First, the number of House reps is no longer proportionate to the population. Yes they are. Each house district has about 750,000 people. You get a bit of deviation because states don't necessarily have a precise multiple of 750k people. Also we only redraw districts every 10 years, so things have drifted a bit since 2010. But it's pretty close.
I think they mean number of citizens per House rep, which is many times higher now.
It's also just that at the extremes we have house districts representing just over one million people and just over half a million people. 750k +/- 50% isn't great.
There are a bunch of good arguments here: https://www.thirty-thousand.org/
Hmm. I'd say the biggest argument I could see is that it would result in less stupid bills, e.g. fewer "bridges to nowhere". Maybe less federal bureaucracy. You probably shouldn't really be able to pass something if you can't convince at least 15,001 Americans. On the other hand, logistics would be an insane challenge, and you'd have a huge issue with the inability to have an actual in-person debate. Also, who wants…
As a counter argument I say the place to skimp out on payment isn't in the people making our democracy 30k is a bit OTT in my opinion but 5 billion isn't that much in the grand scheme of the US budget coming in at just .1% of our current spending.
It is probably cheaper to buy off a large number of low-power reps than a smaller number of high power ones
Moreover, if the reps have fewer staff, they will probably rely more on lobbyists for research.
There's loads of ways to solve it though. Let them form groups and pool money to pay for analysts and staff as blocks or beef up the OMB to provide better faster analysis of bills and let them use those. The pooling makes a lot of sense to me because with groups that large you're going to have to form shared interest groups just to have reasonable length debates.
If this happens, Democrats will be very unhappy with how many Republicans there are in Upstate New York, Southern Illinois and Rural California who's vote now counts for something.
Democrats want rural Republicans in New York to have their voice heard, that's the whole point: everyone's vote should count equally and the winner should need to seek majority support. Unlike Republicans, Democrats have these things called "principles". They are ideas that you believe in whether they benefit you or not.
Every time this debate comes up I can't help but wonder if we are letting the office of the president have too much power. To over-simplify a bit: the president should be executing the will of Congress, right?
There are discussions about the electoral college favoring small states. Some people think that's bad, some people think it's good. However, there's a more important issue: that's not really what the electoral college does. It gives a small edge to small states[0]. The much bigger effect is that in every given election, it favors a handful of battleground states over all the rest. If you live in Wyoming, the electora…
You should be careful about the word "small" here. What you mean is least populous, but geographically, they are large. Thus, the question is: Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it? If you eliminate the electoral college you give political control of resources to those who have absolutely NO physical control of those resources and yet still s…
> Do you want the majority of the USA geography being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about it?
So you prefer that the majority of the USA population is being controlled by the will of people least knowledgeable about the issues faced by the most populous and developed regions of the USA?
I doubt it. The Republicans will just have to move their platform just enough to the left to appeal to whichever state has the 270th vote.
The left has gone so authoritarian they may not have to. Left and right are illusion. Freedom and despotism are what you experince as a citizen.
All right, the Republicans have to move their position just enough to appeal to the median electoral vote just a bit more than the Democrats do. If the Democrats go full off-the-deep-end leftist (as seen by the bulk of the voters), then the Republicans may not have to move at all.
I've seen this pointed out, and absolutely do not see it as a problem. What's wrong with politicians paying more attention to the needs of more people? They're going to campaign somewhere , why should they pay more attention to Cleveland, Ohio (metro area population ~2m) than Los Angeles ( city population 3m, metro population over 13m)?
What's great about the electoral college is you need to have cross-regional appeal to win. So its less about which states are going to be battleground but that you generally can't just appeal to 1 or 2 regions and win. In a goal of preserving the union, it's better to have a system that pushes cross-regional appeal than a system based strictly on number of votes IMO.
There is two methods that can be done by removing the electoral college that have vastly different results. First, without "removing" the electoral college, just deem that all electoral votes from a state are proportionate to that state's popular vote. So if a state is split 50-50 then electoral votes are split 50-50. The 2nd method is awarding all the state's electoral votes based on who wins the popular vote. This gives a vastly different outcome if only a few states implement this. It means even if you win even 80 percent of the votes of that state but lose the national popular vote then you still lose that state. I've seen more news about states leaning towards the 2nd option which is actually much worse than the electoral college in its current state.
It is probably cheaper to buy off a large number of low-power reps than a smaller number of high power ones
Moreover, if the reps have fewer staff, they will probably rely more on lobbyists for research.
Not if actual experts get elected. With 30,000 reps you are going to get a wide variety of people elected many of who will know something about the world outside of politics.
If you include the staff there already are 30,000 reps, just that most of them are not elected. The current system is more like having 450 mini corporations running the place.
Guess what? Wyoming pays less than 1.07% of the federal income tax that California does so you have gotten your wish. Also California grows about 100x the food of Wyoming so yeah we can eat our own food, thank you. The most important reason the electoral college was invented was so that states with large slave populations could count 60% of them for representation without actually giving them the vote. You don't hear…
Nice response. With actual data. Of course I am not sure the folks in the San Jaoquin Valley (who produce all that food) would be colored blue if they were an independent state. I don't buy the slave argument -- I think the electoral college was created for the same reason we have two senators per state. Of course those states with large slave populations would have been colored blue, but that is another history folk…
And if the San Jaoquin Valley became its own state conservative votes in San Jaoquin valley and San Fransico would count more if they were seperate states. Which is the whole point. It's telling that my point about economics and representation got turned into a blue / red thing.
>> I don't buy that slave arguement..
And you are a historian? The slave states that were large like Virginia wanted the electoral college, contradicting your argument.