Is Congress still the people’s house?

With 435 members, does Congress accurately represent the people?  Larry Sabato, Founder of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, discusses this and other interesting topics in his book A More Perfect Constitution.

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Washington proposed reducing the number of citizens per Congressman from 40,000 to 30,000.  Madison, writing in The Federalist Papers, predicted that at current population growth rates, the size of the House of Representatives would grow from 65 members to over 400 members by the 1830s.

Our current House of Representatives, at 435 members, has 690,000 citizens per Congressperson.  To compare, each Member of the 646 member British House of Commons represents 91,000.  Even the members of the 577 member French National Assembly represents 102,000 people.

Of course, we can’t return to the original number of 30,000 citizens per representative, as that would generate a deliberative body of over 10,000.  But clearly, an expansion could have positive benefits on the representative power of the house.  Even conservative commentator George Will has argued for a number around 1,000.

With a wealth of topics presented, I’ll discuss other proposals in the book later.

Just in from Camelot, er, Washington DC

This was too good to not pass along. From a friend waiting for a position in the Obama Administration

I am glad to hear from you.  I just wish I had more news for you.  Perhaps you’ve heard, but Treasury (and the remainder of the Obama Administration) is staffing up pitifully slowly.  At a hearing, Paul Volcker called the situation “shameful.”  That’s about right.

Sadly, until the high level people get in place, nothing else can be done.  The atmosphere in all the agencies I’ve visited is one of summertime lull.  Obama and a few overworked aides are running the massive battleship of government with a few loose strings in the White House.

They keep comparing themselves to the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, and left-wing media outlets give them a pass.  It’s an absurd comparison (it would be like Stanford comparing itself to Spring Hill College and Springfield College, because those are the two that precede it in alphabetical order).  In a national emergency like today’s, a responsible government would compare itself to Lincoln or Roosevelt (during whose Administration they built the entire Pentagon–  the country’s largest office building by land area– from conception to completion– in 16 months).