CONGRESS IS THE CUBE ROOT OF ALL EVIL.

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds now has a Substack site for longer form essays, the most recent of which tackles a reconstruction of the Federal institutions.  "Congress is a problem, but is it also too small?"

I am of the view that it is, for a different set of reasons than those he covers.

It's been close to a hundred years since the House of Representatives added more seats, and it's my sense that the electoral vote anomalies of recent years reflect in part that constraint.  There's a lengthy Geoffrey Skelley essay on the merits, or not, of adding seats to the House.  The article notes, in passing, how the country came close to one of those electoral vote anomalies just before Congress got its 435 seats.  It makes reference to Matthew "Fruits and Votes" Shugart and his useful cube root rule for determining the size of an elected body.

The value of that rule is that it suggests an expansion of the House of Representatives as the population increases, but not directly with that increase.  Thus, we don't have to have as many Representatives as there are (allegedly) lakes in Minnesota.

A 1500-member House might be a good compromise, but I’m happy with the idea of it going bigger. (I’d honestly be okay with 10,000 representatives). Congress has shrunk not only in relation to the population, but also, even more so, in relation to the size of the federal government, which has vastly expanded since the House’s size was fixed in 1929. Holding Congress’s size down not only hasn’t kept government small, it may even have helped make it bigger and more intrusive, and certainly less supervised.

Right now members are too busy to do their actual jobs. They’re constantly raising money (smaller districts would require less, and yield fewer donations from interest groups because they wouldn’t be worth as much). They’re often double-scheduled with committee hearings and important meetings, and they wind up leaving the vast majority of Congress’s work to unelected staffers. One justification for the transfer of power to bureaucracies is that Congress is too busy already. A bigger Congress would help with that.

It doesn't have to be that large a House yet, as the cube root of 330 million is about 700, and yes, that might mean more bodies to put on committees, although I have memories from higher education of how committee assignments would expand to exhaust the available faculty.  More districts might make election of a legislative body that more closely approximates the multicultural makeup of the population, even with more sensibly drawn simplest closed regions for the districts.  On the other hand, the likes of Ilhan Omar or Marjorie Taylor Greene might become more common in more politically homogeneous districts.  That's a case for limiting the scope of government, something that might happen organically as those True Believers gridlock themselves.  Like all else in life, it's about the tradeoffs.

With representatives measuring in the thousands instead of the hundreds, there would be more targets.  The return for lobbying any particular one would be small.  And members representing smaller districts would presumably hew closer to the wishes of their constituents, making them harder to lobby toward positions their constituents don’t share.

And a Congress with thousands of members would have less mystique, which I think is also good.  Government shouldn’t have a lot of mystique, since it’s a fundamentally shady operation that should be viewed with skepticism by the citizenry at all times.

Not everyone agrees with [Danielle] Allen’s idea.  Lawprof Steven Lubet argues that a bigger Congress wouldn’t make Congress more efficient, which I’m untroubled by,  and his fears that trans activists and other apostles of wokery wouldn’t get enough attention don’t persuade me that the approach is necessarily flawed.

But maybe it’s a bad idea.  Given Mark Twain’s famous statement that there is no native American criminal class, except Congress, maybe we don’t want to enlarge that class.  More members of Congress, more criminals?

Making Congress “more efficient” might actually be a bad idea, depending on how you measure efficiency.  Putting out more laws would be greater “efficiency” to some, but since I see the role of Congress as making it harder for bills to pass – the “I’m just a bill” Schoolhouse Rock episode illustrates how that works --greater efficiency might involve far more scrutiny of what the government does.  More members of Congress means more people to actually read bills.  More members of Congress means more people to oversee the unelected bureaucracy.  More members of Congress means more representatives to act as ombudsmen for citizens having trouble getting the government to act as it should.  All of this seems more efficient in some important ways.

As long as he's on a roll, he's suggesting changes in the rest of the federal government.

And what about the Senate? The Senate is there to represent states, not people. Post-Seventeenth Amendment, it’s elected by the people of each state, rather than the legislature, but nonetheless it’s a body that is fundamentally meant to represent the interests of the states, not of the people as such. (A small, but growing, cadre thinks the Seventeenth Amendment was a mistake and should be repealed. To paraphrase Chief Justice Marshall, there is great force to this argument, and I am not satisfied that it has been refuted, but that’s a topic for another essay.) But given their role, more Senators wouldn’t really have a desirable impact. (One might argue that the states themselves should be smaller, but that’s a different, and probably impossible, project, and one which the Constitution more-or-less forbids.)

The Executive Branch has gotten bigger, vastly so. If it’s to change in size, it should be in the other direction.

The judiciary should probably get bigger. In particular, the Supreme Court should be larger. Right now, the untimely death – or even the timely death – of a justice or two could set the nation on its ear. When the nation can be thrown for a loop by the death of an 80-year-old, something is wrong. (And it is a temptation to would-be assassins, as we’ve already seen).

The original intent for the Supreme Court was for each Justice to be supervising judge in the Circuit Courts of Appeals, which provided at least some basis for its size. The Reynolds proposal might turn the Supreme Court into a second Senate, of sorts.

In the past I have jokingly proposed expanding the Supreme Court by letting each governor nominate a justice from his/her home state, while keeping the appointment of nine “at large” justices in the hands of the President. But the more I’ve thought about this, the less jokey it seems. A 59-justice court would be big enough to make it immune to sudden changes based on death by natural causes or otherwise. Choosing justices from the 50 states would also make it more diverse – possibly in terms of race and gender and so on, but certainly in other ways. Right now our Supreme Court is composed of what Dahlia Lithwick has called “judicial thoroughbreds” – hard-charging careerists with well-honed resumes who have been careful not to take any chances that might keep them off the top bench. Their backgrounds are so similar that it’s hard to tell their biographies apart when the names are removed, as Ben Barton demonstrated in his excellent book, The Credentialed Court. That’s unlikely for the state-appointed justices under my proposal.

Let's see what comes of it. Nobody ever said that self-governance was easy.