I was fascinated and cautiously optimistic about this proposal until you got to its effects on the Electoral College. Unfortunately, with our current winner-take-all-electoral-votes system in most states, getting smaller districts would have no effect there; the statewide majority would still rule.
So, in the electoral college, this would almost be the same thing as just eliminating the bonus for Senators and giving each state a vote equivalent to its House delegation. I think that has too much of a partisan tilt for me to be happy with it without other changes to Presidential elections.
But if you want to draft another amendment about the Electoral College, I'd be very interested.
I AM planning an electoral college amendment, probably two or three amendments from now. It is, after all, the most conspicuously and catastrophically failed of all provisions in the original Constitution, and the one that absolutely nobody seems to have any ideas for fixing. (Its most prominent critics simply want to *break it further*, often by abolishing it.)
That being said: partisan electoral college effects are extremely short-lived. Trump had an electoral college advantage in 2016 and 2020... but *Obama* had the advantage in the electoral college in 2008 and 2012 (as in, Obama had plenty of room to lose the popular vote while winning the presidency). The moment a coalition shifts, electoral college advantage has a tendency to reverse, and there are plenty of tiny blue states to offset tiny red states (Delaware! Rhode Island! Vermont!). Indeed, if Republicans continue to lose ground among suburban woman while gaining ground among Hispanics, Blacks, and Muslims (as happened in 2022), that could do it!
So I *generally* view it as being in both parties' medium-term interests to render the electoral college as fair as possible, as quickly as possible, because you just never know when the worm's gonna turn and now YOU win the popular vote while losing the electoral college.
(And also to fix the electoral college, but that's an amendment for later.)
Jun 17, 2023·edited Jun 17, 2023Liked by James J. Heaney
Very much looking forward to your Electoral College amendment! And any others you put out - all of this series has been very thought-provoking.
Now that I think about it some more, I'm still struck by how this will change the small state / large state balance in the College. I don't have any definite rationale behind keeping it the same as in the Founders' day - but if we're sticking to their framework for the House of Representatives, perhaps we should stick to their balance in the College too?
So: Under the initial Constitution, there were 59 seats in the House, and 26 in the Senate. After the first Census, in 1790, the House was expanded to 105 seats and the Senate to 30 (Kentucky and Vermont having gained statehood). To keep to this ratio, we should have Electoral College votes equivalent to 44% or 29% of the House divided equally among the states. With your reapportionment, instead of 2 "Senatorial" votes in the Electoral College, each state would get between 63 and 97.
I'm not convinced this's a good idea. I'm not convinced it's even what the Founders would've wanted, considering how the Senate:House ratio kept decreasing as the House kept increasing in size. But I'm pondering it.
Jun 19, 2023·edited Jun 19, 2023Liked by James J. Heaney
James, while I am sympathetic for your arguments for a greatly upsized House of Representatives, I suspect having a standing legislative body the size of a national political convention has all kinds of side affects we can't imagine now that will ultimately be undesirable. For one thing, even if we greatly reduce their salaries (a good thing anyway), remove their personal staffs and their separate offices, and have that body sit only part-time, a 10,000 seat House would be a huge additional expense over the already expensive House we have today.
And I don't see how this solves the problem of forcing elected pols to fundraise. The Senate would still have that problem. And I can readily see that House members who may not need to fundraise for themselves, would still be "encouraged" to spend time calling donors for the Party. Indeed, in such a huge House, the leadership would have a great deal of power, deciding who has plum committee assignments, and who stays on the back bench.
I will look forward to see what you propose for the Senate, as well as the Electoral College. One thing seems for certain: The Founding Father's attempt to have the Senators and President selected at a remove from the popular vote, has failed, and failed as soon as the telegraph improved communications, if not before. (A little observed fact about the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates is that those two Senate candidates, ostensibly elected by the Illinois legislature, were campaigning directly to the people. Even at that date, the legislatlve elections were proxies for the Senate race).
I also found your link to your alternative history of the 2020 election and its aftermath. I am at once heartened by the institutions that held in the real 2020 election (unlike in your fictional recount) and dismayed by how close we came to the chaos in your account. Mike Pence gets a lot more credit than you gave him in that piece. As do the courts. As does the Pennsylvania electoral system, which had to deal with COVID, as did the rest of the country.
"For one thing, even if we greatly reduce their salaries (a good thing anyway), remove their personal staffs and their separate offices, and have that body sit only part-time, a 10,000 seat House would be a huge additional expense over the already expensive House we have today."
