seat.
But it's an empirical question.
I think it's quite obvious the amendment was planned as an algebraic sequence to balance size of Congress and number of constituents per representative. Extending the sequence to today's population, we arrive at 1:200000 and 1665 representatives, which seems more reasonable.
I like the idea of them creating an algebraic sequence in law. Not sure it's accurate, nor that this particular sequence has any basis in science, logic, or reason, but thank you for suggesting it. :)
A 6000 member Congress is not a good idea as it reduces oversight per member even further and will make members just blindly vote along party lines.
In fact, the opposite is needed: radically fewer members of Congress. I'd say about 7 or 9, the typical number of members on a board of directors. This would allow public scrutiny of every one of them, and it would allow them to more easily reach compromise deals across party lines.
Now, you'll object that we lose all local representation with so few Congress members. But you can actually combine the two ideas as follows: first elect a 6000-member Proto-Congress and then let those people elect 9 members for the real Congress. You could even use fancy ranked voting procedures for that last step, because hopefully the Proto-Congress members can intellectually handle that. The Congress members would regularly meet with the Proto-Congress members to discuss constituents' concerns and priorities.
You've just described the Chinese system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_Standing_Committee_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party
Does reducing oversight make them more likely to vote on party lines? I would have thought it makes them less likely to vote on party lines.
Is the "why should the Republicans support this" section intentionally snarky because there's really no good reason for them to support it? It would basically guarantee that the House will be blue forever, if I understand it correctly. That means this has as much chance of being implemented as ranked voting, or a parliamentary system, or any of the other proposals that will never be implemented.
How would this make the house more blue? I don’t think you understand it correctly if you think that would happen.
That would not be a Nash equilibrium. Instead, the Republican party as a whole would shift closer to Democrat policy, and the two parties would stay in balance.
If the primary issue with the current American congress is constant legislative deadlock, I'm not convinced that adding more congresspeople is the solution.
Ireland's lower house (Dáil Éireann, equivalent to the US Congress or the British House of Commons) is huge relative to the size of the population. There are 174 seats against a population of 5 and a half million, or roughly one seat for every 30,000 people. For comparison, if the House of Commons had the same ratio, there would be about 2,300 MPs: instead, there are 650.
In the US, the problem facing Congress is hyper-polarisation and a myopic focus on national rather than local issues. In Ireland, the opposite is true: a large proportion of our seats are occupied by independent politicians (or politicians affiliated with minor parties) who are extremely parochial and have no incentive to vote to pass legislation on any issues of national significance. Because they're independent candidates, the party whip can't be imposed upon them. We have several elected officials whose job essentially seems to consist of driving up to Dublin, going off on a big rant about how the people in Dublin don't care about people in rural Ireland (so that this rant can be filmed and posted to social media, to their electorate's delight) and voting against any proposed bills.
Sounds like representative bodies elected by at-large elections just don't work. Time for Election by Jury?
https://www.electionbyjury.org/
There are two huge flaws with this proposal to make the US Congress much larger, and we have historical evidence to show it would only make American politics worse (yes, everything can get worse: ask Afghan people who lived in the 1970s):
-The Roman senate started off as a pretty effective debating chamber, with around 100 members, and it became more and more unwieldy as it expanded. It settled in around 300 members during the peak Republican era, and then Julius Caesar (yes, the guy who ruled as a dictator rather than listening to the senate) briefly expanded it to near 1,000 members, the better to muzzle it as turn it into a club for people Caesar liked. Augustus and others found this excessive and lowered the numbers, but they were raised again under Diocletian and later Constantine, centralizing autocrats who (like Caesar) had no time listening to senatorial advice. Constantine increased membership to 2,000 and that was pretty much it for the Roman senate, which survived not as an assembly by as an institution membership of which made one into a bonafide Roman elite member. Increasing the size of assemblies is the best method to make them unworkable.
-The idea that partisanship, parties working as blocs would be more effective than politicians representing constituencies is one that is contradicted by the entire parliamentary history of all Spanish-speaking countries. In most such countries, notably including first-world Spain, the stress is on party affiliation rather than constituency representation (fishing for safe seats is a common occurrence when you want an unpopular party hack in parliament). Party discipline is more destructive of the electorate's trust than anything else. Parliament members become lazy party employees who only show up to vote, strictly along party lines each and every time.
Is there a conflict here between the idea that representatives with smaller constituencies would be more attentive to local issues, and the idea that Big Congress would probably entail decisions being taken at the party level rather than the individual?
I think so
The outcome of this would be that the President would gain much more de facto power than they currently have and given that's a lot already then expect a dictatorship in practice.
The reason for this is something I learnt in the Dr. McNinja webcomic: the Inverse Law of Ninjas. When a large group (e.g. of ninjas) faces a small group of the same quality (so, like, one ninja) then the smaller group will win. The lone ninja will triumph over the swarm 6,641 ninja because it is easier for people to identify with the lone ninja.
This might sound like a joke but I'm completely serious: people will view Congress as a swarm and the President as a real person. The swarm will also suffer major coordination problems; Congressmen herd like cats, not sheep. The President will be a 4 or 8 year dictator (and often, via their VP, able to hand select their successor).
This would make things worse.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ConservationOfNinjutsu
Exactly correct. Amazing that this needs to be explained to ostensibly smart people
I'm 99% sure this would make everything people hate about Congress worse.
For a start, very few individual representatives have sustained 20% approval ratings with their constituents. It that does happen, it's not enough for them to survive a primary (the safer the seat is partisan-wise, the higher approval rating you need to stay as nominee as there are more primary voters you need to satisfy). Plenty of people don't like other districts' representatives (eg AOC is presumably not very popular in the white parts of Alabama), but they're not necessarily supposed to.
What people hate is that they vote for Bob Smith, who says he's going to go to Washington and pass the Save the Local Doomed Industry Act, he valiantly goes and fights for it but it ends up stuck in "the committee" and doesn't happen. The same thing then happens with the Abortion, Guns and Race Act. Bob Smith is very good at letting people know why, and a big part of his campaign is how he's "against the elites" and "against congress."
The biggest problem is that Bob Smith lacks the power to do very much, as he individually is 1/435th of one house of Congress. Making him 1/6000th of Congress will make this worse, so the sorts of people who vote for legislators on the basis of what legislation they vote for get very worked up.
It's much worse than that, though, because of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. In short, because 6,000 people can't actually decide things like a committee, they'll need to delegate most of the decision making to a smaller committee that actually makes decisions. This already happens, and is why the House leadership is much more powerful than the Senate leadership, and part of what congressmen actually do for their constituents goes through them.* 6,000-person congress would realistically mean that the parties would need an intermediate tier between congressmen and the leadership.
As for what doesn't, the major use case of congressmen is to cajole people by writing them angry letters, especially but not exclusively in the federal bureaucracy.*** If you write to the head of the FDA, you might get a polite pro forma response, but even the 1st term congressman from Oregon's 4th district will get a proper answer and things looked into. For agencies with a big national footprint (e.g. Farm Services), this lets random Americans access Tier 3 Customer Support for the Federal Government.**
A 6,000 person congress would be very different on this front in two directions. First, the quality of congressmen and staffers would be lower. This would be bad, as a big part of their job is knowing which bureaucrats' arms to twist about what. Second, there's a risk that congressmen would fall below the threshold where they can reliably get government agencies to do things. This would be extremely bad, because if patronage can't route through democracy it will route through something else; presumably whichever MAGA influencer/Omnicause organiser you can attract the attention of on Twitter. These people will be far less keen on solving *everyone's* problems than politicians are.
A corollary of all this is possibly that people prefer the Senate to the House (source: vibes), but they definitely prefer the singular President to Congress, because he can achieve a lot more.
*This is a big part of why 3rd party reps tend to caucus with a party or fizzle out.
**This is the person you get through to after four hours on the phone to your bank who can actually solve your problem.
***If you're reading a blog about congressional reform, you're not a typical consumer of legislatures. Most people consume more government services than you do and use actual sports to scratch their competitive-team-activity itch.
I would register and then vote if this were on my state ballot. Scott, if you really want this to pass, send this to every podcast you can think of. Get comedians to talk about it.
Regarding your statement that the ‘troublesome typo’ would induce a showdown between textualism and originalism, I believe this is wrong and hangs on an incorrect understanding of both theories. Originalism does not mean “you need to follow what the people who wrote the law meant”. This is a common misconception. Originalism means you have to follow the letter of the law and interpret the meaning of the words according to what they meant at the time the constitution was written. So how is that different from textualism? Because textualism isn’t about the constitution at all. Textualism says that you need to follow the letter of the law when interpreting federal statutes. Essentially they are the same principle, with originalism applying that principle to the constitution and textualism applying it to federal statutes.
If textualism isn’t relevant for the discussion of a constitutional amendment, and if originalism means following the letter of the law (according to the meaning of the framers, who I doubt had different means than today for ‘less than’ and ‘more than’) then are we screwed? Not necessarily. Originalism and textualism both acknowledge and correct for obvious typos, known as ‘scrivener’s errors’. For example, in 1945, Arkansas passed a law that said “All laws and parts of laws, and particularly Act 311 of the Acts of 1941, are hereby repealed”. The Arkansas Supreme Court understood that they did not intend to repeal all laws in the state of Arkansas: “No doubt the legislature meant to repeal all laws in conflict with that act, and, by error of the author or the typist, left out the usual words ‘in conflict herewith,’ which we will imply by necessary construction.”
