I didn't say it was a legitimate argument. It is the reasoning from what I recall that there is the Senate since that's the very rationale that it was designed to prohibit.

But I still don't see there being much difference especially with your statements of "urban, rural, industrial, conservative, liberal, libertarian, green, etc., etc." that the current 435 don't represent adequately.

No.

You asked me to describe my political views. My reply was small r republican (as a opposed to a Republican). My point is that I ardently support our republican form of government.

Regarding "politics", I was only making a distinction between politicians and representatives. I am using "politician" in the pejorative sense (which is how the term is most commonly used these days). Or, to be more specific, see definition #2 from dictionary.com: "a seeker or holder of public office, who is more concerned about winning favor or retaining power than about maintaining principles."

I have no doubt that we can replace 435 politicians with 6,000 representatives.

You also don't believe that within the 20 years of transition those same representatives, would not turn into politicians????

It is one of the problems that I see is that our current state is that we have professional politicians, people who have been basically politicians all their entire careers.

Really? OK.

How many Greens do we have in Congress?

How many asians, blacks and women? Is it the same percentages as can be found in the population?

How many devout Christians? How many Jews? How many atheists?

How many farmers?

How many professors?

How many are from the middle class?

...and so forth.

Those are rhetorical questions and anyone reading them understands my point. The federal House is a country club that is largely controlled by elites and special interests. Instead, it should look much more like the citizenry.

I do understand your point, but I don't agree that it will add value.

Cynthetiq, you need to think about how differently things would be with districts of 50,000. The Representatives would no longer be assured of 90%++ reelection rates. High reelection rates are due to the fact that it costs tens of millions of dollars for a challenger to try to unseat an incumbent in a super-sized district.

OK. so you are opposed to smaller congressional districts. And it is fine with you that they grow to 1,300,000 people by 2100. Maybe most people will agree with you.

Would all these congress men & women get the same benefits and salary as curren members?

I would go for this is we had proportional voting. If the Libertarians got 5% of the vote, they get 5% of the representatives from that state. You would also have to vote for specific people though within each party.

No I'm not opposed to smaller congressional districts. I just don't see the added value that you're envisioning. I don't see the same value you do based on what I've read of your website I am not drawing those same conclusions.

I don't disagree with your rehortical questions, but quite honestly, I don't see value in some gangsta kickin' it old school from South Bronx adding value to the representation, nor do I see someone who is elected because he's the head Hassidic of the neighborhood in Brooklyn. I don't see how it adds value at all to be represented by race or religion since those aren't really any bearing to political ideologies when it comes to voting.

In fact, I believe that when I call my representative or senator they are listening to me and my point of view for that few minutes. They shouldn't be voting their own agendas, meaning that Christians voting for anti-abortion legislation, but voting in a manner a majority of their constiuents want them to vote.

Your average person IMO doesn't give a crap about their representatives for all intrinsic purposes. As stated before, they can't name them now, why do you think that they would be able to name them if they were only limited to a smaller district?

You can't force people to care any more than they are already willing to do so.

I believe that having a lot more diversity in the federal House would be a good thing. You don't. That's where we disagree.

If a representative is elected who is disruptive to the process, he/she will be censored out of the House, as has been done for over two centuries (but not so much during the modern country club era of the House).

HOWEVER, your one statement quoted above is somewhat contradictory. If you do NOT see any value to reducing the size of the congressional districts, then you appear to be opposed to it. Or, at least, you clearly are not in favor of it.

I am undecided. I don't see any compelling evidence you've presented on your website to push me in the direction of it.

ratbastid got close to showing that it's compelling, but again, I don't see it being a slam dunk in the same way that you do.

I am not opposed to it, nor am I for it. You've made the posit, and I'm looking for compelling evidence to change it from the current standard.

In a strictly numbers game, statisitical samples aren't too far off the mark. Yes, there is a margin for error which is dually noted, but for the most part statistical sampling is an acceptable method of finding a balance.

So far, you're biggest compelling and most cited arguments are where you representative of TTO feel it should be with a few citations to back up the historical perspective, but little to nothing to back up the current ideological changes you are touting.

In the 4 years your site has been around it hasn't seen any outside contributors of grad students, political pundits, something, anything, anyone else but your own constructs?

Drug addicts? GED holders? Criminal sexual devia---

Wait, don't answer that last one.

How many were homeschooled? How many have children that are serving in the US military? How many were raised by single parents?

Some small amount of parity with the diversity of the US population in many - but not all - respects, would be added just statistically by upping the size of the House. But based on the items I just mentioned (and a few I quoted), you'll never see a truly Representative Congress in our lifetimes.

