Time to build a bigger House
This week, NCPR will air a series of reports on the redistricting process that will follow the 2010 Census.
New York state is expected to lose one or two seats in Congress, as the nation’s population continues its long shift to to the South and the West.
To prepare for these stories, I took a little trip yesterday. I drove from my home in Saranac Lake, which sits on the very last street on the northern end of the 20th House district.
I motored down the Champlain Valley, then along the Hudson Valley, to the outskirts of Poughkeepsie — a journey of roughly 230 miles — which sits at the southern end of the 20th.
On the drive, which took more than four hours, I saw a vast array of communities, with very different identities, needs, goals, political values, and aspirations. (To see a map of the district, go here.)
Put bluntly, the southern end of the 20th district has absolutely zero connection to the northern end. The idea of having one politician represent the entire expanse is ludicrous.
Similar problems exist across the United States. In Alaska, where I grew up, Rep. Don Young is expected to represent a sprawling and diverse (but sparsely populated) territory the size of a small continent.
This runs contrary to the express wishes of the Founding Fathers, who intended the House of Representatives to be our most, well, representative branch of government.
Congressmen (and, later, congresswomen) were supposed to know their communities and their constituents intimately. They were meant to be people you saw around town, in church, and at the market.
For that reason, when the Framers wrote the Constitution, they limited the number of House members to one for ever 30,000 members of the public.
Think about that: Under the original language laid out by the Founding Fathers, Franklin County would have one full Congressional district (and part of another) devoted to its needs.
Granted, if we had stuck with that ratio of politicians-to-constituents, we would currently have a House of Representatives with more than 10,000 voting members.
We can all agree, that’s way more politicians than we need!
But it’s also clear that our current system, which allows for a maximum of 435 sitting House members, is increasingly unworkable and even anti-democratic.
Beginning in 2012, each Representative will represent roughly 714,000 people. That is wildly out of sync with the original design and purpose of the House.
So how did we end up with that arbitrary 435-member limit?
It turns out, the rule is based upon a simple law (called Public Law 62-5) that was passed by Congress in 1911. At that time, each House member represented only around 200,000 citizens.
So what if we returned to that ratio which existed a century ago? Even the most rural Congressional districts would be about the size of Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties combined.
We would have a House of Representatives with roughly 1,500 members — hefty, but still workable.
Arguably, it would be a more chaotic institution, with more parties and factions. Many House members would represent regional, ethnic, or parochial interests. These would likely form coalitions.
Rather than two big-tent parties, we would probably see a more complicated scrum of “tea parties,” “moveon.orgers,” “Palinites,” “Greens,” and so on. That would all get messy at times, to be sure.
But individual Representatives would also be far more rooted in their communities. Gerrymandering would be less of a problem.
Campaigns would be less expensive, more grassroots affairs, reducing the role of money in our elections.
The role of TV and radio advertisements would be downplayed, while public debates and human canvassing would move back to the center of our politics.
Yes, at first, a three-fold increase in the number of Congress-members would seem disorienting. (Where would they all sit?) But we’ve seen the body grow dramatically before.
Our current House has eight times more members than sat for the very first Congress in New York City’s Federal Hall in 1789.
And the simple truth is that as the nation’s population grows, we will have to grow the House as well. Otherwise, “our” politicians will soon wind up representing a million citizens, and more.
Their districts will continue to swell until it will be logistically and practically impossible for them to develop more than a superficial knowledge of the various regions and interests.
That can hardly be what the framers of the Constitution had in mind.
As always, your thoughts welcome.
Tags: politics
The only downside I see to the idea is this Brian, you’d have maybe 1500 people expecting royal treatment, lifetime royal healthcare, huge salaries, etc. So if we did this then the House should also return to what it was intended to be- a chore, a burden the Member took on to benefit his constituents, not to enrich himself. You figure a way to sell that and you’ve got it made. Then move over to the Senate and do the same thing. Take the status and spectacle out of the job and add term limits, maybe we’d get some public servants instead of celebrities.
The rest of this idea I’m 100% for.
“Campaigns would be less expensive, more grassroots affairs, reducing the role of money in our elections. The role of TV and radio advertisements would be downplayed, while public debates and human canvassing would move back to the center of our politics.”
That’s a pretty big assumption to make, when you consider the enormous ramping up of campaigns for state legislative representatives. The difference between Owens v. Doheny and Griffo v. Hennessey, Ritchie v.
