Unrepresentative Government: No, our elected oligarchy in Congress doesn’t really represent your interests.
Scream into the Twitterverse as loud as you want; especially since you don’t have a voice in Congress.
TL;DR
- Tinkering with the Constitution is not something to be taken lightly and I don’t trust our politicians to do it, but there are some necessary changes.
- Among those is the need to reestablish representative government.
- Without responsive and engaged representation, a republican form of government is a farce.
- We are so caught up in issues and arguments, we fail to see that we’re largely screaming into a void and are dumbfounded after being disappointed after each election cycle.
- While there are many important issues, to properly address them we need responsive representation in Congress. We do not have that today.
- We need to have better representation in both houses of Congress, and that can be achieved in several reasonable ways.
- To restore representation (and accountability) would be a huge undertaking and requires a lot more thought, but it is necessary if we really value the type of government our founders established.
American Oligarchy. The Constitution of the United States is not a perfect document. It is, however, really, really good. It has its faults and it has some notable failings, but it provides an excellent framework for government, and undertaking the idea of changing it — amending it — should be done with caution. Tinkering with the Constitution should not be done without serious thought, reluctance, and a recognition that those that wrote it were far more informed than we are today on the ideas of governance, aware of the history of governments and tyranny, as well as the flaws of humanity, and that they wrote it without the political environment we live in today. That environment — from the failings of the two-party system to the always on news and social media to the lack of quality leaders in politics to an always screaming and opinionated yet often uninformed and unthoughtful population (yes, even you and me sometimes…) — does not foster positive conditions to try and positively change the “Law of the Land.” While I’m pretty confident that if we really endeavor to update the Constitution we’ll instead end up politicizing it and leading it upon a path to failure, there are a few really important changes that are needed to respect the realities of the massive territory and the large and diverse population of these United States in 2019. Chief among those perhaps, we need to reestablish representative democracy.
Today, given our fifty states and current rules, Americans are absolutely not adequately represented in Congress and that leads to a mockery of the intentions of our founders and a failing republic. Roundabout, this has come up in various discussions - from getting rid of the Electoral College (we shouldn’t), to Washington, D.C. statehood (no), to breaking up California and Texas into smaller states (we certainly should). Our form of government cannot work if the People are not actually represented by accountable, engageable individuals. The 535 voting members of Congress are not an adequate representation of America; they serve as an elected oligarchy to the detriment of every American citizen and resident.
In America today, we have more opportunity to voice our opinions than ever before. We have abundant media, we have social media, we have other forms of instant communication and we can learn, observe, opine and argue about issues that are close to home and seemingly a world away. We have always been, and likely always will be, a nation in disagreement. We didn’t agree about fighting the English and declaring independence, we didn’t agree about tossing out the Articles of Confederation and establishing the Constitution, we didn’t agree about slavery, nullification, or entering international wars, and we don’t agree on issues from abortion to climate change, gun rights to immigration and a host of other real, difficult issues. And that’s fine. We needn’t agree. But, if we want to see our government represent our interests, argue positions and issues on our behalf, and pass meaningful legislation (or not), then we need government that is accountable to those who empower it and representative of the populations that elect it.
When the Constitution was ratified on 21 Jun 1788, we had nine states, and two years later, when the first Census was completed, we had 13 states and a national population of 3,893,635. When the first Congress met in Philadelphia in 1791, there were 65 men elected to serve in the House of Representatives, for an average of one representative per every ~62,000 people.
In her book, Miracle At Philadelphia, Catherine Drinker Bowen tells a great story of how it was decided that “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative,” as it is written in the Constitution. A telling of that story is captured online thanks to the National Archives and can be read here.
“It was at this point that (George Washington) spoke for the first time in the Convention. ‘When the President rose, for the purpose of putting the question, he said that although his situation had hitherto restrained him from offering his sentiments on questions depending in the House, and it might be thought, ought now to impose silence on him, yet he could not forbear expressing his wish that the alteration proposed might take place. It was much to be desired that the objections to the plan recommended might be made as few as possible — The smallness of the proportion of Representatives had been considered by many members of the Convention, an insufficient security for the rights & interests of the people. He acknowledged that it had always appeared to himself among the exceptionable parts of the plan; and late as the present moment was for admitting amendments, he thought this of so much consequence that it would give much satisfaction to see it adopted’
Abdication & Surrender of the Vital Fundamental Powers Vested in Congress. The number of representatives grew over time until “the House passed the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, fixing the number of Representatives at 435.” As told by the record of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Act had opposition, including “William B. Bankhead of Alabama, who doubted its constitutionality,” and “had earlier described the plan as ‘the abdication and surrender of the vital fundamental powers vested in the Congress of the United States by the Constitution itself.’” I think I agree with Mr. Bankhead and am amazed that this has not been seriously challenged as completely unconstitutional.