And at the end of the day I doubt "the country club" would change much. Perhaps without a college degree and making <$75k per year as head of household with three kids, you could get elected. In, say, North Dakota. In Manhattan, not so much. It's still going to go right back to who has privilege and advantage, and who doesn't.

The faces and backgrounds might shift slightly, but other serious reforms - not just term limitations - would have to take place in conjunction with or prior to scaling back to 50k per district. Something completely off-the-wall batshit crazy like, I dunno, very low spending caps on any election campaign.

But really, here's my $64,000 question:

How would the resizing districts and realigning the house address the issue of roughly 10 to 12 million undocumented/illegal alien residents of the US?


I'll fully concede that I'm not the sharpest bulb in the shed when discussing politics; I also haven't (yet) read up at TTO.org. So if this was addressed there, bear with me.

Huh? I mean, if you have representation by population in a house, a block consisting of the majority of the population can get a majority in that house.

Adding more members has the advantage that it makes accurate representation by population a bit easier, due to quantization problems with unpopulated states.

As it stands, citizens in some states are first class, while citizens of other states aren't, simply because they have far more power to elect federal representatives -- even in the house, which is supposed to be "representation by population" based.

Sure. But now you have just labeled half the population of the nation and implied that "sure, they are a majority, but they don't deserve to be a majority!"

I'm well aware that there is an evil belief that citizens who can claim a more unique label should have more power per person. I'm sorry -- I consider the citizens of the Bronx to be just as important as the citizens of Wyoming, and the citizen in the Bronx's vote should matter just as much.

Sure, you can label the citizens of the Bronx, of LA, of Florida using fewer labels, and then pull out a big pile of labels to label all of the low-population states, and claim there is unfairness -- but the proper response to that is "California should split into 20 states". What makes California not worthy of being 20 different states, other than an accident of history?

And I don't think that a system that grants people who happen to live in low-population states 3 to 5 times as much say as people who happen to live in high-population states in the representation by population house.

Those 9 states? Don't they have more human beings in them than the other 41 states combined? So, why the hell shouldn't they have a majority in the representation by population assembly?

The only alternative is that you believe that the representation by population assembly should treat people from more populated states as second class citizens.

So are you serious, or just blowing smoke?

Because neither congress nor the senate can pass a law that binds a future congress or senate. The only way to have a rule that cannot be overruled by the assembly is via constitutional amendment.

And honestly, the cost of a constitutional amendment are pretty damn high.

Why 435?
 

Cynthetiq, certainly not as much as I would like. But here is a list of articles and reports (NOT from me):
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/pages/Why_435.htm
(See the list at the bottom of the page.)

echo5delta, you bring up a serious problem, but one that should probably be the subject of a different thread. We should absolutely know who enters our country and where they are.

I do believe that the vast majority of Americans, of all political stripes, want to stop undocumented immigration. I believe that a much larger House would far better reflect the will of the people.

If, for example, the majority of Americans wanted significant tax reform (e.g., a flat tax or the "fair tax"), then it would happen if the House were large enough to reflect the popular will. As it stands now, those types of changes will never happen.

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?

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?

It makes sense in a goods and services model wherein the closer you can deliver the goods and services you'll saturate more and gain more marketshare, but how does that translate to people being more interested?

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.

JEQ you state that "they'll change..." you don't have any statistics to show that they've declined because the population increased or anything but just voter apathy.

Yakk, yes, this would require a Constitutional Amendment.

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.

thanks i'll try to read them throughout today.

Cynthetiq, I believe you do not understand the problem that is out there. The people who are interested in "talking to their representatives" usually are not able to. Others have given up.

Moreover, if the districts were considerably smaller the overall dynamics would certainly change. We could debate what that change would be. In my opinion, one of the biggest changes is that many more citizens would get involved. If I were the Rep of a district of 50,000, you can be certain that I would be out talking to the people, explaining legislation, issues, etc. I believe that most Representatives would then be doing that. In a district of 700,000++, it is simply NOT possible to do that even if you wanted to.

I don't know to which of my statements you refer.

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.

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.


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.

/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. :)

Yakk, the smaller-scale analysis you describe could probably be effectively simulated by comparing among the states. For example, comparing New Hampshire, with its very small state districts, to California with its mega-districts. Of course, that analysis would have to adjust for numerous local variables, but it could possibly be very informative.

TTO (Thirty-Thousand.org) is not going to undertake such an analysis, but perhaps someone else in the political studies field might.

BTW, there are several states with super-sized state legislative districts. California is the most obvious example. Someone in California is leading an effort to increase the size of its legislature; story:
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/Content?oid=327153