The fact that this has been "noticed and acknowledged for over two hundred years" would make any originalist worth the name conclude that this is NOT a scrivener's error and the Amendment means what it says.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to reply because this sounds nonsensical to me. The fact that it was discovered over 200 years ago doesn’t mean it’s not a scrivener's error. The Arkansas Supreme Court didn’t have to wait 200 years to discover the scrivener's error in my example above. If anything, it’s evidence to the contrary. If it was only discovered like a decade ago, that would be evidence that this was some modern reinterpretation.
Clarification: that was in the hypothetical that the Amendment is ratified in its current form, long after this supposed "typo" been noted.
The analogy would be if the Arkansas Legislature had noticed and discussed that the Bill's text repealed all laws and passed it after that without changing it.
Ah, I see. I think the counter argument would be that this was the version passed by congress 200 years ago, so the scrivener’s error already occurred, and we the states, as we ratify this, understand that it contains a scrivener’s error and are ratifying it with that in mind as we cannot change the text. I’m not a lawyer, so idk what judges would decide.
Certainly, you might have the case decided by Living Constitutionalists who decide that it means whatever, AND that it bans all guns and guarantees the right to abortion at any time.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. We often SAY that we're considering original public meaning at the time of ratification, but is that actually the standard? Indeed, is that even workable for an amendment that was ratified both in 1790 and in 1998? The public meaning of words can change quite a lot in 200 years!
I read a paper about this from one of the big-name original-public-meaning originalists a few years ago. I thought it was Michael Stokes Paulsen and I thought its title was "Which Originalism?" or "Which Meaning?" or something to that effect, but I cannot for the life of me find it, and it might well have been by someone else. Lawrence Solum? Randy Barnett? I don't know.
But the paper basically argued (persuasively, in my opinion) that meaning is fixated at the time of proposal, rather than the time of ratification. The 14th Amendment means what it meant in 1866, not 1868 -- but those meanings are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, and that is true in most cases, so it only comes up in weird cases like the 27th Amendment.
Sorry I couldn't find it, though! It was a good paper!
Fixing the typo would require re ratificacion by the relevant states but might be the best option
I think the suggestion is utterly, completely bonkers. Just saying.
I think this comment would be more helpful if you explained why you think that. If you aren’t able or don’t have time to do that, it would be more constructive to keep your opinion to yourself.
" I expect that out of necessity, the House would take on a more parliamentary form with the party as the baseline for decision making. Then the big negotiations become those between parties, not between individuals." I'm not sure that's going to increase trust in Congress.
"If you’re a Republican in 2026, you exist to serve Donald Trump and his vision for America."
I think this is a pretty large Ideological Turing Test fail for someone who wants to make a big change politically.
Agree. When I read "imagine how ecstatic he would be to get to design the Donald J. Trump Capitol Building" I ceased taking the author seriously.
I don't want 6000 reps. That's insane, and will lead to political illegibility and chaos.
I have an alternate package of laws that would accomplish these goals and would all have a really good chance of passing. They would have to pass as a package deal as part of a massive negotiated settlement with both parties at the national and state level, but it is doable.
1. Congress gets a huge pay raise. Reps and Senators each now make $2.5 million a year, with automatic pay raises to account for inflation every ten years. This dramatically widens the range of people who can afford to run for and be in Congress, and dramatically raises the caliber of person who might be interested in being in Congress.
2. Constitutional amendment ending gerrymandering through math. All districts need to be as square as mathematically possible, starting from right to left, and it is illegal to consider demographics while drawing districts. A 15 man national board of elections oversees this process, serving ten year terms, appointed by the president (max three appointments per term) and approved by Congress, with the Supreme Court able to remove a member from the board by a minimum 7 person vote if they determine they don't have the right qualifications or have revealed serious partisan bias.
3. Constitutional amendment pegging a Representative seat per 500,000 people. Adds a few hundred Congress people, not 5500.
4. Repeal the 17th amendment. Senators no longer need to raise campaign funds, and no longer need to try to be social media and TV stars.
Congress passes the pay raise law because obviously. They agree to the gerrymandering law and increasing the size of Congress because that's the price of the pay raise. State legislatures ratify the amendment because it gives them power over Senate seats, and because increasing the size of Congress increases their chances of getting into national politics. The Senate ratifies all of it because it increases their power relative to the rest of Congress, they no longer have to run around raising campaign funds and dealing with the public during campaign season, and they get a fat pay raise.
The only entities who lose are the state legislatures of tiny states, who won't get a larger Congressional delegation and will lose power relative to large states, power over Senate elections might not be enough. But there aren't enough tiny states to stop this.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the median member of Congress is already a millionaire. Even if we assume that the richest persons make the best MoC, the utility of guaranteeing millionaire status seems marginal at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_United_States_Congress_by_wealth
Also, if you just want to make money, you could do much worse than to get into Congress even at today's salary:
>In a comprehensive study from the 115th Congress, the combined wealth of all members at that time amounted to at least $2.43 billion, marking a 20 percent increase compared to the preceding Congress. This growth occurred during a period when both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor’s 500 Index experienced gains of slightly under 10 percent
>Over a typical 9‐year career for a Representative, an average Representative will have about 25% more wealth than the average U.S. resident who started the 9‐year period in the same wealth cohort as the Representative
https://www.snoqap.com/posts/2024/6/18/the-wealth-of-us-members-of-congress-a-comprehensive-review
If finances are the problem, then it's getting into Congress, not staying there.
I think the claim is that currently you have to start out rich to afford a career in Congress, and this wouldn’t be true if the salary were higher.
Personally I think that congressional members have an important enough job to easily justify a 7-figure paycheck, but it’s less clear to be that actually paying that much would meaningfully change who gets elected.
I am afraid that such a huge legislation body would be really unable to work in a coordinated manner. China only gets away with having 2900 people in the parliament is because it is not a democracy.
(1) if we're going to try to get 27 states to ratify an amendment that doesn't, in its as-written form, do anything, then we should go the extra mile and get 38 states to ratify an amendment that will do the right thing.
(2) my proposed solution is nonpartisan primaries with approval voting.
Our current primary system generates a lot of polarization. In a normal voting system, we expect to see the candidates converging toward the average of everyone's views. When there's a primary, what we instead see is that one candidate represents the average of the views of all the Democrats, and the other represents the average of the views of all the Republicans. (It's actually worse than this because we only get the views of the ones who are engaged enough to vote in the primary.)
It turns out we can just pass a law that they can't do this any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_primary
We have a few states already where there's one single statewide primary instead.
I think they're still doing it wrong; the wikipedia page notes that, if a party fields lots of candidates, then the votes from people aligned with the party get split across all the candidates and that party loses. The solution is approval voting.
And, to be clear, I think we should definitely apply this to the presidential election as well.
It's even worse than what you said, because with plurality it's not even the average, it's whichever candidate doesn't have any other candidates similar enough to them or with nearly enough money/influence/charisma to get enough share of the votes.
California already has a jingle primary, but we need the approval voting piece of the puzzle to fully unlock its potential.
https://wonk.blog/ca-approval/
To clarify, I meant that in our current system with partisan primaries with plurality voting, it's not even the average of views of all the voters within each party that win out. Because of the deficiencies of plurality voting, similar voices in the middle can split the vote and you can have extremes that win (case in point: Trump in 2016).
And of course I meant we have a *jungle* primary for most state and federal offices, but not President, in California. :)
Look at the rules of order. They can be changed more easily.
We have partisanship because of Congressional rules. Whoever wins majority takes control of the gavel, and completely runs the body. This makes the contest for majority far too important. It forces severe partisanship and creates wildly unequal representation
It should be possible to rewrite rules to eliminate gatekeepers in favor of rules based promotion instead. Every legislator would have the same power. While leadership would be loathe to give up gatekeeping power, the advantage here is that most legislators would gain power, and might be willing to vote to get it.
This is an immensely underappreciated aspect of the failures of Congress.
The argument that it would be significantly more difficult to buy influence seems questionable. Though there would be more races, each would spend significantly less money and therefore be cheaper to swing. AI generated misinformation is cheap and without a strong campaign on defense, it could provide a very cost effective means to swing elections.
IDK if the most likely outcome would be the supreme court accepting it was a typo. I think they would take whatever interpretation they want (whatever Trump says for the conservatives, whatever BlueSky says for the libs) and logic and hypocrisy be damned.
New Hampshire has 400 state representatives - by far the largest of any US state despite having a small population of just 1.4 million. That's one representative per 3500 people. I am pleased to inform you that New Hampshire has incredibly sane politics that prove that this solves all the problems! [note: sarcasm]
FYI this proposal is also what Patrick Deenen, who is influential with the current Trump administration, wants to implement. So maybe I'm biased against it for the reason of not liking Trump but I'm highly dubious of it and nothing I've read has sounded the least bit persuasive.
The fact that Patrick Deenan supports it is a good reason to be skeptical of it, independent of his association with the Trump Administration
I question the "typo" argument. I think the authors of the amendment thought "we can't increase the size of congree indefinitely. At some point it will get too big to manage" It may be mathematically incoherent at a population between 8-10 million, but the intention was to give Congress the flexibility to determine its appropriate size if the population got much larger. Passing the amendment would thus give us the freedom to increase the size of Congress (maybe we have that already?) but not require it.
