After I wrote this “status interview” piece on Tuesday, I heard from TPM Reader AP who said, amidst general agreement, that he would either add to the list or replace DC/PR statehood with expanding the House of Representatives. I’m just seeing now that I hadn’t had a chance to respond yet to AP (I thought I had). But my response was going to be that I basically agree. And as I suggested in the original piece, despite presenting it as a checklist of five questions/agenda items, everything after the first two (filibuster and Supreme Court reform) might have been reclassified as ‘super important things that really need to be done.’ And to that list many more could be added. To go back to the original concept, the thinking behind that list wasn’t that it would be exhaustive but that it was a good list for determining who was serious and who was not, who is worth supporting and who needs to go.
But this potential addition gives me an opportunity to expand what a future era of reformism would need to accomplish because the House of Representatives is a good case study of a number of key trends that got us to this moment. The number of representatives was capped at 435 members in 1929 when the U.S. population stood at roughly 122 million people. That’s about a third of the current population. House districts now average a population of just over 750,000 of a million people. That’s a lot of people. The number was fixed when House districts had a bit over over 250,000 of a million people. Now it’s 750,000. That’s a huge difference and it matters since the House is meant to be the body closest to the people.
What would expanding the House do in practice? It would almost certainly improve constituent services. The fewer people you represent the more time you can devote to serving the needs of the ones you do represent vis a vis the federal government. It would also reduce the non-democratic character of the electoral college by diminishing the representation that is locked into simply being a state. At the most basic level it puts representation closer to the people and individual communities. Reforms like these are unpredictable. You don’t know exactly what all the effects would be. But that is the case with any reform. It’s also complicated or impossible to know the optimal size of congressional districts or just which is optimal for democratic self-government.
What clarifies the matter for me is this: in my original post, I talked about what is necessary to have at least a shot at turning back the tide of Trumpism. But we can take a longer view. The best way to understand our current predicament is that there was in the U.S. a slow deterioration of the democratic character of our government. There was a growing democracy deficit. The structures and mores of democratic self-government slowly atrophied. That was the seedbed on which Trumpism grew.
There are many roots of these changes. But a number of critical ones were structural: the expanding use of the filibuster and de facto minority veto which weakened the tether connecting election results and governing outcomes, the increasingly imperial and politicized Supreme Court, the ballooning size of House districts are only a small number of examples. There are no laws that will change the fact that a large minority of the country supports autocracy. Revising and clarifying statute law, as I outlined in item four of that original post, is a check on autocracy but not a cure or a guarantee against it. The aim of the opposition to Trump and even more what he represents must be to win control of the federal government and use that momentary opportunity to dramatically boost its democratic character, to revitalize and unclog the mechanisms of democratic self-government. That’s what all five items on that original list are really about. That’s certainly what abolishing the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court are about. The central importance of re-democratizing the federal government becomes clear when you realize that it was this breakdown and atrophy of self-government that made Trumpism possible in the first place. The answer to rising autocracy is reinvigorated democracy and democratic self-government.