The idea of representation was very important to our founders. But today, we no longer have a real system of representative government. In addition to the Apportionment Act, we continue to have the same two Senators per state we had at the founding (numerically speaking, though some Senators seem to have been serving since the 18th century…). Today, there are around 295 million Americans. On average, that gives us one representative for every ~678,000 citizens and one Senator per every 2.95 million citizens. It is absurd to think any of those elected officials is able to know and appreciate the interests of those they represent, and even more absurd to think that individual citizens can influence their elected representatives.
Those numbers are choking the life out of any semblance of a representative government and leave you and I left to scream into the Twitterverse, rallying around hashtags and piling on stories, but in reality, impotent in the shaping of our nation. With abysmal representation, an entrenched two-party duopoly exercising a stranglehold on politics, gerrymandered districts, and other challenges — from big money influence to a media more focused on sensational stories than real news — the individual is left without a real voice. And as we perpetuate this system, we sit bewildered after every election when nothing really changes, when we’re constantly disappointed and when the machine of government and the game of elections marches on a seemingly unaccountable, unresponsive path. From the hopeful optimism many felt with Mr. Obama to the desire to see America be “great again” with Mr. Trump, time and again, we’re disappointed and little actually changes. That isn’t only due to a lack of effective representation, but that is one very large contributor.
A Great Many Voices. So, what to do? Like an infection that has been left untreated for far too long, reestablishing representative government would not be easy and may seem overwhelming. But there are ways to do it. The solution lies in having — this hurts me to write — more politicians. Americans are not served by 535 officials in Congress. To have representative government, we need to vastly increase that number. Now, there are many details that it will be great to discuss relating to that idea. I won’t get into those here but will address some of them in the future. Focusing on numbers and the ratio of citizen to representatives, let’s look at the House and the Senate.
The House of Representatives. The House is simpler, but not simple at all. As representatives are aligned to population, this is partially simple math. We determine an acceptable ratio of citizen to representative and we have our correction. The difficulty is in what that means. If we were to go back to George Washington’s sole request in Philadelphia, that ratio is 30,000:1, citizens to representative. Today, that would mean a House of Representatives made up of over 9,800 individuals. Given our increasingly connected world, one could reasonably argue that we can change the 30,000:1 ratio to something greater, but it should remain much closer to that than the current absurdity. Again, there are a lot of ideas to discuss on how to manage that many representatives, but if truly representative government is what we really want, there’s no getting around the need to make it actually representative (and accountable).
The Senate. Here also, the basic math is simple. Two senators per state. But this simplicity breaks down when we try to bring that to be reasonable for modern populations. According to the 1790 Census, the three largest states by population were Virginia (747,610), Pennsylvania (434,373), and North Carolina (393,751). Today, our least populated state is Wyoming, with a population of a little over 572,000. Using Virginia, the largest (by far) state in 1790 and Wyoming, the least populated in 2019, as our examples, the ratio of senators to people hasn’t changed much. But comparing largest to largest — 1790 Virginia to 2019 California (population, 39,747,267!) — the ratio has gone from 2:373,805 to 2:19,873,633–53 times the Virginia ratio! That fails our country — greatly.
The simpler of two options is to increase the number of senators to some larger and more representative number. Taking the average ratio of senator to citizen (nationwide) in 1790, we had approximately 2:300,000 (senators:citizens, nationwide average). To restore that ratio today, we’d need to have ~983 senators nationwide. By 50 states, that would be 20 Senators per state! An alternative solution would be to keep two senators per state, or some number less than 20, and instead, increase the number of states by dividing the current states into much smaller units. That would be a massive challenge for many reasons, but one I would gladly support.
The ideas above are not easy. I think for many, they may seem too massive a change to even consider. However, though technology does perhaps allow some broader effective representation than our elected officials enjoyed in the 18th century, technology doesn’t really bring people closer to their elected representatives (a little bit, maybe) nor does it make elected officials more accountable (again, a little bit, yes). For a republic to endure, elected officials need to be representative of and accountable to the people that they supposedly represent. Both numbers and proximity help effective representation. Increasingly, America is not a representative democracy, but seems, more and more, an elected oligarchy. If it is not corrected, we will continue to suffer from an increasingly unaccountable, unrepresentative, disconnected Congress and our representative democracy will continue to wither.