Aubertine, Russell v. Forsythe, or Blankenship v. McGrath is not that big when it comes to impact on the local voter’s mailbox or airwaves. There weren’t any more debates on the state level campaigns, either.
It also seems to me that the scale of the issues our federal level representatives deal with is different. The issues revolving around the Seaway, for example, have local impact but affect a much larger region than a particular Congressional district. We need our House representatives to think big, to examine the effects of policies on diverse groups of people. One way to do that is to have each of them represent diverse groups of people.
Just in salary, you’d be adding >$185 million dollars/year. Are you going to triple the size of the body…but in turn cut the salaries to a third? Along with Bret above- maybe that draws out some “truer” public servants.
NY-20 is a silly geographically and demographically. But maybe some/much of that could be solved with some honest redistricting?
All that being said, if increasing the size of the body means the person representing me is representing me and my peers, I’d listen.
I’ll second Bret’s comment about taking the glitz out of the job. As a practical matter you’d have to start with their meeting place. We couldn’t afford at this point in history to build a new capital building on the same scale of grandeur that was large enough hold 1500. OTOH maybe we could harness technology to have most of their deliberation and voting done from their districts via the Internet.
If we coupled such a change with my long standing call for “no campaign contributions from outside the district you represent and then only from individuals, not groups (of any kind), and we might manage real movement back toward representative democracy. Remove our representatives physically from “inside the beltway”, have them work in proximity to and be beholden to those they represent??? That might actually work.
Is it too much to ask for just simple honest redistricting and see where that gets us?
While I’m going to agree completely that NY 20 is probably one of the strangest districts I’ve ever seen (and I’m from Delaware, our House district is the entire state, like in Alaska), I’m also going to put forward the point that adding more representatives to the House is probably not the best way to fix the problem. We already see things get bogged down enough due to partisan politics, and honestly I really don’t want to think about what would happen if we suddenly had three times the amount of people in that room. Financial issues about paying their salary and benefits, frankly we can’t afford to create that much more stagnation in the political process right now. Barely anything gets done as it is.
I’m also going to throw my support on Bret’s point about the salary issue. We really should cut back on their wages and benefits to be more in line with the common American. Theres no reason that our elected officials, most of whom are already quite wealthy before they get elected, should become further detached from the common person, thus increasing the likelihood that they will fail in their duties to serve the people who put them in office in the first place.
And yes, NY 20 needs to be redrawn. Its hard to make an election decision when issues relevant to those of us at the Northern end of the district get completely ignored in favor of the issues for the people at the Southern end.
I think that is an interesting question.
I could be wrong but I think there has been some work done on just that idea in political science and economics fields. One of the potential problems is that with more representatives you will actually have more vote trading or logrolling more “politics” which is not all bad but you will have more spent on campaigns not less you will have more spent on lobbying not less.
In addition people complain about gridlock now, it would be much worse with that many competing interests.
I would like to see closer representation by moving many of the decisions made in Washington to the local level the states should have more power and so should the counties.
States should be given the option of opting out of many federal programs if they can do better on their own. For example health care, social security etc.
I guess Americans are becoming a bunch of namby pamby whimps who are afraid of cold weather and the snow.
Let’s ban air conditioners unless you have a doctor’s okay and see where they want to live.
Knuckle,
People never voluntarily make themselves worse off. Redistricting is about power and control and very important.
The only way it will be done fairly is if it is done by a formula and not by elected officials you have to totally take it out of their hands. It would be illogical for a political party to intentionally make the odds of its being elected worse, they will always work to increase those odds and thus work to create more districts that would fall firmly into their hands in every election.
Partisanship would suffer a great blow (in a good way) if we had honest redistricting. Let a computer determine the most compact, contiguous district that contains 30,000 residents – regardless of their party registration. I also like the idea of campaigns funded only by residents of a district.
I agree PNE on both counts.
Brian Mann checking in:
Some great points here. I don’t think redistricting will solve the problem, though better boundaries will help.
With 700,000 constituents, and sparsely settled rural areas, the districts are going to be huge geographically.
I think the main reason that I’m sticking to my guns on this one is that you guys are all talking about technical problems. (Some very real.)
I’m talking about the Constitutional purpose and identity of the House.
Is it still capable of doing what the founding fathers envisioned, when each Representative responds to twenty times as many constituents?
I doubt it.
Brian, NCPR
J Bullard, darn good point I forgot to mention- these guys DO NOT need to be in Washington. They can teleconference easily. In fact, getting out Federal reps out of DC might be the best thing we can do.
