Thread by @unseen1_unseen

I was in a discussion the other day about what is wrong with the country and where Congress went off the rails. It can all be traced, IMO, to the failure of the states to pass the first article proposed in the Bill of Rights. "Article the first" tied Congressional seats to

population increase. Since the amendment was never ratified (it still can be btw just needs 3/4ths of the states minus those that have already ratified it), Congress tried to handle congressional apportionment by law which was a massive failure as every state and each party

..sought to retain their power in the House. In 1911 Congress passed the Apportionment Act of 1911 which set the number of representatives at 433 then failed to agree in 1921 on anything. Missing that decade's reappointment. It wasn't until the Reapportionment Act of 1929

..that a compromise of sorts was worked out that capped the House at 435 members. It is that law that the US House lives under still. In that same time, the population of the USA about tripled. If the House just expanded with population the House should be three times

...larger today. The House was never meant to be capped in it's growth. It was designed to grow with the population. That is the entire constitutional reason we have a census taken every 10 years to reappoint the representatives based on changes in population.

George Washington argued that one representative should not represent more than 30,000 people. It was the only time he offered an opinion during the Convention that wrote the constitution.

In federalist papers Number 55 James Madison argued

that the numbers of representatives must be kept in a sweet spot. That too few representatives made the government an "unsafe depository of the public interests", made the representatives out of touch with the people's concerns, made the representatives that where selected more

.. likely to come from an upper class not connected to the mass of the population, and population growth along with the obstacles that growth brings would make House "more and more disproportionate" as we grew.

on the other hand he argued

..that if you get the number of representatives too large they just become a mob ruled by passion instead of reason.

So, the House of Representatives was designed to grow and to remain in the sweet spot as population grew.

Since the House hasn't grown

...since 1911/1929 while our population has tripled, the House is out of that sweet spot sought by the founders. The longer this goes on, the more out of touch the federal government becomes to the needs and wishes of the people. The longer this goes on, the more the House

...becomes, as Madison put it, "an unsafe depositary of the public interests". The longer this goes on, the more the House becomes filled with the "elites/upper class" of society bringing with them groupthink.
All of these problems are no longer "theory". We have evidence that it

...is happening. The Congress itself has given away much of it's authority to the executive branch, judicial branch and the Fed. It has sold the public interests to K street, Wall street and globalists. The representatives themselves act like royalty and D.C. is filled

...with groupthink. The "elites/incumbants" have formed protection rackets where they can't be touched and the law doesn't effect them. Most of these problems can be traced back to that decision to cap the house at 435 people. Even the two party political system is fed by a

capped House. How much easier would it be to have 3, 4, or more parties if the House were three times larger? How much harder would it be for Congress to invent laws that we have to pass to find out what's in them?

An increase in the House would also filter into other parts of the Government. It would be much harder for one party to control a state or a city. The EC would then expand beyond a few battle ground states. States would become more powerful and the federal government weaker.

States, local governments, private industries, religious sectors and charities would gain influence as they fill the vacuum left by a federal government that would have more difficulty passing unpopular laws. Elections will become cheaper as each representative has to reach

...less people within a smaller area. So next time you ask why the government seems distant and out of touch to the will of the people instead of thinking "term limits" think of the number 435.

As always think as you will.