In response to Joseph Postell’s complaints about situational constitutionalism and Congressional inaction at the Library of Law and Liberty, I would point out that the end of the “Golden Age of Congress” and the beginnings of the imperial presidency coincided with the capping of the number of Congressmen in the Appointment Act of 1911.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 played a role, too, but that’s a subject for another post.
I wonder if maybe 435 Representatives isn’t too many? My thought is that being fewer, it’s easier to find distinction as a senator than as a representative, and perhaps as a consequence we expect senators to be wiser and more capable.
Why not just one?
IMO 435 representatives is far too few. Compare it to the number of representatives in the UK, France, or Germany. And we’re far more diverse than any of them. In a game theoretical framework we have an order of magnitude too few.
Good argument. Perhaps we should try it both ways — ten or twenty years my way with say 250 Representatives, then a couple decades with a 1000.
Which we can’t quite do, of course … but I wonder if we could use state legislatures as a proxy? There must be some variation between the states in how many citizens it takes to have a legislator. Are the states with proportionally more legislators better governed or less (judging by arrests for corruption, surveys of citizen satisfaction, business growth, even educational standards, and other metrics)?
Could we perform such an analysis across nations? How does the USA stack up, measuring Congress against legislatures in Canada and Brazil and Italy and Taiwan and so on, using some objective measures of legislator performance?
Because I can’t think of a whole lot of such analyses. There must be a zillion studies and papers out there focused on economics, telling what happened, for instance, what happened to employment when Oaxaco raised minimum wages for agricultural workers 15%, but very few on whether state representatives in Nebraska take more or less in bribes than say in Connecticut. Seems to suggest economics matters more in our society than political science.