I'm not sure I buy this. I mean... well, let me rephrase that. Yes, it would cost more, and the "more" is objectively a very large number. But, in the context of the federal budget, the cost of the House of Representatives today is a rounding error, and even *radically* increasing its size wouldn't change that.
In FY2021 (the latest year for which I found final enacted appropriations), the House of Representatives had a total budget of $1.477 billion + $0.012 billion in supplemental appropriations.
The actual salaries of the members costs $0.076 billion per year. Many members also receive health insurance benefits. I can't figure out exactly how much money goes to this, but, based on my own workplace and adding some generous padding, let's assume that Congress's salary + benefits right now costs double the salary-alone figure, so $0.151 billion. That leaves $1.326 billion of other Congressional spending.
About half of that ($0.6 billion) goes to the "Member's Representational Allowance," which is a fund divided up between the members that they can use to hire staff, mail constituents, expense flights, and generally use in order to represent their constituents effectively (or, all too often, buy nicer carpets). A lot of Congressional staff gets paid out of that allowance, though not nearly all.
Most of the rest appears to go to pay staffers of various kinds, from committee legislative aids to, I assume, the janitor.
(Wider context: the Senate cost almost exactly $1 billion, Capitol Police around $0.5 billion, the Library of Congress $0.5 billion, the Congressional Research Service and Government Printing Officer about $0.12 billion apiece, the Architect of the Capitol -- which would also be impacted by radical House expansion-- had a total budget of $0.675 billion, and the Government Accountability Office cost $0.7 billion, plus a few smaller items, all of which added up to a total legislative branch budget of $5.3 billion.)
These are large numbers to normal humans, but must be interpreted in the context of the U.S. federal budget, which spent $6818 billion in FY2021 and $4407 billion in FY2019 (the last pre-pandemic year of "normalcy").
So! With all that context established, let's consider the costs of an ELEVEN THOUSAND MEMBER HOUSE MWAHAHAHA! I will assume for this exercise that we keep Congressional pay and benefits exactly the same as they are today (even though there's room to cut).
The new House would have 25.3 times as many members, so the cost of paying their salary + benefits would rise from $0.151 billion to $3.820 billion. On the one hand, that's serious cheddar. On the other hand, this increase represents a 0.08% increase in the annual pre-pandemic federal budget. It is the equivalent of what the federal government ordinarily (pre-pandemic) would spend between Midnight and 7 AM, every day. This seems to me like a very small increase, relative to the democratic dividends.
And, of course, the increase could be offset by substantial savings. The Members' Representational Allowance would not need to grow, and would in fact need to shrink (because far more members need far fewer staff and allowances to represent the exact same overall U.S. population). I don't hold out hope that we could eliminate the MRA outright, but it seems that even a pessimist would agree that it could be cut by *at least* half, for a savings of $0.33 billion.
Likewise, not all House staff could be cut (you'd still need the janitor, you'd still need the interns who set up committee hearing placards), but a LOT of it could be cut, for another savings somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And, of course, you can cut Congressional pay and benefits to be more commensurate with the new and more narrow role of each Congressman.
The cost of constructing a new facility will be a substantial but one-time outlay. We're talking about something the size of a sports stadium here, but a *small* sports stadium, not a ritzy NFL stadium. I understand that the cost of Geodis Park (a Nashville soccer stadium, capacity 30,000, opened 2022) was in the neighborhood of $340 million. That seems reasonable.
All told, I think you could, without too much difficulty, wrestle the ongoing cost of the expansion down to below $3 billion a year.
Given the benefits, I think it's worth the spend. I wouldn't say that if the price tag were $100 billion, but a well-functioning Congress is the foundation on which the rest of our system (including all our spending) is based, so it's worth a *little* juice.
> And I don't see how this solves the problem of forcing elected pols to fundraise. The Senate would still have that problem.
The Senate is a very different animal, in many senses much more wounded than the House, and will get its own post (maybe two posts).
However, it seems self-evidently a win to me if we dramatically reduce the amount of political spending, fundraising, and lobbying dollars in *one* house of Congress, even if the other remains exactly the same.
> Indeed, in such a huge House, the leadership would have a great deal of power, deciding who has plum committee assignments, and who stays on the back bench.
I don't see why this should be. Any majority of the House can decide who gets plum committee assignments, or how committee chairs are appointed. Any majority can decide what committees *exist*. (I think there would naturally be a lot more committees in a much larger House, with correspondingly more seats.) The decisive majority doesn't have to be Republicans vs. Democrats; it can just as easily be back-bench vs. leadership... and, in a much larger House, back-benchers would have a dramatic advantage.