RatifyThe1st.org is live!
Now what do we do? the site has info, sources, and a way to sign up for news, but do we all just mail our state legistlatures and watch the world continue as it is?
My proposed solution is that in every ODD numbered year, the entire US gets an up or down vote on Congress and if DOWN gets more than 2/3rds (or perhaps 60%) then all current members of congress are barred from running from re-election in the next cycle. (So all of the House members and 1/3rd of the Senate) AND any laws that they pass cannot take effect until 180 days after the next Congress is sworn in, to give the next congress time to review/reject.
What’s to stop the replacement Congress from being essentially the same as before? Joe Crowley gets kicked out of Congress and we get AOC instead — AOC gets kicked out and we get someone like Mandani?
The point is that the the fear of getting kicked out may actually encourage the current members of Congress to value US public opinion as much as they value (say) lobbiest money, lest they lose their sinecure.
The author displays the same deep understanding of the judicial philosophy of originalism as he does the motivations of Republicans.
> obvious criticism of this incorrectly-worded law,
If it's ratified as written even after the ostensible typo is noted, then the wording is intentional.
The idea is interesting and might be good but the actual analysis in this post is bad in a few ways. Firstly, you took jabs at Republicans. This will be noticed if it ever gains traction and the political economy you propose is fairly simplistic. A lot of the things you want to change are things some people want to actively preserve.
Secondly, your legal analysis is spotty. There is no form of Constitutional theory that says "we look at what they intended to do and modify the wording to mean that." The description of textualism and originalism is faulty too. You don't even bring up purposivism or contextualism or the other ideas that are closer. And the idea they've never been in conflict is very wrong.
You also don't grapple with the fact that Congress's unpopularity is a collective action problem. Individual congresspeople can poll pretty well. It's Congress collectively that polls poorly. Basically people like their representatives and dislike the other side's. That's the point.
Also, assuming costs increase proportionally the big house would cost about $10 billion a year which someone would bring up. By the way, you get a pension after five years of serving. Assuming it approaches the maximum (ie, people cycle out) you might end up with six figures of people drawing pensions. I don't think this is a good argument but someone would bring it up. What might be a better argument is if salaries go down you end up with it becoming a rich person's hobby club.
Lastly, you don't deal with the fact Congress WAS increasing steadily until the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. You could simply repeal that without needing a constitutional amendment. But also this is kind of a problem for your theory of change. The representatives per people was steadily increasing but it changed about 10x from 1787 to 1929 (so about 7% per year) and from 1929 to 2025 about 3x (so about 3% per year). The growth has actually slowed.
>a representative has little incentive to care about the experience of individual people in their district.
If that is true, why do representatives hire so many people to provide constituent services? And, why do polls show much higher approval for respondents' own representative than for Congress as a whole?
>the House would take on a more parliamentary form with the party as the baseline for decision making. Then the big negotiations become those between parties, not between individuals.
So, each Congressperson will ignore the interests of his/her local constituents? Isn't that exacerbating the problem that you are trying to solve?
This change would be very interesting for politics nerds. I'm much less certain that it would actually improve governance, which should be the goal of reforms like this.
>And when my state representative and my state Senator tell me about the good work that they’ve done and ask for me to vote for them again, they point to legislation that they’ve passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.
The problem with this is that a legislator in a 6,641 person House is not going to be introducing any bills at all. Bills will originate with committees and the legislator gets to vote yay or nay. This could just as easily backfire and make legislators even less interested in legislating and more interested in stealing the media spotlight so they can advance to governor/senator/Presidency.
Lawyer note: Originalism in the context of constitutional *amendments* does not mean "what the people who wrote it meant", it relies instead on analysis of "original public meaning". What the language would have been understood to mean by the people voting to ratify it. This is of course an obvious problem in the case of amendments ratified across the span of 250 years, as there IS no shared understanding of what it meant.
As to the shape of the arguments that would occur, these theories and canons of interpretation are typically relied upon only when there is ambiguity in the text, which there isn't here. You would have to argue that, primarily because of the 8 to 10 M impossibility, the law as written is nonsensical, and therefore needs to be fixed. But the Court would likely determine that had the people wanted to do it correctly, they need only to have re-introduced it without the typo, most of the ratifying states would have done so in the 21st c. when the absurdity was both noted and arguably irrelevant because we are well over the 10M threshold (never mind the political realities, your practical hurdles don't count.)
Of course this is all academic, as small states will never vote to make the Electoral College irrelevant, the world where presidential candidates can just run up numbers in their densest strongholds is death to rural America. And that's even if I grant you that your new Mega-Congress somehow weakened the executive. Let's face it, the only available evidence of such a body is that weak leaders such as the hapless Chancellor Velorum will let it get clogged up by bureaucratic excess and 2000 weirdos yelling about trade policy from their hovering delegation platforms (solves the space issue though!) Meanwhile Naboo burns under fire from a droid army, and a strong executive like Palpatine will inevitably use the crisis of inaction to step in and ultimately dissolve the body.
I was initially exposed to this amendment and the giant house idea by the De Civ blog (which had an unrelated link shared on ACX awhile ago). https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/expand-the-house-you-cowards
His writeup has some more details investigating the concept, and is worth a read.
Is the 11 state head start worth preserving the paradox? And worth glossing over whether 1 / 50k is the right amount of giant? Why not start fresh?
Make sure the pay raise is massive. $2 million a year for the house, $3 million for the senate, something out of hand. We are trying to attract capable people here.
This proposal might be fun to debate, but it is wildly unrealistic both legally and politically. It is inconceivable that it could actually happen. If there was ever sufficient support to get it through there would be enough support for far more revolutionary changes.
An underlying assumption is that the American people are somehow better than their legislature, and the right structural changes would improve the legislative product and result in better governance. I don't see any evidence in support of this thesis. I submit that we have the government we collectively "deserve." Congress passes plenty of laws and is plenty responsive to the popular will. Making it more responsive in our closely divided country would be destabilizing. It is not a good thing to have policy swing wildly back and forth as the result of 51-49 elections.
If the government we have now is worse than in the past, why? Are the voters worse?
I think there's a reason no legislature is that large (and China of course is a dictatorship where the legislature matters less even than the US).
Gerrymandering is irrelevant to the Senate, which is also prohibited even via Constitutional Amendment from not equally representing the states, and that's just as much part of Congress that people complain about as the House. They don't have to worry quite as much about re-election, because their terms are three times as long, but that's a separate issue.
The real solution is to break up the US into multiple countries. We are too large to be effectively governed by one national system.
The gerrymandering analysis is quite poor.
Consider a population perfectly dispersed by party affiliation. The party with one more vote per district would sweep the election without gerrymandering. Determining how much gerrymandering exists requires a much much more granular analysis.
I co-founded FairVote's chief competitor, the Center for Election Science, and we advocate the simpler and better approval voting.
It's also worth pointing out that FairVote are lying idiots, and here's proof.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005158mp_/https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/fact-check
They're right that the voting method is the most important issue:
https://www.rangevoting.org/RelImport
But Proportional representation is NOT the answer. And even if you want it, you have to break out of the two party system first, so you need approval voting as a prerequisite.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representation-fallacy-553846a383b3
I tried explaining this to Nader's former running mate, Matt Gonzalez, in two separate one-hour whiteboard sessions, but he's not a math guy (extremely right-brained) so he really didn't seem to follow. He did allow us to host this essay on his personal web site tho.
https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/
You can only do this via ballot initiative. That’s how we got St Louis to get approval voting by a 68% majority. This can be done for mere tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, if only you could get some rich people to fund it.
In case anyone else clicked through to the article in the opener, saw that Ebola and Gonnorhea had 28% and 25% of respondents liking them more than congress, and wondered how the hell that's larger than the lizardman constant, it's because the questions are not independent but are a head to head e.g.:
Q26 What do you have a higher opinion of:
Congress or gonorrhea?
Congress ……………………………………………….. 53%
Gonorrhea………………………………………………. 28%
Not sure …………………………………………………. 18%
This also means the statement "People dislike congress more than cockroaches" is more figurative than literal, in the sense that it's a measurement of people's willingness to say "I have a higher opinion of congress than cockroaches", which is different from "We measured how much people like cockroaches and congress independently and found out people like cockroaches more". It's really a proxy for general disgust with congress, which to be fair supports the idea that many people are disgusted with congress.
Regarding the 11th (27th) amendment, it seems like the only way to change things is to get incredibly mad for a decade and work for that whole time to prove yourself right
FairVote are lying idiots. I co-founded their chief competitor, the Center for Election Science, and we advocate the simpler and better approval voting.
https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/
You can only do this via ballot initiative. That’s how we got St Louis to get approval voting by a 68% majority.
Proportional representation is not the answer.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/the-proportional-representation-fallacy-553846a383b3
I'm not sure that anyone, in the history of deliberative bodies, has thought that increasing a body's member's by a factor of ten would make it more efficient or functional.
Maybe they're wrong. Maybe the scleroticism of large bodies is actually unique to 'medium'-sized bodies, and we simply haven't tried enough dakka yet. But I think my initial assumption would be that coordination problems would reduce the effective power of the House of Representatives.
