It makes sense, but it will likely never happen due to "no moar expandin' gubbermint!!!11" rhetoric. Our checks and balances need some serious updating, and not just the house.
Agreed, and I think the above further illuminates the nonsensical nature of the more "hardline" anti-government types.
It makes sense especially if the new districts can keep from being gerrymandered. That would be a real treat.
I heard Jacqueline Stevens on NPR yesterday talk about this. Its an interesting proposal but I don't think it will solve the problems she talks about. Given the dominance of the two party system and especially how they play a strong role in state legislatures I don't think adding more US reps will reduce the dominance of the two parties. It will obviously give more opportunity for a third party candidate to win a US Rep seat but the influence of that seat will be further diluted by a larger house. Also while each campaign might be cheaper that doesn't mean that a special interests still can't essentially buy candidates. Having more seats might spread out the money more or it might even mean more money put into the election to contest the added seats. For me the bigger reform would be ending gerrymandering as that would likely make candidates more diverse in their outlook and moderate the parties if they knew they couldn't just run ideological pure candidates catering to gerrymandered districts or have entrenched candidates just hold onto specially constructed safe districts.
Actually, I've seen some Tea Partiers pushing for this. Virtually everyone agrees that more representation is a good thing. It's an idea whose time has come, by the way. I'd increase the size of the House to 1000 reps. It'd be an even easier sale if you combined it with term limits.
But it might split them based on the tendency towards moderate or radical policies. Effectively the same thing.
Actually, there are a LOT of people I encountered in the TEA Party movement who were proponents of this kind of move.
Interesting idea, but so many ramifications it makes me head hurt to think about them. And, obviously too radical to get traction. Consider, each rep makes $174k/year. For 435 reps, that's a payroll of $76m (straight salary, ignoring tax and benefits and overhead). For 5,000 reps, it would be $870m. Is that worth the money? And then think about the staff and overhead for each one, plus the campaign expenses of getting each elected. The combination of expense and diluted power would induce us to make these unpaid or stipended positions. The article spins it as 'citizen-legislators' but I don't see it as a benefit. If people can make better money elsewhere, you'll be stuck with people who are already rich, people who lack the skills to make money elsewhere, people who hope to enrich themselves from the office with secondary benefits, and people who will work two jobs for the privilege of serving. That's a risk in itself, but then even good people in office are more likely to put the people's business second on their priority list behind their main personal economic interest. And given you've reduced your chances of getting the best people, and reduced the time and focus they can spend concentrating on governing, can you really get good decision-making? The House may become more honest, but less competent (if you can imagine that). More likely, the Founding Fathers had a bad idea here. Or, at least, it wasn't scalable.
We're not even good at finding 400 decent House Reps. I'd hate to see us water them down even more. State Reps suck - you'd just end up with more people like that. Besides which, is there any evidence that 1000 people would come to better decisions than 450? It seems to me that it just furthers the influence of special interests and pork barrel spending at the expense of good national policy.
Put me in the camp that thinks the idea of the founding fathers in this case just isn't scalable to this day and age. 5000 reps debating and presenting bills? No thank you.
To combine with JV's post about financing cost, we could create a cable reality channel with Sheila Jackson Lee and 3 others like her from the expanded pool.
That would be some quality entertainment. We could also make reality shows out of House proceedings. As a bonus, it would eliminate all the backdoor deal-making!
