modest proposal

[quislibet]

Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) made headlines the other day when, in the wake of Hurricane Irene, he said that FEMA budget shortfall could be made up only by slashing the money from something else. For the Republicans, every crisis is an opportunity to shrink the government further. Take, for example, the current economic woes our country faces: the Republican answer to widespread unemployment is to add to it by firing as many public employees as possible.

We can work with that.

Listen: operating Congress is expensive. Now, here in Rhode Island, we have a little over a million people and two Representatives. In Wyoming Montana, they have one representative for just under a million people. We Rhode Islanders can only admire that efficiency. If we made all of the House of Representatives run on the Montana model – one representative for every million people or so, rounding up or down to the nearest million (usually down; we're trying to save money here), we could cut, for example, three representatives from the Honorable Mr. Cantor's home state, seven from Texas, as many as sixteen from California, and so on, totaling a grand layoff of 120 members of Congress.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest this would save American taxpayers about $300 million a year in salaries, benefits, office costs, and staffer pay – and that's before other savings like lower electricity, the reduced need for security, and so on.

Now, $300 million isn't a lot compared to the size of the deficit, but it's a good round number for a lot of programs conservatives complain about, like the recently imperiled Economic Development Administration, which sends grants to economically devastated communities of the sort that, we are given to understand, Obama has been creating on a daily basis. It could instead cover, for example, the annual budget for anti-terror transit security, if that seemed important.

Would this be less democratic? Probably. Or would a reduced Congress be more efficient? Who knows? Doesn't matter. We're not talking about what's good for our country; we're just talking about slashing the budget. Let's not lose track of what's important here.

Comments

[sjo.livejournal.com]

I advocate for a whack-a-mole game, only with Eric Cantor as the mole. It'll raise millions.

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

Huh. Should each Representative represent the exact same number of people as any other, by law? It seems way, way out of proportion for RI voters to count *twice* as much as a Wyoming voter in the House of Representatives.

Of course, up here it's worse in some cases - a voter in Prince Edward Island has three times the weight of a voter in some BC and Ontario ridings. But that's kind of mandated by the Constitution, because Prince Edward Island is guaranteed no less that four MPs, no matter what the population. Is there a similar Constitutional guarantee in play here?

[emzebel.livejournal.com]

The US has a bicameral legislature which splits the difference. The Senate is comprised of two representatives from each state who serve for 7 year terms and theoretically represent the state as a whole. The House of Representatives allocates 2-year-term reps by population, so more populous states have greater representation based on representative districts which are determined by the state legislature. Gerry-rigging these districts to try to encourage greater representation at the national level for the party that controls the state leg is almost expected, which means that there's no guarantee that representatives represent the same number of people even within each state.

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

Right, the Senate is definitely not rep by pop. (Senators serve for 6 years rather than 7.)

The House of Representatives is rep by pop, though, so I thought each seat must represent roughly the same number of people as all the others. Even if the boundaries of districts are gerrymandered by the state legislature, how can two states with almost the same population have different numbers of Representatives? It would have to be one heck of a rounding error.

However, looking it up on Wikipedia, I see that Wyoming's population is actually listed as 563,626 (in 2010), where Rhode Island's is indeed above a million (1,052,567). So the problem is that iterum is, alas, proceeding from a flawed assumption: the population of WY isn't really just under a million - it's more like half of that.

[iterum.livejournal.com]

For Wyoming read Montana. Carry on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population

[sorceror.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay. One mystery solved, another mystery revived.

[iterum.livejournal.com]

There's a complicated formula they use right now -- the number of Representatives in the House is fixed by law at 435 (the number at the time of the law), but states' delegations change according to population. Every state gets one, and then they start assigning the remaining seats, one at a time to each state by population, until they run out.

There's slightly more math to it than that; according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment), "The remaining seats are allocated one at a time, to the state that with the highest priority number. Thus, the 51st seat would go to the most populous state (currently California). The priority number is determined by a formula that is mathematically computed to be the ratio of the state population to the geometric mean of the number of seats it currently holds in the assignment process, n (initially 1), and the number of seats it would hold if the seat were assigned to it, n+1)."

They reapportion the seats after every 10-year census. Apparently it works out so that the voting weight of each citizen is somehow the same (as mandated in the Constitution), but the voting weight of each *Representative* isn't necessarily.