Following the last census, the average member of the U.S. House of Representatives had a constituency of about 710,000.
The Arkansas figure is even higher. Our U.S. reps “represent” more than 731,000 people each on average (for context, the city of Memphis population is 655,000).
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t make me feel very represented in Washington.
And furthermore, how could the visionary founders of this country have failed to take into account an issue so important?
They didn’t, of course.
The founders established a definitive benchmark for representation in the House (which they envisioned as the people’s chamber of the Congress). The Constitution defines a representative ratio in Article 1, Section 2:
“The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative.”
If you’re scratching your head to remember which amendment changed the ratio, stop.
There was no amendment.
Then who fixed the number of representatives in the House at 435, regardless of the nation’s population?
Congress itself, that’s who (how surprising?).
The story of how you lost your constitutional representation rights goes all the way back to the original proposed Bill of Rights.
As initially proposed, the amendments comprising the Bill of Rights numbered 12.
The proposed first amendment was not the one about freedom of speech and religion; that was number three on the list.
Article the First dealt directly with the critical issue of representation. Population growth was imminent, the founders knew, so the proposed first amendment addressed it by raising the House member-population ratio incrementally.
When the number of representatives exceeded 100, it increased the ratio to one for every 40,000, and after 200 representatives the ratio was one for every 50,000 people.
But that amendment was never ratified.
Instead, Congress in 1929 decided that it would artificially cap the number of members in the House at 435, which was the last figure used after the 1910 Census.
Even then, the national average was seven times what the founders had in mind, at one member per 213,000 population or so.
Other than 1920s politicians, who were protecting their own turf, who can possibly think that freezing a 1911 number of seats in the House is any wiser than freezing anything else from that year?
If the government had frozen suffrage laws then, women would have been forever barred from the ballot.
If the government had frozen the size of the defense budget then, we could never have entered World War I or II.
Nearly everything has changed in the century since then, except the 435 number.
Automobile travel-and its shortening of distances-was still in its infancy in 1911, and there were only about 1,000 miles of paved roads in the entire country. At the first ever running of the Indy 500 that year, the winning car averaged under 75 mph.
Sweatshops were in full swing, and the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan killed 146 garment workers, mostly women and mostly immigrants, because they were trapped in the overcrowded building with locks on the exits and stairwell doors.
Nine out of 10 births occurred at home, and 90 percent of doctors had no college education.
Male average life expectancy was a mere 50 years.
Nobody had ever seen a television, and wouldn’t for decades.
But there were 435 members of the House then, and that number hasn’t changed since.
It’s time to write representation back into the U.S. Constitution.
OMG, critics cry, that would mean thousands of members of the House of Representatives!
About 6,100, in fact, if we kept the one for every 50,000 ratio. That would translate to about 60 U.S. representatives from Arkansas. Talk about reducing the influence of money in government! Right now a lobby or PAC can steer the legislative will of 3 million by swaying four representatives. Try herding 60 at a time, which would be neither easy nor cheap.
As website thirtythousand.org declares, we need more representatives, not more politicians. And that’s just what expanding the House would give us.
Gone would be the days when campaign costs put congressional elections out of reach for the average wage-earner.
Historically, states have done exactly that which naysayers now claim is impossible to do in Washington.
Our 100 state reps mirror the original constitutional formula: about one for every 30,000 Arkansans.
Technology today allows thousands to meet and convene and work together in ways that were unimaginable only 20 years ago.
I also like thirtythousand.org’s idea of adding more federal districts, like maybe three more to match major population centers in the Chicago, Dallas and southern California areas.
Just think of the accessibility you would have with your Arkansas congressman if the originally proposed constitutional formula were intact. Being one of 50,000 constituents is worlds away from being one of 731,000.
Critics (most of them establishment hacks) warn against an unwieldy Congress of thousands. Arkansas should yearn for it.
Heck, maybe our General Assembly should be the first to call for modern ratification of that long-overdue “Article the First.” -
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Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 11/08/2013