Financial pressure *could* still be brought to bear, but financial pressure is mostly brought today in order to increase the coffers of the NRCC, so that they can get House Republicans elected (or vice versa on the other side). If running for Congress is much cheaper, the NRCC doesn't need to exist, or at least is far less important. Likewise, another financial pressure point is that the GOP can threaten to withhold funding from your campaign if you don't hit your numbers. That's not so scary if you don't need funding.
A lot of partisan control over the members *in general* comes from the large amounts of money needed to run a successful campaign, and the party controls the pursestrings. Take that away, and members have far less incentive to pay attention to party leadership at all. You could see more Congressmen voting in unexpected blocs -- and you'd surely see a good few Congressmen who don't caucus with the two parties at all!
I'm not saying the power of leadership would vanish. In a large body, the biggest threat to the backbench is indeed a well-organized, disciplined leadership with deep procedural knowledge outflanking a much larger, but undisciplined and ignorant, back bench -- or just outright cheating and expecting to get away with it, as John Boehner was known to do from time to time. But the back bench would have a lot of tools (and a lot of numbers) that they just don't have today, and leadership would have both less leverage and less incentive to use it. It wouldn't be perfect, but it seems likely to be progress!
> having a standing legislative body the size of a national political convention has all kinds of side affects we can't imagine now that will ultimately be undesirable.
I agree that it will have unexpected and perhaps unimaginable side effects. I don't see why we should presume that these unexpected side effects will be overwhelmingly undesirable. It might just as easily work out even *better* than I've imagined here! Or, most likely, the unexpected consequences will work out in some sort of balance.
And remember that the alternative is not perfection; the alternative is the *current* House of Representatives, which, in my opinion, is a pretty low bar to clear! :) (The current House's structure, too, had a lot of unforeseeable side effects, some of which the Founders would have liked, others not so much.)
> Mike Pence gets a lot more credit than you gave him in that piece.
He does deserve credit for doing the right thing under intense political pressure.
And you deserve credit for reading for so many words! That's a long one!
I was fascinated and cautiously optimistic about this proposal until you got to its effects on the Electoral College. Unfortunately, with our current winner-take-all-electoral-votes system in most states, getting smaller districts would have no effect there; the statewide majority would still rule.
So, in the electoral college, this would almost be the same thing as just eliminating the bonus for Senators and giving each state a vote equivalent to its House delegation. I think that has too much of a partisan tilt for me to be happy with it without other changes to Presidential elections.
But if you want to draft another amendment about the Electoral College, I'd be very interested.
I AM planning an electoral college amendment, probably two or three amendments from now. It is, after all, the most conspicuously and catastrophically failed of all provisions in the original Constitution, and the one that absolutely nobody seems to have any ideas for fixing. (Its most prominent critics simply want to *break it further*, often by abolishing it.)
That being said: partisan electoral college effects are extremely short-lived. Trump had an electoral college advantage in 2016 and 2020... but *Obama* had the advantage in the electoral college in 2008 and 2012 (as in, Obama had plenty of room to lose the popular vote while winning the presidency). The moment a coalition shifts, electoral college advantage has a tendency to reverse, and there are plenty of tiny blue states to offset tiny red states (Delaware! Rhode Island! Vermont!). Indeed, if Republicans continue to lose ground among suburban woman while gaining ground among Hispanics, Blacks, and Muslims (as happened in 2022), that could do it!
So I *generally* view it as being in both parties' medium-term interests to render the electoral college as fair as possible, as quickly as possible, because you just never know when the worm's gonna turn and now YOU win the popular vote while losing the electoral college.
(And also to fix the electoral college, but that's an amendment for later.)
Very much looking forward to your Electoral College amendment! And any others you put out - all of this series has been very thought-provoking.
Now that I think about it some more, I'm still struck by how this will change the small state / large state balance in the College. I don't have any definite rationale behind keeping it the same as in the Founders' day - but if we're sticking to their framework for the House of Representatives, perhaps we should stick to their balance in the College too?
So: Under the initial Constitution, there were 59 seats in the House, and 26 in the Senate. After the first Census, in 1790, the House was expanded to 105 seats and the Senate to 30 (Kentucky and Vermont having gained statehood). To keep to this ratio, we should have Electoral College votes equivalent to 44% or 29% of the House divided equally among the states. With your reapportionment, instead of 2 "Senatorial" votes in the Electoral College, each state would get between 63 and 97.
