The Outstater
Let’s Pack the U.S. House
GALLUP REPORTS this week that the approval rate if Congress has fallen to 10 percent. Coincidentally, a Butler graduate student, Evan Wareham, has an intriguing idea — reapportionment on steroids. What if we reformed the U.S. House of Representatives by adding members to increase per-capita representation?
That, please know, was the original plan. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison argued that the House of Representatives should expand with the size of the American population.
Madison’s warning has proved prescient: “So small a number of representatives will be[come] an unsafe depositary of the public interests.” He rightly predicted that representatives would turn unresponsive to the wider issues faced in their districts, having to account for more constituents than they could handle. In this chaos, he said, they would be “most likely to aim at a permanent elevation of the few on the depression of the many.”
Congress followed the Madison blueprint for nearly two centuries, Wareham notes. House seats were expanded following every census beginning with 59 members in 1789 and growing about 34 seats every 10 years. The number was capped at an arbitrary 435 by the Reapportionment Act of 1929. Wareham proposes increasing the number of Representatives to 1,305, still way below what Madison’s formula would recommend (10,000 or more).
Where would they all sit, you ask. Well, they could stay home and vote remotely, living among their constituents and their concerns and away from a concentration of lobbyists and the pressures of leadership cabals.
There are many other questions, and we don’t mean to argue the reform here (it will be featured in the summer Indiana Policy Review). It is nonetheless reasonable to ask how the situation could be much worse, and does anybody have a better idea?.
To put Congress’s 10 percent approval rate in perspective, I asked my assistant, Grok, to estimate how many Americans are drunk, drugged or otherwise chemically discombobulated at any given time. Using self-reports, surveys and modeling, he estimates that the percentage of acutely impaired is significant — in the single digits at least. That leaves only a sliver of the sober electorate happy with a Congress that somehow wins reelection at a rate of 98 percent or higher.
Finally, Wareham’s proposal, in addition to providing a constructive point to begin the reform discussion, is feasible — at least compared with a Constitutional amendment or armed rebellion. All we need do is elect a simple majority to vote for it, as is the case with any law. (We can deal with senators and the 17th Amendment later.)
“Political minorities would finally be heard,” Wareham says. “Individual politicians would be left with less jurisdiction, less authority and more time to listen to the people — and maybe some of them would keep their promises.”
Fire away, young Wareham, fire away.
Republicans for Taxes
GOV. MIKE BRAUN and the legislative leadership are ambivalent about an indefinite suspension of the 7 percent gas tax. But we elect Republicans to cut taxes, especially on what we want more of, such as cheap energy. The idea is to reduce the size of government, not to prop it up, and in a crisis to reduce nonessential services, not reflexively maintain the burden on the citizenry.
Nonetheless, they are telling us in effect that there is no spending anywhere in the $44-billion budget — much of it line items we don’t want or need or ever requested — that could be cut to offset the gas-tax revenue, that could make life more affordable for every Hoosier, not only at the pump but all along the supply chain.
Perversely, Democrats, who worship taxation, are feigning opposition to discontinuing the tax. The uni-party is a real thing, isn’t it? — tcl
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