And I'm really not sure that would be good. My primary concern with our current government structure is that the legislature has seen fit to reduce its duties and effective powers in favor of a 'supervisory' role over a legislatively-empowered executive. That power vacuum has led to an increase in the effective power of courts as well, as they serve as the primary counter-majoritarian check on the increasingly potent president.
How does dektupling the size of the House help this? Maybe it would force a two-tier representative selection system, which would accomplish a lot of the goals originally intended for the Senate under its original design? I'm not sure. It's plausible, but I'm not convinced.
Why think it’s harder to gerrymander smaller seats? It’s going to be harder to eliminate all representation for a group that is a strong majority over a large region (so any place with cities and with countryside is going to have some democrats and some republicans). But at the interface, you can do a lot more with a lot of little districts than with a few big districts.
And if you think beyond party, to racial, cultural, and geographic gerrymandering, there’s plenty that can and will go on with 50,000 person districts. In Los Angeles, you would be able to decide whether there’s a district that represents the Hollywood hills, or whether those rich people would be diluted in a bunch of neighboring districts. You’d be able to decide if there’s a district centered in historic downtown, or if those apartment dwellers are divided among neighboring districts. You could decide if koreatown gets four or five districts, or if there’s only one core koreatown district with the rest of the neighborhood diluted into its neighbors. Are there several districts that primarily represent coastal neighborhoods, or is each neighborhood broken up into strips cutting across it?
And if you allow the kind of long thin districts that, say, Texas has to ensure multiple representatives of border communities (who each get a tail into San Antonio), then you could absolutely draw lots of tails from a city into the countryside, either making sure that each is 60% city and 40% country with one or two big totally rural districts, or making sure that each is 60% rural and 40% urban with a few totally urban districts.
You're right on one level, but your examples require a lot more specialized knowledge about all of the local characteristics of those places, and to some extent rely on neighborhoods staying the same over time. It's not by any stretch of the imagination impossible, but it's still harder than gerrymandering at the coarser resolution of districts we have today.
It doesn’t actually require any more specialized knowledge than is required for modern gerrymanders that make large scale maps that look nice!
And importantly, all it really takes is one lawmaker from West Shelbyville to tell the map drawing people that East Shelbyville should definitely not get its own representative.
> Imagine how owned all those Washington libs will be when they walk by the giant golden statue of Donald Trump that hosts Congress.
You could at least pretend to write well, even if sentences like this show that your brain falls out when you think about republicans. If you want to convince the opposite side, don’t make fun of them
If the current number of house representatives is 435 and the hypothetical future number if the amendment is naïvely passed is between 6,641 and 6,980, what is the actual optimal number?
Per the nerds, it should be the cube root of the population, which would result in about 694. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law.
The United States is not a democracy, nor is it a democratic republic, but an oligarchy with some vestigial trappings of democracy but run by a system of de facto unlimited legal political bribery (for those who can afford pricey lawyers and who have enough sense not to be caught buying or selling votes in a blatant quid pro quo).
This system may be justifiably unpopular with the peons, but it suits people of influence and authority just fine. Therefore it will not be changed.
That said, a larger Congress might be harder to bribe. That alone would have The People Who Matter up in arms. They paid good money for this Congress, and they do not want to have to pay off a whole new crew. (This is why many people living in third world countries may detest the local strongman, but don't necessarily want to see him replaced, as that would mean that they'd have to make new connections and pay off a new set of swollen assholes.)
On this general topic I would recommend a couple of things:
https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-want-to-reform-democracy-7f3b1ef10597
Also, I don't have a great link handy but there was a Congressional committee that examined how much Congress sucks for a while and some of their committee hearings are great (it's a lot of people being like "We suck so much! We are the worst!").
https://www.congress.gov/committee/house-select-committee-on-the-modernization-of-congress/hlmh00
Sorry if this is a naive question, but why bother with an ancient proposed amendment with a typo? Why not just start from scratch and write a better one?
Because it's already well on its way towards ratification and any hypothetical new amendment isn't.
In particular, Congress would have to pass the new amendment, and it seems unlikely that they would do so.
One upside for politicians is it gives state officials an easier path to holding a federal office.
I don't understand why you start talking about a potential Supreme Court battle over textualism vs originalism in the section on the typo. If you're going to bother with getting 27 states to ratify something, which is already a huge effort, you might as well start over with a well-written amendment and get the 11 other states to re-ratify the corrected version.
I believe the conceit is that state ratification is much easier than getting Congress to pass such an Amendment today.
I will also echo some other commenters that I think concentration of power in the federal government is a major issue. Congress's popularity, and the taking of power by the executive, doesn't matter as much if neither has a lot less power. Partisan control of Congress also matters less in this case.
I remember learning in high school that back in the 1800s, federal representatives would leave their posts to take a more prestigious one... in their *state* legislature. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to put Pandora's Box back into place. SCOTUS could theoretically remember that words mean things and that the 9th and 10th amendments exist, and overturn a bunch of cases (such as the infamous Depression "growing wheat on your farm for your consumption is interstate commerce"), but I don't see that happening any time soon. Individual states could try to assert themselves, but there's little they could actually do to *reduce* federal power, and both parties seem primarily interested in increasing federal power whenever they get the chance.
This is genuinely one of the most destructive “well meaning” wonk reform proposals I have seen floating around political discussion spheres. What are the historical examples of 1000+ parliamentary bodies? The Estates-General which was deadlocked and melted down in the French Revolution. The Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies with 2250, or the All-Union Congress of Soviets with 2025 members. The National People’s Congress of China with ~3000 members.
The continuity between all of them, every historical example I can find, is that they’re either utterly dysfunctional, or they are rubber stamp machines for centralized executive power. It is not hard to see that a mob of thousands of representatives might lose cohesiveness and become pliant to executive power. Each individual member is practically faceless as the influence of individual seats drops towards zero and the “bully pulpit” steering effect becomes overwhelming.
Several suggested benefits do not make sense. The role of money in an election is primarily to buy advertisements and fund on the ground campaigners. This activity is largely localized to the district the election occurs in. Elite money will go as far as small donors whether the election is in a big district or a smaller one. The suggested logistical issue of coordination of influence campaigns across more districts is routinely performed by private sector advertisers. The suggested benefit with regard to gerrymandering is unsubstantiated, mathematically more zones increases rather than decreases gerrymandering capacity.
These proposals seen across various think tanks are born less from realistically approaching congress’s problems and more from pure idealism about increasing the “representation” knob to try and fix institutional problems.
Eh all those examples were pre-internet though? There are better ways of coordinating, deliberating, debating and the like these days.
National People’s Congress of China still exists today.
Utopianism around the internet aiding rather than debilitating civil society coordination should be put to bed given the experience of the last 10-20 years. The median online debate, the actually popular with the mass public kind not the nerdy kind, is observably an exercise in gutter sophistry.
I think this is pretty cute, in a "Modest Proposal" kind of way. It reminds me a little bit of "Sovereign Citizen" tactics. There are lots of different varieties of Sovereign Citizens, but mostly they replace their car's license plates with something that says "Private: not for commerce", and then attempt to argue in court that "driving" refers to commercial operation, and therefore they don't need to pay any traffic tickets. Also, according to some old treaty, the US government is a corporation and not a Constitutional entity, and the entire so-called body of law is just admiralty statutes that apply only to maritime actions etc.
All of that stuff sounds really plausible and authoritative and honorable, but it never works, because at the end of the day the government says you need a license to drive, and they have all the cops to enforce that preference. And you might think this is unfair, and every man must be free to travel as he chooses; but the mother of that child you will run over while going 90 in a 25 zone might disagree.
All that is to say that Shelling points and entrenched institutions cannot be overturned with "one simple trick", no matter how elegant that trick might sound.
I like the angle. What would the estimated total cost be for the new building, the offices, and the newly required support staffs (and housing, transportation, etc, etc). Meaningful or not?
Actually Effective governance reform would be worth trillions IMHO, though it’s another question if this proposal would actually be effective.
Let's make Giant Congress but also make it so that each member of Congress must live and hold an office in the district that they represent. The work should be remote.
giant "zoom" congress FTW
The polls about people’s approval of Congress are misleading. Everyone hates Congress, but most people approve of their own representative in Congress. “Does my representative deserve re-election” is a useful metric here — it’s almost always above 50%. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
So contra the author’s claim, we don’t live in “A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives” — something more complicated is going on.
One reason the proposed solution is a bad idea is that it would reduce the power of the individual people in Congress — the ones people actually like — and replace it with party control. Party control has increased tremendously in the past 20 years and seems a more obvious reason why “the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive” — the main problem the article proposes to fix.
The claims about congressional approval polls being misleading are misleading. Most people can’t name their district or rep, know nothing about their character or political views.
All this shows that in partisan districts, the larger party wants to keep their seat and keep the other guys out. Obviously.
There’s an option for “no opinion” in the poll I linked; presumably many folks who don’t know their rep are choosing that option. It’s possible that my interpretation is wrong, but it’s far from obvious. The situation is just more complicated than “everyone hates Congress.”
If you can get 27 states, why not just ditch this version, fix the typo, and get an extra 11?
