Why the "People's House" isn't.

[Terry Tate]

The "People's House" simply isn't anymore, and hasn't been for some time.

 

I apologize if what follows is old news to some, but past high school I'm self-taught on civics, so I honestly wouldn't know what is covered in colleges and universities.

 

After the Constitution was ratified, the first Congress met and proposed ten articles that were ratified into amendments, aka the Bill of Rights - everyone knows that, right? Don't answer too quickly - because there were twelve articles proposed, not ten. These were the issues the states had been guaranteed would be addressed in order to achieve ratification of the Constitution. Articles 3-12 were ratified and became the Bill of Rights everyone should be familiar with. Article 2 - Regulating Congressional Pay, actually passed over two hundred years later, becoming the 27th amendment.

 

But the first article proposed, the one with the greatest significance, before freedom of speech, before the right of people to peaceably assemble, etc? It was to set the level of representation in the "People's House" to a level determined after the first census. What level did they think appropriate? One representative for a population of 30,000 people. Unfortunately (some suggest deliberately), the article as proposed had an internal logic error, and there were states fighting not only to achieve their maximum representation, but to deny others from getting too much - and it did not pass. But the general expectation of the states, one of the agreements that their ratification of the Constitution was based upon, was that there would be a common divisor so that districts were equally sized, and that the size would remain near the constitutional minimum of 30,000.

 

Today, each congressman "represents", on average, over 680,000 people. That number continues to climb quickly.

 

Every decade the size of Congress was increased to reflect the size of the population, until it reached 435 in 1913. In 1941, Congress passed a law fixing it at this size permanently. I believe this was unconstitutional, as the founding fathers clearly meant for the number of representatives to grow along with the population. They recognized citizen's participation was crucial to protect the citizens from the government. Nowhere is Congress authorized to permanently fix the size of the House.

 

This freeze in the size has a lot of predictable outcomes (predicted, in fact, by some of the founding fathers), many of which we are suffering the effects of today.

 

With an average House district size of well over 600,000 people and a two-year term, representatives are forced to raise enormous amounts of money to campaign. The pressure to obtain these funds starts on day one, and makes the average human being subjected to a level and intensity of consistent corruptive influences that I doubt many here would be able to contend with. Corruptive influences, by the way, that find it much easier to focus their influence successfully on a smaller number of individuals who have way too much power than they would a larger number of individuals wielding nowhere near as much individual power in a larger House. If the districts were closer to 30,000 people, they could practically campaign door to door.

 

Doing the math on this, it's pretty easy to see that a population of almost 300,000,000 people would require a House of nearly 10,000 representatives. Is that necessary? Well, James Madison believed the size of the House should have a maximum, lest it turn into a mob. So frankly, I don't know what the appropriate size would be.

 

But I'm sure any of the founding fathers would have immediately recognized the problem with having a People's House of 435 representatives for a population of nearly 300,000,000.

[Adam]

Well, you could decrease the population to fix the problem too!

[Pine Barrens Mafia]

great post!

[beausox]

Madison's notes and recollections provide a virtual cascade of ideas and proposals most of which did not make it into the convention ( Washington as King or a "two consul" executive e.g.). As far as the Bill of Rights is concerned these were to assuage Anti-Federalist- in particular- fears of an over-bearing government. Not 20 years would elapse before John Marshall would insure Federal hegemony and of its Federal judiciary. So before the intellectual king of the Anti-Federalists would finish his Presidency the anti-federalist movement was effectively ended as a practice. Of course Jefferson did not let the philosophy he preached interfere with his practice, viz: Louisiana Purchase.

I cannot imagine , however the "nuclear option" goes that the supremes would modify Marbury