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Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
Yakk, no I don't think that anyone is less than the other, which is what I'm trying to explalin. I may not be explaining it well, and I'm not extremely versed in our system other than the indoctrinations of schooling way back whenever I don't recall any longer.
Again, the population is reflected representatives 435 or 6,000, and it is balanced by the senate which is 2 per state.
So because there is the balance and the reflection of number 435, I cannot see a huge jump in value by adding another 5,000 people into the mix.
If the a majority of 300M Americans right now don't care so much as to how the 435 representives are getting things done how are the 600M going to care about 6,000 representatives?
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This has to do with social interaction.
A human being cannot interact socially with 1 million people, not even remotely.
50,000 people? That's ~12,000 households. If the congresscritter spent 2 nights a week meeting a 5 households at a time at a sit-down dinner, in a mere 4 years that congresscritter could have met
every single human that they represent. And broken bread with them.
50,000 people is a lot of people, but it isn't completely beyond the scale of social interaction. The congresscritter can afford to have a human relationship with the constituents.
At half a million to a million? There isn't a hope. The congresscritter has no choice but to deal with the people they represent as a statistical glob, and not as human beings.
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If people aren't interested in talking to their representatives and senators now, what makes that going to happen more if there are smaller districts and more representatives?
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The only reason any senator or congresscritter should spend time with someone is for image purposes. In any interaction you have with them, they have no reason to be honest, or to even take your opinions into account beyond the most superficial level. Their job is to represent 500,000 to 1 million people -- and
spending time with any one of them is a fundamentally poor way to do it. Interaction with individual humans must be a photo op, not a way to understand what is going on.
This is the mathematics of fame. A Hollywood star cannot afford to be friends with everyone who wants to be friends with them, because there just isn't enough time to do it mathematically. So that Hollywood star must withdraw from casual friendship with people who want to be friends with them. That means that trying to become friends with a hollywood star is pointless -- and attempting to engage your senator in a discussion about political issues you care about, as a typical citizen, is equally pointless.
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Voter turnouts are abysmally low. There are many instances where in districts for local elections are nonraces because no one wishes to participate in the process.
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Yes, that might be because your ballots cover everything from dog catcher on up. Directly electing non-legislative and non-executive positions always seemed to be strange to me.
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Originally Posted by JEQ
My belief is that the cost of NOT returning the federal House to the people (through smaller congressional districts) is far greater than the cost of securing the amendment.
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/shrug, that seems (to me) to be an example of not knowing how high the cost is, or overestimating the benefit.
If you want to demonstrate the benefit, I'd advise doing it on a smaller scale than "the entire USA". One of the benefits of the USA's state design is that you can experiment with such changes at the state level, and see if they work well.
Instead of changing the rules at the Federal level
first, do it in an individual state. This isn't the kind of thing where somebody else not doing it makes it not work here.