The 27th Amendment was easier to pass once resurrected than this would be, because people have a visceral objection to Congress voting themselves pay raises. I don't think the size of Congress elicits a visceral reaction.
I'm not convinced by your argument about money. One seat is less valuable, but it would also cost less money to "buy". I expect you'd see donors simply shift to funding collections of ideologically aligned candidates. Funding a "package" of candidates would be different, but I don't know if it would fundamentally change the degree to which money influences politics.
I worry about the unintended consequences of trying to do business with such a large organization. A substantially bigger Congress? I can see an argument for it. 6,691? I'm more skeptical and would like some people who study the dynamics of very large organizations and how they make decisions to chime in.
Wise
> If you can get 27 states, why not just ditch this version, fix the typo, and get an extra 11?
Because the current Congress would have to pass the fixed version, and it seems unlikely they would.
There's always the possibility of an article 5 convention of the states with this on the agenda
This proposal assumes that a bicameral body invested with legislative powers, separated from and checking the authority of the executive, can be made to work in a large, rich, 21st century super power. I desperately *want* to believe that's true, but I think it's worth considering that it might not be.
Here's the Devil's Advocate argument: Compared to 1787 the world is more globalized, the US is more nationalized, and problems arise and must be dealt with more quickly and nimbly. If Congress isn't up to those tasks, it doesn't matter how big it is, how little districts are gerrymandered, how little money influences politics, or how bipartisan the country is. The President will act, Congress will acquiesce, and Representatives will win elections by performing for the cameras rather than accomplishing anything meaningful. Maybe Congress will be less hated, but it won't be any better at performing its Constitutional role.
Please, pick this argument apart.
Bingo
As a present congress-person, one should block this idea as it will most likely lead to a decrease not only in power but also in salary. Or is anybody believing congress-people will be paid the same after such an explosion in their numbers? (At around 100 comments, I may not be the first to wonder. Scrolled down some, not all.)
Which states have and have not ratified it, and if my state hasn't, who do I contact to ask them to push for ratifying it?
Why not just start a new amendment without the typo?
Because Congress would have to pass the new amendment first.
Prevent much of the increase for staffers by limiting them. After all, if there are so many more, there is that much less work per Representative.
"Democrats: You’re about to take a beating in the next census. California is moving to gerrymander its Congressional delegation, but it’s also going to lose four seats. Texas is moving to gerrymander its delegation even more aggressively, and it’s going to gain four seats. Florida is going to gain three. Illinois and New York are losing seats. Across the board it’s bad news; while you might come out on top in this year’s elections, you’re going to lose the gerrymandering battle come 2030."
That picture has been shifting for a couple of years now and, if present trends continue, will by 2030 be rather different than the above.
-- the Census Bureau reports that regarding its July 1 2025 annual estimates, "The Midwest was the only region where all states gained population from July 2024 to July 2025. In addition, after experiencing population decline in 2021 and small growth in 2022, the Midwest’s population grew solidly in 2023 (259,938), 2024 (386,231), and 2025 (244,385)...."
-- the Trumpist jihad against nonwhite immigration is dramatically slowing population growth in the two largest politically-red states, Florida and Texas. "Immigration accounted for 44 percent of the Lone Star State’s population growth between 2024 and 2025, a larger share than came from either domestic in-migration or natural increase (births)....in the same period, immigration accounted for more than 90 percent of Florida’s growth....If, in fact, immigration levels turn out to be zero or negative for the balance of the decade, the current reapportionment projections could be impacted in unexpected ways. For example, with zero immigration between 2025 and 2030, the Brennan Center projects that Florida would gain only two seats rather than three because it would go from being one of the nation’s fastest growing states to a relatively slow growing one. Meanwhile, Wisconsin would keep a seat that it is currently projected to lose."
-- the Census Bureau again: "domestic migration within the US has been changing. From July 2024 through June 2025, the Midwest saw positive net domestic migration for the first time this decade." Looking at major blue or red states, CA through 7/1/25 had its 4th straight annual decline in net domestic-migration loss; NY for 2025 had less than half the net loss of either 2021 or 2022; TX had its lowest net annual gain since 2020 and FL its lowest since sometime before 2020; WI had its 4th straight year of net domestic gain; MN and MI each had their first domestic net gain since sometime before 2020; VA had its 2nd year of net domestic gain after three years of losses; IL had its lowest net domestic loss since 2020; WA had its 2nd year of net domestic gain after three years of losses. The large blue city in which I live, Chicago, is today on track to in 2030 record its largest census population since 1980.
That's a fun quirk I didn't know about but I want to argue that the fundamental problem we have with congress is too much (direct) representation not too little.
Yglesias wrote an interesting piece awhile ago about how everyone thinks policy is easy and they hate congress because they keep electing people and then those people don't do the 'obvious' things that would fix everything. Of course the problem is that at this point in history there are usually good reasons we didn't do those obvious things (like they have bad consequences or a bunch of other people think it's obvious we shouldn't do that).
I don't think he takes the implications of this seriously enough. Indeed, I'd argue that Trump is the natural result of frustration with a system where people keep campaigning on things easy enough for voters to understand in the limited time they are willing to give to an election and then have to deal with the real complications of the world.
In an ideal world we would have something like transferable votes. Rather than having to pick a particular politician I could pick a particular organization to place my vote for me. But there are quite a lot of issues there with corruption and practical implementation. Another great idea would be to have our state legislatures vote for our national legislatures but even that seems pretty hard.
So at least what we should do is repeal McCain-Feingold and allow the national parties to make unlimited donations to individual canidates to reduce the effects favoring the most extreme legislatures in terms of fundraising and creating pressure to do things that are nationally popular.
My weird suggestion is to have congress reform the electoral college in the following ways. They can set the date (and I believe manner) of elections so specify that electors will be choosen 8 years before they vote for their canidate and don't allow the name of any canidate to appear on the ballot (ie you have to vote for an elector and the listed party, if they want to promise to vote for a particular figure in 8 years that information can't be on the ballot).
Aside from reduced polarization, one of the main things I'd want to get out of a political reform is better consumer protection, like Europe has. This seems like it would be very much at odds with unlimited donations.
That electoral system sounds nice in theory. If anybody gets some large groups of voting nerds together, maybe they can try it out on some toy elections and see how it does in practice. I'd be interested to hear how it goes.
I actually think consumer protection regulations tend to benefit established market incumbents so this might go the other way. Consumer protections increase barriers to entry into the market but since they apply to all market participants generally they are to the advantage of the incumbents. It might feel like consumer protections are things the companies will hate but overall that's not so clear. I mean at the end of the day you can always just pass any increased costs along to your customers since everyone has them so why would this result in less consumer protection?
Anyway what I said was unlimited donations from the party to a candidate which is a bit different. We already have unlimited donations to super-pacs -- they just can't coordinate. Those have much more of an incentive to be extremist but it isn't clear it does much to cut down on the ability of politicians to see how their votes impact the corporate donations to the super-pacs on their side.
Also, you have to realize that most influence happens not by outright purchasing a vote but simply because they manage to get the politician's time and that lets them pitch the arguments and considerations that benefit them. Someone is always going to have that kind of time advantage, even if you had no donations at all it wouldn't result in politicians hanging out with random joe public. Is it really better when that influence and time is basically being managed by Epstein style shadowy figures who somehow can get anyone who is anyone into their roleadex? I tend to think open lobbying might be the least bad way for this influence to be distributed.
That's why I specified "like Europe has". Somehow, in the US, every law that is drafted, no matter the subject and no matter the direction, seems to end up benefiting large, established corporations. Consumer protection absolutely can be done without making things harder for small or informal businesses! For instance, you can fine a supplier that sells tumeric with too much lead. While larger corporations would still have an advantage at testing the lead levels of their products at scale, it avoids adding start-up costs you might see with a different system like certification.
Depends a lot on the industry but Airlines for America for example is definitely lobbying against, not for, consumer protections.
So this is a nice dream. So our congress has many problems, too much big money, too much influence from big business (pharma, defense, food) and as you say accountability to constituents. But I see the biggest problem with congress is that they have given much of their power to the executive branch. And so I see the solution as; We the voters must insist on congress people that will take back their power and make the hard decisions. But no one I hear is even talking about this.
Lots of people including this post are talking about this...
In this fascinating post, Scott doesn't really go into detail about why this amendment has overwhelming advantage compared to other ways to fix Congress, in the form of actually Getting Anything Done.
If you want to say "Giant Congress we'll make things worse, here's my own plan for fixing things," you're entitled to. But let's say that although you think this amendment would improve our system, but not enormously. And you're afraid of the opportunity cost of pushing this amendment when we could be doing something more useful.
You can put that worry right out of your mind, because this amendment has a huge advantage. Which is that the actual text of the amendment goes back to the 1780s, and was endorsed by numerous members of the founding generation. In a country that still largely reverse the Founders, that's a huge advantage.
.
Even though the amendment originally failed, the fact that it is a relic from the original Convention is hugely important. For much of America, not limited to conservative Republicans, America's unofficial civil cult is alive and well. And no modern amendment will ever have the cachet in that cult called like an amendment that was endorsed by George Washington (I think).
So if you think Giant Congress is a step in the right direction, your choice amounts to This or Nothing. As far as legislative solutions go, you're not going to find anything better that has a snowball's
Great point. What other fixes come to mind?
