Resizing the House
Apart from its overworked, none-too-Swift title — “A Modest Proposal” — and a couple of fine points here and there, I find Ric Locke’s “clarifications and definitions of terms,” as applicable to the US Constitution, a worthy effort, even if it does run to a whole fifteen (rather short) articles.
One such article had to do with redefining the size of the House of Representatives. His methodology depends on the number of “Electors,” so we look for a definition thereof, and we find in Article 10:
Persons who are Citizens of the United States of full majority, as specified by the Laws of the United States, are Electors, directly of the Representative and Senators in whose district and State they reside, and indirectly of the President throught the Electoral College; Persons who are not Citizens of full majority under the Law are not Electors; but this Constitution does not otherwise distinguish between those Persons who are Citizens and those who are not.
In other words, 18 and up, that being the age limit for the moment. The Bureau of the Census, in this set of numbers, refers only to the “resident population,” and does not, as the phrase goes, distinguish between those Persons who are Citizens and those who are not, but I suspect it will be something of a wash in the final calculation, which is performed, per Article 12, thusly:
The number of Representatives shall be calculated as follows: Multiply the number of Citizens who are Electors in the United States by three, divide by the number of Citizens who are Electors in the least populous State, add one-half, and truncate to a whole number. Arguments that the resulting Body is cumbersome, or overstretches the facilities provided for its use, will not be heard.
So: 230.1 million total, times three is 690.3 million, divided by 404,000 (Wyoming), is 1708.66; add one-half and throw away the decimal, a standard rounding technique, and you have a House of 1,709.
According to the original Constitutional specification, the number of Representatives “shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand,” which this doesn’t: we’d need over 10,000 to violate that clause.
If your immediate response is “Big whoop. We have 435 mostly-useless drones already. Why should we quadruple their number?” Melancton Smith anticipated this way back in 1788:
To me it appears clear, that the relative weight of influence of the different states will be the same, with the number of representatives at sixty-five as at six hundred, and that of the individual members greater; for each member’s share of power will decrease as the number of the House of Representatives increases. If, therefore, this maxim be true, that men are unwilling to relinquish powers which they once possess, we are not to expect the House of Representatives will be inclined to enlarge the numbers. The same motive will operate to influence the President and Senate to oppose the increase of the number of representatives; for, in proportion as the House of Representatives is augmented, they will feel their own power diminished.
Emphasis added. It took Congress about 125 years, but they did indeed stop the increase in the number of Representatives.
There exists a group called Thirty-Thousand.org which seeks to return to that specific Constitutional provision. I have no idea if Mr Locke has seen their stuff, but some of their arguments and some of his dovetail nicely.
Ric Locke »
9 September 2009 · 9:04 am
Thanks for the kind words; my apologies for the title, which I knew was trite when I composed it. Obedient to Stacy McCain’s rules, you will now go on the blogroll. WordPress makes that hard enough that I haven’t translated my Favorites list wholesale.
In reality, I think proposal #11 (about the districts of the Representatives) is more important, which is why it came earlier in the list.
Regards,
Ric
CGHill »
9 September 2009 · 9:58 am
I’ve never bothered with WordPress’s Links function; I cut the old blogroll out of the original static page, built a WP page for it, and just pasted it in. Less hassle.