connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by noonespillow)

By Jason Lefkowitz, in a comment thread on Joho the Blog:

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution says:

“The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative…”

One Congressman for every 30,000 citizens was the rule until the early 1900s, when Congress simply fixed the size of the House at 435 members. I’m no lawyer, but I’m not sure how they could square that with the language of Article I; anyway, that’s been the rule ever since.

The result is that today each Congressman represents roughly 700,000 people — an order of magnitude more than the Founders intended them to. The result is that House campaigns are just as media — and image — driven as campaigns for greater offices, which is a shame.

An interesting thought experiment: if we went back to the Article I rules, we’d have something like 10,000 House members today. How would the operations of government have to be modified to accommodate them? A Virtual Congress? Regional Congresses?

What’s interesting to note is the actual intent of this detail in Article 1, Section 2:

The total number of Representatives is set by statute, not in the Constitution. The detail concerning 30,000 means that the ratio would never be lower than 1:30,000 (like 1:20,000). This was done to prevent the House from getting too large and to prevent larger states from having an overwhelming number of representatives. The average ratio today is about 1:640,000.

So, legally speaking, we’re actually guarding the concerns of our forefathers with such numbers — they wanted a decent sized House in order for business to get accomplished.

But our forefathers couldn’t have imagined the information age.

I left a comment in the thread that might sound radical, but I think it would be a great way to up the degree of transparent discourse in government.

What do you think?