I doubt this thread will get much play because it challenges the USMB membership to think beyond their usual lemming limits of following whatever partisan hack's blog they read every single fucking hour, but here goes;
The HoR has had the same number of members since 1910.
I know some of you may want me to post a link to evidence supporting my contention that the US population has grown since 1910, but let's just use our imaginations for a moment.
This population change means each US representative, Dem OR Repub, has an average 770,000 constituants.
Realistically, there is no fucking way these guys are representing this many people: No other representative body on the face of the planet has such an absurd ratio.
If you really cared about the validity or representative government, then you'd stop the political hackary, and demand that congress vote to triple the size (at minimum) the number of representatives in the HoR.
Of course, this would open wide the door for MORE that BiPartisan government....hell, we might even be able to form an effective third party: GOD FORBID!!!
This is a good point to review, Samson, and I'm glad you brought it up.
In America, we have redefined government as a people who have gone through a process.
Along the way, we started employing extremists to help moderates make choices, but we lost moderation in the process, and now, government is by the extremists themselves, and not by representatives. That came about by legislating to a small number of people who benefitted the larger, and a press that doesn't give any but a myopic view.
At present, we have a press lockstepped into a faction of extremists who want to do a Bolshevik number on the founder's constitution which doesn't fit into the Government-as-owner-and-caregiver-of-everyone schema, and traditionalists who mind. The rift is pretty wide, and avails America to more extremism than ever, and it splits us in two, sadly.
Adding more people in government to make laws carries a common i.e.d. of centralized government blowing up states rights.
The founders set up a system to keep a country as large as ours operating through broad common goals that protect freedoms of individuals alive at the time the Constitution was written. So careful were they that when we are swayed by debaters with strong goal-oriented agendas to increase federal power, we lose integrity of agreements the nation made with low-population states guaranteed an equal voice in government. I realize this occasionally brings out some angst between large and small states, but it does keep smaller states in the position of having a voice and from being swamped by population centers that have completely different needs for keeping human systems and institutions in order.
Term limits viewed from the perspective that locals should have some say in who represents them is not desirable in certain areas of the country that view experience in politics wins them advantages. There was a reason the founders did not take that away from the people, whilst being themselves willing to back off after two terms to give younger men the opportunity and experience it would take to lead the nation at another given time.
My problem with adding more spenders to the rolls of Congress is that it might increase Congressional spending.
That's taking money out of private hands and putting them into an almighty federalist system.
The founders were chary of too much centralized power because it was too much like the European harpies they had just thrown off their backs.
The founders knew the weight of a big power was undesirable to the man on the street. That means something to this American.
