Upgrading the United States Congress
I don't know about you, but I really don't think my Representative in Congress cares about what I think. I know this for a fact; I meet him on a plane every other January as he rushes back to get sworn in. He listens politely to me and tells me to call back to his staff, who of course never have any idea what I'm talking about.
Why is this? I have one idea. Check this table out. The first census was in 1790; by the time it was done, we had fifteen states in the Union. I pulled their population and representation figures to see how many people were being represented by each congressman back then -- and now.
StatePop., 1790# of Reps., 1790People per rep., 1790Pop., 2000# of Reps., 2000People per rep., 2000Representation ratioConnecticut237655733950.7142934055845681116.820.06192843Delaware59096159096783600178360013.2597807Georgia82548241274818645313629727.153815.25723588Kentucky73677236838.540417696673628.166718.28598251Maryland31972883996652964868662060.7516.56559951Massachusetts475199859399.875634909710634909.710.68873798New Hampshire141899435474.751235786261789317.41782535New Jersey184139536827.8841435013647257.692317.57524729New York340241656706.833331879645729648153.689711.4299045North Carolina3950051039500.5804931313619177.923115.67519204Pennsylvania4336111333354.692311228105419646371.263219.37872061Rhode Island6911223455610483192524159.515.1684078South Carolina249073641512.1666740120126668668.666716.10777563Vermont85341242670.5608827160882714.26810091Virginia7475501939344.73684707851511643501.363616.35546239 TOTAL/AVERAGE38938749542031.537989587622139644515.266215.33408717UNITED STATES38938749542031.5379281,421,906435646946.910315.39194002Sources: United States Census Bureau; United States House of Representatives
In the good ol' days of the eighteenth century, each representative spoke for about forty thousand people. That would be Possum Town and its immediate surroundings (not even the outlying towns in the county!) today, or maybe all of Cambridge east of Harvard Square. If that were the ratio of a representative to his constituents, it would only take a few big meetings for each and every constitutent to hear his or her representative (or, say, the candidates thereof) speak and be spoken to. Can you imagine? Say a meeting in each of Columbus' ten or so public school districts, or one at each of Cambridge's squares, and you'd be done politicking for a couple of years.
But we don't have a system anymore where our federal representatives speak for forty thousand. No, today they speak for six hundred and fifty thousand apiece, give or take. I calculated out the ratios in the last column -- each representative, at least in the fifteen states covered by the 1790 census, now represents between ten and twenty times the number of people their predecessor did. And people wonder why Congress doesn't listen to them anymore?
As tempting as it is, though, expanding Congress wouldn't work by itself. To have the same ratio as we did in 1790, we'd need 6,696 Members of the House. If we also expanded the Senate to match, each state would get 43 senators, for a total Senate population of 2,150. Clearly this is unworkable.
Or is it? Think about it. What's the average size of the staff of a Member of Congress (I'm talking about their legislative staff, not the bunch of people they keep on hand to run their permanent re-election campaigns.)? Ten or twenty people, isn't it? And a number of those people are the ones who write most of the routine language of bills their bosses eventually vote on.
So maybe the real question isn't the number of people on Capitol Hill -- that seems to have scaled roughly linearly with the population of the Republic. The real question is how those nine thousand or so people are chosen, and how much those nine thousand people are required to listen to the people they are supposedly working for. Are they representing us adequately? Does anyone who pays attention to these things seriously think they are?
The House and Senate can't really be expanded further; not only are their chambers too small to accomodate further expansion, but there is a natural limit to how much face-to-face business can get done once any group expands beyond a certain limit. But if we can't improve our representation by numbers, we'll have to make our few representatives work harder for us. We need a system that is at least fifteen times more efficient at conveying our opinions and concerns to Washington just to keep pace with our 1790 level of representation. What can do it? It can't be letter writing; Thomas Jefferson was drowning in letters even in 1805. Surely it has to be an Information Age system. But what?
Oh, and remember me trying to talk to my representative on the little prop plane out of Tupelo? I was trying to tell him that scandals like the one where a legislative assistant "helpfully" inserted industry language into a bill couldn't happen if we had a publicly displayed database of all current bill drafts, with version control and authorship tags (just like almost every commercial operation uses today) so that someone is accountable for every word and punctuation mark in every bill on the Hill. What's more, most bills are written as "diffs" -- that is, they are structured like patches are in computer code, with instructions like "strike section X, add blah blah blah at this spot in section Y, change Z to A" at specific points in the United States Code. It would be almost trivial to write display programs so that the American people could see, not just year by year and day by day and even minute by minute, exactly what changes were being proposed in the laws, the budget, whatever.