Reminder that this is not Scott’s post.
Years ago, as a student in a course that involved reading the daily minutes of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, I learned that the Electoral College had been a desperate bit of improv not even suggested until almost the last day of the gathering. Virtually nobody present deeply liked it or had thought through its implications; they were just hopelessly stuck on the point of how the new "president" would be elected and the EC was the half-a-loaf that a majority present could live with.
Then, as part of trying to persuade enough states to ratify the drafted new constitution, Hamilton/Madison in the Federalist Papers hand-waved the idea of the EC ensuring that small states got heard in national elections. Then when states, in order to give that notion teeth, began requiring their electors to vote as a bloc the way the state's presidential vote had gone, Madison was horrified and outraged. He proposed a Constitutional amendment banning the practice but it didn't go anywhere.
In legal reality no amendment is required to get rid of the EC's state by state all-or-nothing aspect (because that part is not in the Constitution). Congress could pass a federal law declaring that the EC votes shall be assigned based on the winning candidate by House district (for 435 of the votes) or state as a whole (for the other 100 EC votes i.e. the 2 per state based on Senate representation).
That change would preserve the EC's extra representation for low-population states, while largely eliminating the scenario of a presidential candidate losing the popular vote but winning the White House. And of greatest value to me that change would end the thing where presidential tickets campaign in and pander to only the handful of "swing" states, basically ignoring the rest of us whether our state is large or small.
And now states can gerrymander the EC as well as the House. Also, I'm not sure the Feds can compel how the states allocate their EVs.
Your comment made me dig a bit more and, current SCOTUS precedent is indeed that Congress alone could not prevent the states from the all-or-nothing thing. So, pending a future-SCOTUS conclusion to the contrary, an amendment would be required. Foo. I am discouraged by this.
As for gerrymandering, I certainly would make ending that practice the highest constitutional priority ahead of actually anything else, including reforming the EC. That said, my idea about the present situation [gerrymandering still happening] would be that EC votes being cast by congressional district would at least make the gerrymandering of federal districts _harder_. The politicians trying to choose their voters for House of Representatives partisan gain, which always includes trying to protect some specific incumbents, would now have to compromise that selfish objective with a different party-selfish objective of trying to guess which lines would best help future POTUS nominees of their party.
Getting rid of gerrymandering is the best first choice! Making is a bit less practical to do without backfire risk would be...well not even half a loaf but, something at least.
All we need to get rid of the EC is to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; if we can’t pass that, why do you think we could get Congress to do it?
This is an analogue of the problem that brought a lot of pre-literate cultures to ruin.
See also ThirtyThousand.org
https://thirty-thousand.org/house-size-why-435/
The point about originalism vs textualism is amateurish. There's already a lot of thought put into how textualism can be reconciled with the existence of typos (called "scrivener's errors" in the legal business), and originalism is of two types (original meaning and original purpose), not just the one type mentioned in the post.
See for instance https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1838566
trying to peer into the minds of the legislators who wrote the bill has been very much out of favor for decades. Just the public meaning of the text they actually passed. What congressmen said about it on the side has very little weight, for good reason: it's not what the full congress actually voted on.
Its not a serious call to action.
Should have provided methods for contacting legislators and making it very clear why it's a good idea for them to spread and ratify it.
Having a relatively small lower house seems to be a common feature of large countries. India's lower house has 543, Brazil's has 513, Indonesia's has 580, Apart from China, no other legislature has more than 900 people in one chamber.
Not arguing against the proposal, but I wonder why no democracy has tried having a large legislature.
One rule of thumb I've heard is that empirically, lower houses of legislatures tend to be sized to approximately the cube root of the population. That would be about 685 members for the US.
An important difference between the US and those nations is the power and impact of the 50 state legislatures.
Even after some decades of the federal government gaining relative power, the states still do have and carry out significant lawmaking authority at the practical level. To note one example currently in the news, there's a reason most of the wave of "YIMBY" advocacy/lobbying efforts is taking place in state capitols rather than Congress.
Also a current theme in SCOTUS jurisprudence is pushing back at the federal agglomeration of authority [some examples being the "Sackett", "Dobbs", "Loper", "Sebelius", "Allen", "Skrmetti", "City and County of San Francisco" rulings]. Given lifetime terms for justices that trend won't change anytime soon.
So to some degree lawmaking power is more decentralized in the US than in most other places.
I don't think federalism is a determining factor here. Canada, Mexico, and Switzerland are all (as of 2019) within 1-2% of the legislature size suggested by the cube root rule. To the best of my knowledge, Canada has about the same level of federalism as the US, Mexico maybe somewhat less, and Switzerland quite a bit more. The EU Parliament also comes pretty close the cube root rule levels, with 720 MEPs as of 2025 for a population of 450 million (CRR legislature size would be 766).
That said, the cube root rule is an empirical observation based on a very rough trend with a lot of departures in both directions. There are theoretical justifications that have been proposed for it, but I don't think it should be adhered to too strongly as a prescriptive rule.
Here's another idea. Winner-take-all voting systems, like in the US, naturally produce two parties that roughly evenly divide the national vote. New forms of media, like cable TV, talk radio, and social media, that give people more choice to absorb news the way they want, lead people to self-segregate into echo chambers and vote for more polarized politicians, driving these two parties further apart and making it harder for them to compromise and thus pass laws. Citizens are frustrated by this deadlock. One way to reduce it may be to introduce national propositions so that we can directly vote on laws, like many cities, counties, and states already do.
Why would voting directly on issues be any more successful than voting indirectly, by electing our Congressional representatives? As citizens, we have diverse views, but to elect representatives in a two-party system, all these views on a huge range of issues must be sorted, often arbitrarily, into just two boxes. It’s not just squeezing a square peg into a round hole; it’s putting a hypercube with hundreds of dimensions into a dot. There are issues that majorities of citizens agree on and want action on, but which aren’t acted on because of the representative system. Voting directly on these issues would get things done that majorities want, relieving much of our frustration. Another benefit of offloading some of the contentious issues from Congress would be to reduce pressure on representatives and perhaps let them relax their adversarial stance and cooperate more to get bills passed.
It wouldn’t be a radical thing. Many local and state governments in the US already do it, as does Switzerland, which is pretty conservative, stable, and successful.
A change in TV ad market structure seems trivial compared expanding the Congress. Surely they would respond to incentives(assuming most of the targets of TV ads are voters)
So a gargantuan effort to add a Constitutional amendment (the 27th was absolutely nothing, by the 1980s most members of Congress were getting their income through means other than their day jobs anyway, so it was just a cutesy meme-y thing to do to help out this plucky mediagenic undergrad), a perhaps-slightly-less-gargantuan effort to deal with the "least/most" typo, a likely-equally-gargantuan effort to set up new infrastructure for this gigantic House of Representatives, a decade or more of waiting around for smaller parties to start springing up and gaining power in order to do something about the already-existing quasi-parliamentary system we've got whose shortcomings you acknowledge in your sidenote about your own district's representative...
...and then whatever they do is still subject to the mercy of the same ol' shitty ol' creaky-ass-ol' Senate.
Tons of effort, zero meaningful change once the dust settles.
Yea. This concept should not be referred to as increasing the size of _Congress_, which while pedantically correct gives a very-misleading impression of lawmaking impact if this was done.
> if the US population ever declined to between eight and ten million - admittedly another thing that’s not really in the cards - the Constitution would become logically impossible to follow, and America would officially be a paradox.
This would open the door to legalizing everything via proof by contradiction.
Theorem: Murder is legal.
Proof: Assume murder is illegal.
- Premise 1. Congress must have at least 200 members.
- Premise 2. Congress cannot have more than 1 member per 50,000 people.
- Contradiction (from 1 and 2).
Therefore murder is legal. QED.
However, the government can also use the proof by contradiction trick to enforce anything they want.
This amendment is clearly establishing a pattern where the representatives grow proportionally to the square root of the population.
For 3 million people:
100 \times (\sqrt{3+1} - 1) = 100 \times (2-1) = \mathbf{100} reps
For 8 million people:
100 \times (\sqrt{8+1} - 1) = 100 \times (3-1) = \mathbf{200} reps
For 15 million people:
100 \times (\sqrt{15+1} - 1) = 100 \times (4-1) = \mathbf{300} reps
Thus for a population of ~346 million people we should have 1,763 reps.
Putting 6600 important people in one location is a security risk.
The thing to do here is to have 11 more congress buildings (in addition to the original, of course), and 11 more house speakers. Each congress house will have around 560 members and each speaker job is to speak on behalf of their house.
They each control legislation for a month.
Piece of anecdata in favor of this... the city of Glendale ~200k people near the so cal suburb where I live has 5 city council people which each rep around 40k people and coffee meetings rather than money and interest groups are the key factors there. Coordination costs are very real and there is something beautiful about small d democracy.
I'm very bothered by this guest author's name. They practically just took my name and put an "-er" on the end. How would you (Scott) like it if you found someone who was Scott Alexanderer than you.
A current critique of Congress is that authority is currently so diffuse that everyone can successfully avoid taking responsibility. Instead, power defaults to the executive or the small circle of leaders who set policy and assume compliance from the rest of the body.
