« The Case From Weird Gender Stereotypes | Main | Facts on the Ground » MSM Meets DFH19 Jul 2008 03:01 am Atrios asks about rumors that Kit Seelye was/is at Netroots Nation. Indeed she was, and I snapped this photo of her sitting near some hippie at the national popular vote panel:
The dude, if I understood him correctly, thinks the real answer to the problems with our electoral system is smaller congressional districts. Comments (26)
I didn't know Kit Seeyle was an amputee! I always noticed she never did the legwork to do reliable campaign reporting, but I thought it was just because she was lazy and too invested in right-wing media frames to challenge them. It turns out it's because she only has one leg. 
That rug really tied the room together -- and Kit Seeyle peed on it!
That rug really tied the room together -- and Kit Seeyle peed on it!
Stay out of my beachfront community!
"The dude, if I understood him correctly, thinks the real answer to the problems with our electoral system is smaller congressional districts." There is a good argument for this. The size of congressional districts will go up to 715,000 by the time of the next census. Only India has legislators representing more people. There is no way you can reach that many voters without spending the sort of money that most potential candidates don't have, which in turn limits the range of viewpoints in the House. The problem, and the reason why you don't have smaller districts at the federal or national level in places like India or Japan, is that the legislatures become unweildy after they reach a certain size (usually 600 to 700 people). There isn't much point to electing a Congressman only to see him ignored because there are literally thousands of others. There is a good argument to increasing the size of the house by a third, to 580, but that only chops the size of the districts down to what they were in 1980 and the effect is probably so small to be worth bothering about. India has very vigorous state politics, and you have parties with strong bases in individual states but which are not nationwide competing for seats in the federal parliament. In India, state boundaries are also changed periodically to reflect economic and cultural realities. That may be something to consider.
But did Kit take a picture of Matt?
She's very nimble! Actually, that was pretty nice of her to climb over the chair rather than asking the DFH to move his Mac.
The dude looks like a relatively clean fucking hippie to me.
"There is no way you can reach [600k-700k voters] without spending the sort of money that most potential candidates don't have, which in turn limits the range of viewpoints in the House." It also limits the responsiveness of the candidate to the district. If you have 600+ thousand voters, you can afford to ignore any individual voter, even if they are of your party. Hell, you're going to be forced to ignore them; you don't have time to meet them all. With a district more like 100,000, which is around the size of some state districts, a dedicated representative can meet the vast majority of their constituents, which improves responsiveness. We'd need more subcommittees, obviously, but we really ought to expand the U.S. House to about 3000 members.
Ed, Richard Campbell, and the DFH are right about the benefits of smaller congressional districts. Multiple parties would be a lot more likely if every darn district didn't require massive amounts of money-- usually from the DNC/RNC-- to make a go of it. So it'll never happen, because both parties are down with it.
And, not that every view of the Founders is to be fetishized, but they didn't dream of 500,000-person districts.
I wasn't familiar with Seelye. Now I know she's just another incompetent NYT political columnist. No wonder I don't read that paper.
"And, not that every view of the Founders is to be fetishized, but they didn't dream of 500,000-person districts." Well, they contemplated it, at least implicitly. The constitution allows House districts to be anywhere from 30,000 people to statewide, and Virginia had just under 700,000 people in 1790 (Massachusetts had over 400,000).
Ed, I'm not sure it's accurate to say India's state borders are 'periodically' changed. It's more that the borders they inherited from the British were largely meaningless from a linguistic point of view, and so there was a big spate of reorganizing the states in the early 1950s. A bit later the Punjab was divided so as to give the Sikhs a state in which they were majority. In the last few years three new states were created partly to give minority groups more political power (to give the tribal people in southern Bihar their own state for example). But I don't think there is going to be much more state reorganization in the future. Most of the states at this point are a pretty good fit to the linguistic map and don't really need to be reorganized. I do think that India is much too large to have a truly responsive government and would probably be better off if it were divided into a couple of smaller countries.
Ed, I'm not sure it's accurate to say India's state borders are 'periodically' changed. It's more that the borders they inherited from the British were largely meaningless from a linguistic point of view, and so there was a big spate of reorganizing the states in the early 1950s. A bit later the Punjab was divided so as to give the Sikhs a state in which they were majority. In the last few years three new states were created partly to give minority groups more political power (to give the tribal people in southern Bihar their own state for example). But I don't think there is going to be much more state reorganization in the future. Most of the states at this point are a pretty good fit to the linguistic map and don't really need to be reorganized. I do think that India is much too large to have a truly responsive government and would probably be better off if it were divided into a couple of smaller countries.
One does and will encounter bad ideas if exposed too much. That is a very bad idea.
Now, if I were a DFH, I would be talking about the need for unicameral state legislatures, but I'm not, so I won't.
Actually, I know exactly who that DFH is. MattY, he's a pretty well-known activist in DFH-type Democratic party circles the northeast. I'm surprised you didn't recognize him.
The dude, if I understood him correctly, thinks the real answer to the problems with our electoral system is smaller congressional districts. Since our democracy is already indirect, how about a few more levels of indirection? We citizens would vote for city council members, who would in turn vote for county board members, who would vote for state representatives, who would then vote for federal representatives, who would elect a president. And we could have some other track for senators, who already vote for the Supreme Court and cabinet ministers. I guess this plan would require a little fine tuning.
Hey there, I'm "this dude". Although I do think smaller congressional districts would be a good thing (we'd need a constitutional amendment to remove the 435 cap, and I'd support such an amendment), that was not the main focus of my comments :) It is related, though: I think past a certain point, very large districts for election for any office result in less actual democracy in the way campaigns work. One of the biggest problems in our current presidential election system is that many of the "districts" used, aka states, are way too large.
P.S. "Hippie guy in picture" commenting above, was not me.
Only India has legislators representing more people. At the national level. At the local level, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors is five people representing districts of about 2 million people each. And you know what? The LACoBOS sucks. Smaller congressional districts would also alleviate the disproportionate weighting of states in the Electoral College. Count me in the "more members of Congress, please" camp.
I'm not sure I agree, Cos. I think there's a real risk, if we did what you suggest, that the legislature would become even less of a check on the executive branch. I don't mean this as an invidious analogy, but the 2,250 member Congress of People's Deputies couldn't really stand up to the Politburo.
Growrrr, that is one foxy hippie! No wonder she's jumping over chairs!
we'd need a constitutional amendment to remove the 435 cap No the total House membership is set at 435 by Congress. The Constitution only requires one seat per state and "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand."
Comments closed August 02, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
Once again I had to use Google to find out who your latest random reference was.
Can't you find any good looking babes at this conference to take pictures of?
Jane Mayer wasn't bad, but you can probably do better if you look around.
Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 19, 2008 3:56 AM