But then Congresscritters might have to be accountable and endure transparency, and we can't have that, now can we?
Why is this? I have one idea. Check this table out. The first census was in 1790; by the time it was done, we had fifteen states in the Union. I pulled their population and representation figures to see how many people were being represented by each congressman back then -- and now.
StatePop., 1790# of Reps., 1790People per rep., 1790Pop., 2000# of Reps., 2000People per rep., 2000Representation ratioConnecticut237655733950.7142934055845681116.820.06192843Delaware59096159096783600178360013.2597807Georgia82548241274818645313629727.153815.25723588Kentucky73677236838.540417696673628.166718.28598251Maryland31972883996652964868662060.7516.56559951Massachusetts475199859399.875634909710634909.710.68873798New Hampshire141899435474.751235786261789317.41782535New Jersey184139536827.8841435013647257.692317.57524729New York340241656706.833331879645729648153.689711.4299045North Carolina3950051039500.5804931313619177.923115.67519204Pennsylvania4336111333354.692311228105419646371.263219.37872061Rhode Island6911223455610483192524159.515.1684078South Carolina249073641512.1666740120126668668.666716.10777563Vermont85341242670.5608827160882714.26810091Virginia7475501939344.73684707851511643501.363616.35546239 TOTAL/AVERAGE38938749542031.537989587622139644515.266215.33408717UNITED STATES38938749542031.5379281,421,906435646946.910315.39194002Sources: United States Census Bureau; United States House of Representatives
In the good ol' days of the eighteenth century, each representative spoke for about forty thousand people. That would be Possum Town and its immediate surroundings (not even the outlying towns in the county!) today, or maybe all of Cambridge east of Harvard Square. If that were the ratio of a representative to his constituents, it would only take a few big meetings for each and every constitutent to hear his or her representative (or, say, the candidates thereof) speak and be spoken to. Can you imagine? Say a meeting in each of Columbus' ten or so public school districts, or one at each of Cambridge's squares, and you'd be done politicking for a couple of years.
But we don't have a system anymore where our federal representatives speak for forty thousand. No, today they speak for six hundred and fifty thousand apiece, give or take. I calculated out the ratios in the last column -- each representative, at least in the fifteen states covered by the 1790 census, now represents between ten and twenty times the number of people their predecessor did. And people wonder why Congress doesn't listen to them anymore?
As tempting as it is, though, expanding Congress wouldn't work by itself. To have the same ratio as we did in 1790, we'd need 6,696 Members of the House. If we also expanded the Senate to match, each state would get 43 senators, for a total Senate population of 2,150. Clearly this is unworkable.
Or is it? Think about it. What's the average size of the staff of a Member of Congress (I'm talking about their legislative staff, not the bunch of people they keep on hand to run their permanent re-election campaigns.)? Ten or twenty people, isn't it? And a number of those people are the ones who write most of the routine language of bills their bosses eventually vote on.
So maybe the real question isn't the number of people on Capitol Hill -- that seems to have scaled roughly linearly with the population of the Republic. The real question is how those nine thousand or so people are chosen, and how much those nine thousand people are required to listen to the people they are supposedly working for. Are they representing us adequately? Does anyone who pays attention to these things seriously think they are?
The House and Senate can't really be expanded further; not only are their chambers too small to accomodate further expansion, but there is a natural limit to how much face-to-face business can get done once any group expands beyond a certain limit. But if we can't improve our representation by numbers, we'll have to make our few representatives work harder for us. We need a system that is at least fifteen times more efficient at conveying our opinions and concerns to Washington just to keep pace with our 1790 level of representation. What can do it? It can't be letter writing; Thomas Jefferson was drowning in letters even in 1805. Surely it has to be an Information Age system. But what?
Oh, and remember me trying to talk to my representative on the little prop plane out of Tupelo? I was trying to tell him that scandals like the one where a legislative assistant "helpfully" inserted industry language into a bill couldn't happen if we had a publicly displayed database of all current bill drafts, with version control and authorship tags (just like almost every commercial operation uses today) so that someone is accountable for every word and punctuation mark in every bill on the Hill. What's more, most bills are written as "diffs" -- that is, they are structured like patches are in computer code, with instructions like "strike section X, add blah blah blah at this spot in section Y, change Z to A" at specific points in the United States Code. It would be almost trivial to write display programs so that the American people could see, not just year by year and day by day and even minute by minute, exactly what changes were being proposed in the laws, the budget, whatever.
But then Congresscritters might have to be accountable and endure transparency, and we can't have that, now can we?