Advertisement

I Proposed A Law That Would Actually Fix Congress...More Congressmen

Every once in a while this old brain stumbles across a great idea and I pretend as if it was my own to seem smarter than I am. This is one of those idea....expand congress. Expand it to the numbers that the founders originally had. 

Back in the olden times at the founding of our country congress had an elected official for roughly every 30,000 people. I don't know how they originally settled on that number and I don't plan on looking it up either. If you do feel free to hit me up on twitter. Perhaps that was the right number all along. 30,000 people is roughly a good sized suburban town. If you have 30,000 people in your town you're probably playing 7A football and if you're playing 7A HS football then you deserve to have a representative in Congress. 

If my math is right (it's probably not) then that'd be about 10,200 members of congress. We'd have to hold the State of The Union at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre. That's fine though. We are supposed to have a representative democracy. Who has ever met their congressmen in a meaningful way? I bet the answer is basically zero. Things get fucked up because the people have been disconnected from the government. The House was supposed to be representative. It isn't anymore. 

The people who say this is dumb raise a few objections. 

1) It'd be too expensive to pay for that many members of congress.

--Uhh...money is fake. It always appears when politicians need it. I think they'll find it in the budget for themselves. 

2) We'd have more crackpots

Bro...

We still have lunatics in Congress with the present system. I think you can argue that we'd have less because you'd only have like 30,000 people voting and it's easier to be crazy and hide it from strangers than it is to hide it from your neighbors. 

3) Nothing would ever get done

Things don't really get done now which is why Congress always has the lowest approval rating. 

I think expanding the house would make it too expensive for lobbyists to use corruption to get things done. You might be able to buy the majority of congressmen when the majority is like 250 people. That'd be pretty cost prohibitive if you had to buy off over 5000 people. 

It'd also be a lot harder to keep things secret from the public. If you have 10,000+ people serving on a variety of committees, eventually you're going to have some leaks of the truth out to the general public. That's a good thing. I think having more normal people who serve for 2 or 4 years would be a good thing too because I think if 10,000 people are holding an office it'd actually be less attractive to ego maniacs. Like look at this clip

Advertisement

Even if you get the same proportion of scummy people in congress, it is likely easier to get them out because the won't be able to rely on special interest groups to fund their campaigns which let them sit on appropriations committees until they die. 

Kinda bullshit that we had a proportional representation that was working just fine until 1929 and then the government just decided that 435 was the limit. Couldn't fit anymore seats in the building or something. Who knows. Now we are in a position where Montana which has over 500,000 more people than Wyoming, but because the Congressional representation is capped at 435, they have the same amount of seats in congress. They're mathematically far more under represented as a citizen in Montana than you are in Wyoming. That's not fair. It's not how it was supposed to be set up originally. #ChiefIsRight. Way more important than a snack wrap from McDonald's

Mid Show is live again today at 2pm CST. Subscribe below