Knuck, if we could get honest redistricting a lot of this wouldn;t be an issue. The computer generated idea brought up by another poster has merit until you realize that someone, some actual person, has to write the program. Where do we find an absolutely non-partisan person to do that?
Gridlock isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Gridlock can prevent stupid legislation just as effectively as Mr Smith did.
Mervel, if you consider having a more representative form of as being better off then maybe there’s a chance. I know, that’s why they call me a knucklehead.
Brian, I’m not sure I buy your Constitutional purpose argument. The technology for communication is so much better today than at the founding of the country. Also, I believe in some ways we may be a more cohesive nation than we were at the start. I think the car we have is still fixable; I’m not ready to buy the new model that hasn’t been tested just yet. But it is worth thinking about.
An aside about the 20th district. Have you noticed that the Olympic venues and the Baseball Hall of Fame fall within the district? You don’t believe that is a coincidence do you?
Expanding the size of the House of Representatives is in principle a good idea. Just look at the size of the 23rd. Includes parts of at least five media markets: from Watertown area to Plattsburgh to suburban Syracuse. Bu tI think that given the size of the federal deficit it may not be wise to increasing the cost of government.
The founding fathers lived in a country the size of one of our smaller states. Thus if you really wanted to get at the intent of the constitution we would look to representation at the levels that they would be used to. Thus you would look to more power resting within the states and localities.
New York and for that matter any state could easily construct a social security system and a health care system. Some states would be better than others some states would be very cumbersome, the people would vote with their feet, which is the most direct and effective method of voting.
At the founding of our nation a man could travel in a day what we travel in an half an hour, and that is if he had a horse. Letters took weeks to move a few hundreds of miles. Most of New York state was Indian territory and a large swath along the Hudson river was Dutch speaking.
In 1911 travel was faster along train lines but for much of the country it wasn’t much faster than 100 years earlier. Mail travelled more quickly and they had the telegraph but communication was still incredibly slow.
Today the sum total of all of Thomas Jeffersons books can be downloaded off of the internet quicker than Jefferson could make a copy of the Declaration of Independence. The ability to communicate ideas with our representatives is thousands of times better for most people…certainly for black people who would have been counted as 2/3 of a person for representation but would have absolutely no voice in Congress.
If we were to have more representatives would we have better representation? Maybe. Or maybe we would have worse representation. What media outlet is going to keep us informed on all these extra people. Brian suggests that we may end up with more parties represented in Congress. Really? And which news outlet will be informing us of all the new ideas that these people are going to bring to the table?
We just had an election in which serious candidates for governor had virtually no mention on NCPR. Who was the Green candidate or the Libertarian? What were their positions on major issues? You wont know if you depend on local media for your news, but you will know that Paladino had a baseball bat and a spat with Fred Dicker.
And don’t weasel out of the argument by saying that third party candidates aren’t serious because they don’t stand a chance of winning. A serious candidate is one who has serious ideas; ideas that the public should have a chance to hear.
Brian Mann:
I agree with you.
I would rather see a larger House representing a consistent number of people rather than a consistent number of politicians representing an ever-increasing number of people.
Let’s do it.
I just checked Wikipedia, and my suspicions were confirmed. The Parliament of Indian, a nation with roughly 3.5 times our population, and an infinitely more complex composition of social, economic, ethnic, religious, and political groups, and “the world’s largest democracy” has a Parliament of …….545 members. Also, “Council of States with 250 Members.” I don’t know about Indian Gerrymandering, but all the other problems we have here must be infinitely greater in Indian, yet they limited the size of their Parliament to one only slightly larger than ours.
I think, no, I am certain that this is at the natural extreme size range of the size of a deliberative body that would work, and India’s Parliament must sort of work. We humans are limited in the number of people we can interact with successfully, and we are at it in the U.S. House.
I read a book about this once, about numbers of humans that can interact successfully. For example, why do an infantry squad, the U.S,. Supreme Court, and baseball, soccer, and football teams, all have between nine and eleven members? Because our brains won’t allow successful interaction with more members.
And, having the kind of face to face interaction that Brian longs for is more approximated in the States.
You have lots of neat ideas Brian, and this ain’t one of them.
During the long process of getting a healthcare bill through the House the public got an unusally detailed look at the process of legislative sausage being made and, by and large, didnt like it.
Expanding the House to 870 members, say, doesnt in my mind’s eye, improve the picture.