I'm not convinced this's a good idea. I'm not convinced it's even what the Founders would've wanted, considering how the Senate:House ratio kept decreasing as the House kept increasing in size. But I'm pondering it.
James, while I am sympathetic for your arguments for a greatly upsized House of Representatives, I suspect having a standing legislative body the size of a national political convention has all kinds of side affects we can't imagine now that will ultimately be undesirable. For one thing, even if we greatly reduce their salaries (a good thing anyway), remove their personal staffs and their separate offices, and have that body sit only part-time, a 10,000 seat House would be a huge additional expense over the already expensive House we have today.
And I don't see how this solves the problem of forcing elected pols to fundraise. The Senate would still have that problem. And I can readily see that House members who may not need to fundraise for themselves, would still be "encouraged" to spend time calling donors for the Party. Indeed, in such a huge House, the leadership would have a great deal of power, deciding who has plum committee assignments, and who stays on the back bench.
I will look forward to see what you propose for the Senate, as well as the Electoral College. One thing seems for certain: The Founding Father's attempt to have the Senators and President selected at a remove from the popular vote, has failed, and failed as soon as the telegraph improved communications, if not before. (A little observed fact about the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates is that those two Senate candidates, ostensibly elected by the Illinois legislature, were campaigning directly to the people. Even at that date, the legislatlve elections were proxies for the Senate race).
I also found your link to your alternative history of the 2020 election and its aftermath. I am at once heartened by the institutions that held in the real 2020 election (unlike in your fictional recount) and dismayed by how close we came to the chaos in your account. Mike Pence gets a lot more credit than you gave him in that piece. As do the courts. As does the Pennsylvania electoral system, which had to deal with COVID, as did the rest of the country.
"For one thing, even if we greatly reduce their salaries (a good thing anyway), remove their personal staffs and their separate offices, and have that body sit only part-time, a 10,000 seat House would be a huge additional expense over the already expensive House we have today."
I'm not sure I buy this. I mean... well, let me rephrase that. Yes, it would cost more, and the "more" is objectively a very large number. But, in the context of the federal budget, the cost of the House of Representatives today is a rounding error, and even *radically* increasing its size wouldn't change that.
In FY2021 (the latest year for which I found final enacted appropriations), the House of Representatives had a total budget of $1.477 billion + $0.012 billion in supplemental appropriations.
The actual salaries of the members costs $0.076 billion per year. Many members also receive health insurance benefits. I can't figure out exactly how much money goes to this, but, based on my own workplace and adding some generous padding, let's assume that Congress's salary + benefits right now costs double the salary-alone figure, so $0.151 billion. That leaves $1.326 billion of other Congressional spending.
About half of that ($0.6 billion) goes to the "Member's Representational Allowance," which is a fund divided up between the members that they can use to hire staff, mail constituents, expense flights, and generally use in order to represent their constituents effectively (or, all too often, buy nicer carpets). A lot of Congressional staff gets paid out of that allowance, though not nearly all.
Most of the rest appears to go to pay staffers of various kinds, from committee legislative aids to, I assume, the janitor.
(Wider context: the Senate cost almost exactly $1 billion, Capitol Police around $0.5 billion, the Library of Congress $0.5 billion, the Congressional Research Service and Government Printing Officer about $0.12 billion apiece, the Architect of the Capitol -- which would also be impacted by radical House expansion-- had a total budget of $0.675 billion, and the Government Accountability Office cost $0.7 billion, plus a few smaller items, all of which added up to a total legislative branch budget of $5.3 billion.)
Source for all this: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46936
These are large numbers to normal humans, but must be interpreted in the context of the U.S. federal budget, which spent $6818 billion in FY2021 and $4407 billion in FY2019 (the last pre-pandemic year of "normalcy").
So! With all that context established, let's consider the costs of an ELEVEN THOUSAND MEMBER HOUSE MWAHAHAHA! I will assume for this exercise that we keep Congressional pay and benefits exactly the same as they are today (even though there's room to cut).
The new House would have 25.3 times as many members, so the cost of paying their salary + benefits would rise from $0.151 billion to $3.820 billion. On the one hand, that's serious cheddar. On the other hand, this increase represents a 0.08% increase in the annual pre-pandemic federal budget. It is the equivalent of what the federal government ordinarily (pre-pandemic) would spend between Midnight and 7 AM, every day. This seems to me like a very small increase, relative to the democratic dividends.