I don't see how scaling the membership dramatically higher does anything other than make the problem substantially worse. You'd scale the difficulty of coordinating and dilute any feasible assignment of blame for failure.
No one looks to China's thousands-strong national Assembly as being the powerhouse of a robust democracy.
Exactly. This is basic common sense! Who will the buck stop at?
Why is the post called last rights
Its a cute idea, for sure. And it has zero chance of ever being reality.
Unless SAI in charge of SEZs becomes a thing, and the economy doubles in size every year, the problem of federal government is going to work itself out when they become so insolvent no one will issue them credit. I look forward to the day they become so ridiculous and powerless that the states just stop listening to them and go their own way.
I don't know the solution, or even the direction in which a solution might lie, but I appreciate the careful articulation of one possible solution in the context of the procedure which has to be followed if we're going to keep the actual structure of our constitutional republic, and I certainly think that's important, even given how awful the general public's relationship to our representatives is at present and how terribly those reprensentatives have responded to the crisis. But the thought of that many represenatitives actually turns my stomach. In any event, I think we need to work hard at the smaller tasks in the mean time of eliminating dark money and reversing bad precedents and rooting out corruption and realighning incentives to encourage honor and cooperation rather than corruption and waste.
I'm making precisely the opposite argument. Currently, only people who are already rich can afford to run for and be in Congress. Living in DC on your own dime, with the lifestyle expected of someone in your position, is very expensive. And If you somehow get to Congress without being rich, your only way to afford your current lifestyle and reach your financial ambitions going forward is to become a quasi lobbyist, being bought and paid for while in office, or doing shady stock market stuff. That's obviously bad for governance.
If you massively increase the standard normal above-board no shenanigans required salary, then all of a sudden a small business owner, an entrepreneur, a high-paid, high-flying big law lawyer, a doctor, a highly paid professional of some kind or other can now quit their job, quit their career, put it on pause, and go for Congress. If they win, know that they will be making more than enough money to keep themselves in their current lifestyle or maybe do even better. Especially for young ambitious people who are not yet making a bunch of money, Congress now is a viable career path.
If you get into Congress, you are set for life. You are going to be wealthy, which means that higher caliber, more competitive, more competent people are going to be competing to become congresspeople, which is good for governance. Higher quality people, smarter people, more competitive people, that's good.
Hey Scott-- I'm sad Speiser didn't mention the actually crazy CAA fact. It passed!! Several states actually did ratify it but then tried to "unratify it" after noticing the typo. Because the ratifications were not *mailed* they didn't get registered, but in practice there was a period in 1792 where the correct number of states HAD ratified it!
The "Why should Republicans support this" paragraph is really weak. As far as I can tell, no Trump supporter (other than Trump himself, and maybe some of his lackeys) is motivated by Trump's glorification to the point of calling up congressmen to glorify him further. The paragraph focuses on short term wins for Republicans and ignores the giant problem hidden in an earlier section:
> As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s. Under the CAA, both states would be about equal.
This alone makes the Amendment a non-starter on the right. The Executive has been gobbling up more and more power from Congress over the last century, increasing the stakes of the Presidential election, and it is well-known that Republicans have an advantage in the Electoral College. It might be tempting to imagine that conservatives are so devoted to Trump that they would cut off their nose to spite their face, but this is wishful thinking.
---
The good news is: Republicans' permanent EC advantage is actually a widely-held misconception! Electoral College bias effects are surprisingly short-lived—they flip roughly every decade (https://dbaron.org/presidential-election-tipping-point-states). Democrats actually had the EC advantage in 2008 and 2012—thanks, Obama! And thanks to Trump's gains among young men and people of color, the 2024 Republican EC advantage was just 0.23%—the smallest *in either direction* since 1988, and lower than all but 3 elections since 1900. If the EC bias remains small in 2028, this might be the best opportunity in decades to eliminate it, with neither party giving up much power in the short or long term. Though small states would still object, and this is not a small problem.
Credit to James J. Heaney (https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/expand-the-house-you-cowards/comment/17410897) for wising me up to this historical trend.
Great comment. There are good reasons for Republicans to support this, but the author's theory of mind for Republicans strikes me as a bit weak. That's okay, we all have trouble with theory of mind for the other tribe these days, but your point about the electoral college's swinginess is something one would want to emphasize in trying to sell this to the GOP.
(P.S. I solemnly promise that I read this comment and had decided to reply "great comment" before I saw that you said nice things about me at the very end.)
All correct and well-said.
I commented with one way in which this post's factual assumptions are outdated [the US population-trends/House reapportionment arrow is now in the process of changing directions], and the EC partisan advantage is another.
I don’t think getting an 8 state head start is worth litigating the typo or managing the logistics of a 6,600 member Congress. If this is really a good idea I would start over and make the proportion per 100 million of total population at a ratio that doubles or triples the size of Congress at current population. Trump would still get his new development project and all the other benefits would still apply, although on a diluted basis. Plus the new amendment could add term limits, campaign finance restriction or whatever other swamp draining that no incumbent would vote for.
This seems mistaken to me. Look at the UK: constituencies are about that size, politicians make all sorts of dumb decisions in order to appease there local voters. I think you want better politicians. No idea if localism gets you that.
Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek and I'm just falling for the bait. But this would make polarization worse. If anything, we should be making Congress much smaller.
Quick exercise: Can you name your representative in Congress? Can you name three ways that person is ideologically distinct from the average member of their party?
At best, when voters go to the polls, they're voting for a party brand (D or R). Most of the time, that really just boils down to what they think of the incumbent president (midterms) or the party's presidential candidate (presidential years). If legislative elections are just a referendum on the president, then it's no surprise that the legislature does basically nothing and spends its time either abdicating power to an incumbent of the same party or fighting with a president of the opposite one.
Voters don't know anything about Congressional candidates because most media is national. CNN, the New York Times, Fox, etc. don't cover your representative unless that person is doing something nationally notable. And the local newspaper that once would have done that got bought out by private equity, run into the ground, and is barely sputtering along covering local high school sports. Even if you're a political junkie consuming non-stop political news, you're still not likely to know much about your local representative unless they happen to be either a party leader or one of a handful of media stars.
And if no one has any idea what you're doing, then why do anything?
At least now, there's some fighting chance for members to distinguish themselves. A decent number of people in the much smaller Senate have managed to stake out distinctive brands. If you follow politics closely, you can at least tell me some ways that someone like John Fetterman or Rand Paul or Lisa Murkowski is distinctive. And that means those people may have an incentive to do actually *do* things. But, there's not enough media oxygen to give independent attention to 435 members of the House much less 6,000, and so there's no incentive for them to do anything.
Hypothetically, you could go far enough in the expansion direction that people actually have personal knowledge of their local candidate rather than media-derived knowledge. But you need *tiny* districts for that -- much smaller than even the typical district for a state legislature (do you know anything about your state legislator?). At that point, you might as well go full-on direct democracy.
If, on the other hand, you had a really small legislature -- like 15 people or something, then it's reasonable for all of them to get enough attention to have a personal brand and be evaluated on their merits.
I strongly recommend reading De Civitate’s series on non-partisan constitutional amendments, of which this is one. He proposes a series of amendments designed to improve the republic using our updated 250-year perspective that are consistent with the framers’ intent.
Some are more *experimental* than others, but others are solid and have me convinced. Geld the veto!
https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/roundup-some-constitutional-amendments?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The gerrymandering argument doesn't necessarily follow. Gerrymandering is least possible at either end of the representative-to-constituent ratios--one giant distract or each constituent is a district. Then, the maximally effective ratio for gerrymandering lies between those two extremes. Until we know if we currently lie to the right or left of that maximum, we can't say that decreasing district size will necessarily lead to less effective gerrymandering.
A less-popular idea: CongressCritters should be paid a lot more. Right now a lot of what they do is indirect enrichment. You get the people who show up for the resume building, or the insider trading. Almost nobody who is actually good at stuff wants high office jobs just to do them because they generally suck.
Also, the public is against allowing CongressCritters having a useful research or legislative staff so a lot of that gets outsourced.
This could also be made much easier if the size and scope of the Federal government were drastically reduced. But just about nobody actually wants that. They just want the Eye of Sauron directed at their enemies and the pork to go to their pet projects.
This comment arrives quite late, but something many comments are overlooking is that Congress *already has* well over 6,000 members.
We just call them "staff", treat them like garbage, and don't get to vote for them. But most of the actual work of the U.S. House of Representatives today is carried out by the 9,034 staffers (that's the real number, not hyperbole) who do most of the actual legislating, most of the meetings, most of the compromising, all of the corresponding, all of the constituent services, and who control more of their members' voting behavior than you'd like to think.
Meanwhile, my mayor does all that stuff for himself, because he represents 20,000 people, not 700,000.
Big Congress would mostly just take the power we handed over to aides when districts got unmanageably large and hand it back to elected officials (and to the People), while having all the beneficial effects OP writes about. I think the CAA is a problematic vehicle, but Big Congress is a huge win.
The people saying this proposal is absurd and couldn't possibly function are just wrong. I can see *why* they're wrong. They look at Congress today and see 435 seats, so they think 10x'ing that is going to be impossibly disruptive. But I look at Congress today and see 9,469 seats (with 435 of them exercising special powers over the rest) and I wonder whether Big Congress is actually big *enough*.
