Solution to Bad Representation-Make More of Them?

Jonah Goldberg today has an interesting article up in Townhall.com entitled We Need a Bigger House. The House he is referring to is the House of Representatives. So how did the House become permanently set at 435 members? Some history:

Except for a brief effort to accommodate Alaska and Hawaii, the size of the House has been frozen at 435 members since 1911. A 1929 law, driven in part to keep immigrants underrepresented, has kept it that way.

But there's nothing sacred about the 435 number. In fact, the Founders would be aghast at the idea that the "peoples' house" is filled with pols speaking for hundreds of thousands of citizens.

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we need term limits on these jokers, but only because they are unlikely to vote to dilute their own power. But there are a lot of reasons why increasing the number of Representatives is a good idea. For one thing, it will reduce the current power of the two dominant parties, and encourage more people to stand as Independents. More importantly, with Representatives now representing 700,000 people, as opposed to 30,000 at the founding, it has become possible to find a constituency for pretty much anything within that population, and therefore frees representatives to vote however they feel, with little chance of being voted out of office at the next election. However, if Representatives represented smaller populations, they might very well fear coming back and facing friends and neighbors who strongly oppose a Congressman's voting record. Another quote:

Critics of the status quo from the left and right yearn to shatter the two-party system's lock on politics. I'm not convinced that would be a good thing, but wouldn't the best way to do that be for smaller parties in Congress to champion fresh new ideas? Rather than have some billionaire egomaniac who, in effect, creates or co-opts a ridiculous third party just so he can indulge his presidential ambitions, why not have third, fourth or 15th parties test their wares in a smaller political market and build themselves up to where they could field a president?

Obviously, the rajahs of incumbentstan don't like the prospect of diluting their own power. But expanding Congress would, among other things, make late night C-SPAN so much more entertaining.

It's an idea well worth considering. Go check out Jonah's idea.