And, of course, the increase could be offset by substantial savings. The Members' Representational Allowance would not need to grow, and would in fact need to shrink (because far more members need far fewer staff and allowances to represent the exact same overall U.S. population). I don't hold out hope that we could eliminate the MRA outright, but it seems that even a pessimist would agree that it could be cut by *at least* half, for a savings of $0.33 billion.
Likewise, not all House staff could be cut (you'd still need the janitor, you'd still need the interns who set up committee hearing placards), but a LOT of it could be cut, for another savings somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And, of course, you can cut Congressional pay and benefits to be more commensurate with the new and more narrow role of each Congressman.
The cost of constructing a new facility will be a substantial but one-time outlay. We're talking about something the size of a sports stadium here, but a *small* sports stadium, not a ritzy NFL stadium. I understand that the cost of Geodis Park (a Nashville soccer stadium, capacity 30,000, opened 2022) was in the neighborhood of $340 million. That seems reasonable.
All told, I think you could, without too much difficulty, wrestle the ongoing cost of the expansion down to below $3 billion a year.
That is, I admit, a chunk of change.
...but is also less than the House Agriculture Committee attempted to spend on "tree equity" in FY2021. (SOURCE: https://www.westernjournal.com/4-ridiculous-items-hidden-inside-bidens-3-5-trillion-budget-probably-havent-seen/)
Given the benefits, I think it's worth the spend. I wouldn't say that if the price tag were $100 billion, but a well-functioning Congress is the foundation on which the rest of our system (including all our spending) is based, so it's worth a *little* juice.
> And I don't see how this solves the problem of forcing elected pols to fundraise. The Senate would still have that problem.
The Senate is a very different animal, in many senses much more wounded than the House, and will get its own post (maybe two posts).
However, it seems self-evidently a win to me if we dramatically reduce the amount of political spending, fundraising, and lobbying dollars in *one* house of Congress, even if the other remains exactly the same.
> Indeed, in such a huge House, the leadership would have a great deal of power, deciding who has plum committee assignments, and who stays on the back bench.
I don't see why this should be. Any majority of the House can decide who gets plum committee assignments, or how committee chairs are appointed. Any majority can decide what committees *exist*. (I think there would naturally be a lot more committees in a much larger House, with correspondingly more seats.) The decisive majority doesn't have to be Republicans vs. Democrats; it can just as easily be back-bench vs. leadership... and, in a much larger House, back-benchers would have a dramatic advantage.
Financial pressure *could* still be brought to bear, but financial pressure is mostly brought today in order to increase the coffers of the NRCC, so that they can get House Republicans elected (or vice versa on the other side). If running for Congress is much cheaper, the NRCC doesn't need to exist, or at least is far less important. Likewise, another financial pressure point is that the GOP can threaten to withhold funding from your campaign if you don't hit your numbers. That's not so scary if you don't need funding.
A lot of partisan control over the members *in general* comes from the large amounts of money needed to run a successful campaign, and the party controls the pursestrings. Take that away, and members have far less incentive to pay attention to party leadership at all. You could see more Congressmen voting in unexpected blocs -- and you'd surely see a good few Congressmen who don't caucus with the two parties at all!
I'm not saying the power of leadership would vanish. In a large body, the biggest threat to the backbench is indeed a well-organized, disciplined leadership with deep procedural knowledge outflanking a much larger, but undisciplined and ignorant, back bench -- or just outright cheating and expecting to get away with it, as John Boehner was known to do from time to time. But the back bench would have a lot of tools (and a lot of numbers) that they just don't have today, and leadership would have both less leverage and less incentive to use it. It wouldn't be perfect, but it seems likely to be progress!
> having a standing legislative body the size of a national political convention has all kinds of side affects we can't imagine now that will ultimately be undesirable.
I agree that it will have unexpected and perhaps unimaginable side effects. I don't see why we should presume that these unexpected side effects will be overwhelmingly undesirable. It might just as easily work out even *better* than I've imagined here! Or, most likely, the unexpected consequences will work out in some sort of balance.
And remember that the alternative is not perfection; the alternative is the *current* House of Representatives, which, in my opinion, is a pretty low bar to clear! :) (The current House's structure, too, had a lot of unforeseeable side effects, some of which the Founders would have liked, others not so much.)
> Mike Pence gets a lot more credit than you gave him in that piece.
He does deserve credit for doing the right thing under intense political pressure.
And you deserve credit for reading for so many words! That's a long one!
“My proposal is the best proposal” 😂 and 17 footnotes!! I liked #8 the best, all new information for me!