WRT to FN4: Historically, New Jersey was the most expensive state to campaign in. One had to buy advertising in the NYC or Philadelphia media markets, which charged for audiences that were mostly not in New Jersey.
But today, under the current cable/digital streaming system, it's possible to target commercials to individual households.
It's probably been mentioned somewhere but:
>In many states, the new CAA-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.
Is likely optimistic, at least for stated reasons. We're split about 50/50 nationally, but states are closer to a combo of 60/40 and 40/60. That means that the dominate party's state control is pretty secure, even without gerrymandering. But since the national outcome is always in doubt, state's have strong incentive to try to further shift the national outcome by gerrymandering from a 60/40 electorate to a 90/10 representation *nationally,* whereas it wouldn't be nearly as efficacious to the state legislature, which they always control anyways without gerrymandering.
we want way FEWER representatives. congress could easily be 100 people, max.
the problem is how we elect them. we want better voting methods (score voting, approval voting, STAR voting), and election by jury.
https://www.rangevoting.org/LivesSaved
https://www.electionbyjury.org/manifesto
A step towards direct democracy is a step in the right direction.
From the economist correspondence this week
“””
As a former staffer in Congress I fully agree with your analysis on why it is so hard to work there today (“Bleak House”, February 21st). Another factor behind this is the number of constituents in congressional districts, which has risen hugely over the past century. After 1910, when the total number of seats in the House of Representatives increased to its current size of 435, each member had on average 212,000 constituents. Today that figure is 760,000, but with wide variation among states owing to a quirky apportionment process.
America has one of the highest ratios of constituents to representatives of any country in the world. As you rightfully noted, this means that each member’s finite time is increasingly spent on the most well-resourced interests.
Overturning the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 would not only make their lives easier, it would also ensure that voters have a greater say in what is supposed to be the more representative of the two chambers. Even a modest reduction in this ratio, say to 500,000 Americans per congressional seat, would add about 250 more elected officials to help carry the load.
Ryan Zamarripa Adjunct lecturer School of Social Work Columbia University
This type of constitutional proposal seems like a worthy topic for an essay contest with a prize. Celebrate America's 250th birthday in style.
There's a recent Supreme Court of PA decision tackling a state constitutional amendment that was incorrectly worded and did the opposite of what was intended. The Court ruled that the plain text won.
The case is Commonwealth v Yard. There's some interesting secondary opinions in that case.
What is required to get rid of single-member districts? That's not a Constitutional requirement. And it is very bad for representation. Wouldn't state-wide representative elections, with something like ranked choice, give better representation?
The difference between the dominant party's percentage of the popular vote from the percentage of districts that they won is a terrible way of measuring gerrymandering, because you should usually expect this difference to be quite large even when there's no gerrymandering at all.
The dominant party winning a higher percentage of districts when there are fewer larger districts than when there are many smaller districts is what you should expect to happen by default when there is no gerrymandering, not a demonstration that larger districts are more gerrymandered. Consider two extremes: If there is only one district, then the dominant party wins 100% of the districts. If there is one district per voter, then the dominant party wins exactly the same share of districts as their share of the popular vote. In both cases, gerrymandering is impossible. In general, the more districts there are, the more opportunity for fluctuations in the distribution of voters of each party to create local majorities for the minority party in some districts. If there are fewer larger districts, then the minority party winning a district requires a descrepancy from the average distribution of voters to be sustained across a larger geographic area. So in the absence of gerrymandering, you should expect the majority party to win a larger fraction of districts when there are fewer districts, just like the data does in fact show. So this does not establish that the larger districts are more gerrymandered.
> Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven’t improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn’t recovered since.
A noteworthy observation: Of our 100 Senators, only 8 are underwater in approval among their own constituents. All eight of them are interventionist abroad, but pro-immigration - the group most people would identify as "neoconservatives", or "GOP establishment".
Names:
- Mitch McConnell (-35)
- Susan Collins (-13)
- Dan Sullivan (-8)
- Ron Johnson (-6)
- Lisa Murkowski (-9)
- Joni Ernst (-5)
- Lindsay Graham (-2)
Every single one of the most prominent members of this faction of Congress is underwater, and nobody else is. But they always seem to get their way.
Source:
- https://pro.morningconsult.com/trackers/senator-approval-ratings
I think this is the root of American (and Western) discontent. Immigration and foreign war are two high-salience issues on which the government almost exclusively does the opposite of what the public wants.
This is a self-evidently dumb idea, which nowhere directly addresses WHY people dislike congress, and is 180 degrees from the solution, which is simplification, and concentration of power and responsibility.
Voters want to know: who is in charge? How well are they doing? If poorly, who can I replace them with?
Expecting an atomized, highly transient, and locally disengaged population to get involved on such a minute local level is a pipe dream. We don’t live in a New England township anymore, most don’t know their neighbors and don’t want to. A tiny minority of nimby retirees with emotional disorders will take even greater power.
6k reps is the fast track to increasing the specific things we hate about congress:
-total lack of feeling that one’s vote matters (who cares if my buddy Jack gets elected? There’s 5999 votes against him),
-even more special interests control of legislature (local car dealers will swing neighborhood elections for personal pork),
-and again, no one for THE BUCK TO STOP AT.
“Who’s in charge?” No one. “So who do we ask to fix it?” I have no idea.
This is an absolutely terrible ivory tower idea with no connection to the actual lives of modern Americans. We’re stuck with mass media nationalized political warfare, like it or not.
A propositional representation Party-List system actually addresses what voters are upset about, and accepts the reality of modern politics.
It allows every vote to count, every view to be represented. Instead of making the unrealistic request that voters learn the ins-and-outs of every candidate’s personal character and positions, voters simply choose which party fits their worldview. Parties coordinate themselves with internal discipline, so negotiating happens with 5-6 actors, not 435 or 6000, and shit actually gets done.
This would be a vast improvement, but it still wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem which is that there is no such thing as “us” anymore. From a sociological view America no longer exists, has no common identity, neighbors have no reason to get to know each other, and widely different political views are to be expected amongst such an outrageously heterogeneous population. So we’ll muddle along.
Not that Im not duly impressed by the Austin student, I have to wonder if in fact we'd be better off without the amendment. It is often claimed that congress members should be paid more for various incentive reasons and relatedly have bigger staff budgets. Nothing is stopping them from giving their future selves raises, but maybe theyre a bit shy? Afraid theyd lose a primary? Maybe a congress committing electoral suicide by giving themselves a million dollar raise and being able to walk away with the money for their "sacrifice" would be better for everyone.
Insanity
You have misunderstood originalism. Originalism isn't about what the people who wrote it meant. Originalism asks what the original public meaning of the words was - it deals with how language changes over time. So in this case, both originalism and textualism would allow the smaller congress.
I want Giant Congress, but I also want a Citizen's Assembly, or Jury Duty Congress. This is a form of direct democracy that goes beyond electoral politics and directly enlists citizens by lottery into lawmaking. Instead of a bunch of wealthy former lawyers, you'll get a true representation of the country-- age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. You'll get the full ideological mix, from Nazis to Communists and the vast majority in between. Yes, you’ll have illiterates and people who believe in QAnon, but 1) the pool will be large and diverse enough they wont be writing law alone and 2) there will be another chamber of congress of annoying lawyers and professional lawmakers that also has to pass legislation. And an executive that can veto. And a judiciary that can strike down unconstitutional laws. And the benefits in taking electoral politics (amd big money) out while putting authentic representation in is a pretty huge upside.
CHONKY CONGRESS CHONKY CONGRESS CHONKY CONGRESS
you’ll have illiterates and people who believe in QAnon, but 1) the pool will be large and diverse enough they wont be writing law alone and 2) there will be another chamber of congress of https://www.red-humana.com.co/ annoying lawyers and professional lawmakers that also has to pass legislation. And an executive that can veto.
Out of curiosity, what is the utilitarian case for avoiding gerrymandering and having more equitable democracy? Do we actually think this will lead to better decision making if voters have more power relative to lobbyists? Couldn’t you argue the reverse?
I'm rather late to this post, but fundamentally it seems to be barking up the wrong tree. First of all, while people famously hate Congress as a whole, they generally approve of *their* representative. That is, presumably, why they voted them in! But since the issue of low approval rates does not come from the individual representatives, all the proposals to "improve representation" are basically misguided.
Second, the hope that Giant Congress would be "more parliamentary" is also misguided. Congress is already parliamentary. It has parties defined on ideological lines with leadership that makes decisions individual members mostly follow. The main issue is that the US is a presidential system and (as other countries have repeatedly demonstrated) this structure makes it very easy for the president to absorb powers from the legislature. The things that work in a parliamentary system just don't work in a presidential one, and adding 6,000 members of Congress won't change that.
If you go to the trouble of sending a letter to your legislator, the response that they will send you is boiler plate verbiage that they are passing along from on high. In my opinion, the triumph of legal positivism over natural law has rendered representational government moot. When the jurisprudence system posits law, in lieu of discovering law, discourse no longer functions to facilitate representation. The function of discourse is to legitimize. Voters are not heard. Voters are groomed by narrators for the 1% margin that empowers the pen and the phone to "posit" law.
"It would be hilarious." Best line. 2 marks.